Bank of Montreal (BMO), a Canadian financial services leader for more than 200 years, hosted Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tech professionals from Canada and Hong Kong to unveil innovative AI technology and applications.

An autonomous car with a new kind of artificial intelligence has taught itself to drive in less than twenty minutes. An autonomous car with a new kind of artificial intelligence has taught itself to drive in less than twenty minutes.

Boston Dynamics is preparing to build its terrifying army of robot dogs, according to a Saturday report in Inverse that the company has set a target date of July 2019 as the time it will be ready to manufacture 1,000 of its compact SpotMini models annually. SpotMini is the smallest variant of Boston Dynamics' many different models of robo-dogs yet at approximately two feet, nine inches tall. It weighs "around 66 pounds" and has an hour and a half battery life, per TechCrunch, and the company has recently demonstrated all kinds of functionalities like opening doors for other robots and increasingly complicated navigational skills. While the company already announced plans to launch commercially in 2019 with a limited run of robots already in pre-production, Inverse's report has some new details, such as that the SpotMini is intended to eventually become a multi-use platform of sorts: The overarching goal for the 26-year-old company is to become the what Android operating system is for phones: a versatile foundation for limitless applications. The attachment point where the SpotMini's robotic arm stems from its body could in the future hold a variety of attachments "to be designed and produced by third parties," per Fortune, making it more versatile.

Investors trying to pick winners are parsing what little data is available, but that could lead them down the wrong path. Even investor darling Tesla is struggling with production and financing problems. These have pushed the stock down more than 10% in the past year. Sales data tell one story. China's BYD and BAIC are in the lead, followed by Tesla and BMW .

In January, Amazon opened Amazon Go, a high-tech, cashierless convenience store in Seattle. There are no checkout lines and few employees. The only requirement to shop is downloading an app. Customers just walk in, load up their bags, and go. There's no need to even scan purchases; cameras positioned overhead take note of items in customers' carts and add them to a virtual bill. Amazon Go is both an interesting novelty -- and a profound challenge to the livelihoods of the more than 3.5 million Americans who work as cashiers. Rumors of a coming wave of similar stores and robot-run factories have provoked apocalyptic predictions of mass unemployment among pundits and politicians.

Many technology companies are developing artificial intelligence systems that can analyze medical data to help diagnose or treat health problems. Such systems raise the question of whether cutting-edge tools can perform or as well as or in certain cases much better than a human doctor -- though researchers say AI probably won't be replacing physicians anytime soon. A new study from MIT computer scientists suggests that human doctors provide a dimension that, as yet, artificial intelligence does not. By analyzing doctors' written notes on intensive care unit patients, the researchers found that the doctors' "gut feelings" about a particular patient's condition played a significant role in determining how many tests they ordered for the patient. This intuition plays an even stronger role during the first day or two of a patient's hospital stay, when the amount of data doctors have on patients is less than on subsequent days.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Japan's edition of Hebocon (the "best worst robot competition") took place at the end of last month, I think, and while we hope to get a bunch of really good videos at some point, here's a tiny teaser fight that's too good not to share. On the left, we have "Transparent Robot," which consists mostly of a GoPro pointing backwards, and a phone that displays the video feed from the GoPro pointing forwards, making the robot "invisible."

The scorching heatwave gripping northern Europe was made twice as likely to happen by climate change, scientists have revealed. An initial assessment of the prolonged period of record-breaking hot weather suggests rising temperatures caused by human activity increased the odds of it happening. The preliminary research claims to have found'unambiguous' evidence that human interference has triggered the recent heatwave, which computer models predict will continue until the end of August. People enjoy the Bournemouth beach in Dorset, England, as the hot weather continues across Britain. Britain is experiencing a severe heatwave which has prompted its national weather service to issue an alert for people to'stay out of the sun' 'The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,' said one of the authors Dr Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium that did the latest research.

A Saudi-led coalition has launched air raids on Yemen's Hodeidah, in an apparent resumption of military operations on the strategic Red Sea city after Houthi rebels attacked two Saudi oil tankers and one of the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) main airports. The Houthi-run al-Masirah TV said in a series of tweets on Friday that coalition air strikes had targeted a radio station inside the city and a fishing pier. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The latest offensive on the port city of Hodeidah came a day after Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Abu Dhabi's international airport. According to the Al-Masirah television channel, the Sammad-3 drone launched three attacks on the airport.

In a world where the technology is constantly changing and evolving Mohan Sekhar, senior managing director and lead at Accenture Advanced Technology Centres in India has said that it was time to move on from generals qualifications to expertise in niche subjects. Speaking to a leading daily, Sekhar emphasised how things in the tech sector are constantly changing and how Accenture was asking their employees to learn more about new sectors like artificial intelligence, analytics, data science, internet of things and blockchain, among others. "The generalist management cadre has got wiped out in Accenture in the last few years. We needed an innovation culture, subject matter experts. We told our people that they have to be closer to the tech and the industry domain."