ARISA, a project by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, is a 6-foot guide robot that will work in the subway stations to show passengers the way to restrooms and lockers, offer transit directions and recommend tourist attractions in the area. Developed by the Japanese tech company Aruze Gaming and Chicago-headquartered THK, she's wide-eyed, sharply dressed and can speak in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. She's also accompanied by a touch-screen monitor.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. LAS VEGAS – You enter the backseat of a tricked out BMW SUV X5, imagine it's a self-driving car of the future and look to be entertained. A movie screen pops up and offers you 270 degrees worth of choices – how about a visual Batman comic book, a movie trailer or a complete film? Sit in this BMW and listen to the sounds of multiple speakers pumping out stereo, and hi-def resolution on the screen, and let's face it – how could you argue that this wasn't really cool? The Batman Immersive Experience, from computer chip maker Intel and Batman owner Warner Media, is just one of five cool things we saw on the second day of CES previews. The trade floor of the CES officially opens to the public Tuesday.

When computer systems start performing tasks that require human intelligence such as speech and object recognition or decision-making, products and services start to become vulnerable to the consequences of undefined use cases. AI is as good as the data it is trained on and without humans advocating for the voice of every type of customer, technology will not be able to avoid biased, black-box algorithms or account for niche use cases that have a broader cultural and global impact. For example, when loved ones inquired about survivors after a 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia, they received celebratory balloons and confetti in Facebook messages because the word "selamat" means both "congrats" and "to survive."

Robotics manufacturers are scrambling for more than a half billion dollars in Pentagon contracts for battlefield robots that will defuse bombs and scout ahead for soldiers on the battlefield. That's according to a new Associated Press report about the U.S. military's efforts to purchase thousands of "backpack-sized" robots that troops can deploy to take bullets in dangerous situations -- and its fear that it could be outpaced by similar efforts by China and Russia. These battlefield robots aren't killer bots capable of using lethal force autonomously, a class of machine that is currently being debated worldwide. Rather, U.S. military leaders are interested in intermediary devices like Endeavor Robotics' treadmill-sporting Centaur bot, which can perform reconnaissance and disable explosives -- bots that soldiers can put in harm's way instead of themselves.

Apple customers are receiving calls that appear in almost every way to be from Apple – except they are from scammers trying to steal money. As part of the attacks, people will receive calls from people that appear to be in customer service: they will ring from an Apple number, and identify themselves correctly, before asking for some information. It is almost impossible to spot that the calls are actually coming from somewhere else entirely. That's because attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to spoof official numbers, meaning that even the phone number they are ringing from looks legitimate. The scams are becoming so advanced that they even caught out Jody Westby, the CEO of a cyber security research firm, reports expert Brian Krebs.

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere--China. Infervision, a four-year-old Beijing startup, has amassed more than a million scans from Chinese hospitals that it's using to train and test algorithms. Gathering medical data is much easier for Chinese companies than for their US counterparts, because patient populations are larger and the burden of privacy regulations smaller. "In the US, particularly for big academic hospitals, you have to go through so many processes and it can take a really long time to access data," says Yufeng Deng, Infervision's chief scientist.

Business people, not to mention the public on a global basis, are getting increasingly excited, as well as concerned, about the potential of artificial intelligence (A.I.). So much so that China's growing involvement in A.I., and the vast quantity of data that China is capable of generating on a daily basis, has many wondering if the U.S. will be a leader or follower in this important technology category as the future unfolds. Data is the fuel that feeds A.I. The more data you have, the more A.I. can learn and adapt. Most feel it's all about the quantity of data.

LG has unveiled the world's first consumer-ready rollable television at the CES 2019 trade show in Las Vegas. The South Korean electronics giant said the "revolutionary form factor" of its Signature OLED TV R will define the next generation of television. A concept for the roll-up screen was first demonstrated at the world's biggest technology showcase in 2016 but it has taken three years to develop a commercially viable version of the television. The Signature OLED forms part of a new trend that has seen manufacturers attempt to diminish the presence of large televisions in the living room when they are not in use. Samsung's answer is Ambient Mode, a setting that blends the screen with the wall behind it when it is on standby.

Trying to shoot a selfie video, but can't stay in the frame? An artificially intelligent camera could soon help. On Sunday, January 6, Remo Technology teased the Obsbot Tail, what the company calls the first A.I.-powered autonomous director camera. The camera-gimbal combo uses A.I. to keep the subject in the frame. The Obsbot Tail mixes a 4K 60 fps camera with a three-axis mechanical gimbal and a 3.5x optical zoom lens.

In what is perhaps the tensest scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship's onboard artificial intelligence system HAL-9000 reads the lips of hiding crew members. Discovering their plans to turn it off, the system turns against all humans onboard for the sake of protecting the mission. What was once science fiction is now inching closer to reality thanks to artificial intelligence--but in the wrong hands it could open up terrifying possibilities. In 2018, Chinese researchers crafted a new dataset and surveillance application benchmarks for lip-reading in real-world settings. Though this tech was meant to aid the hearing-impaired, the Chinese are likely to use it to broaden their already expansive surveillance state.