Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Your front door is the gateway to your home, so it needs to be well protected. Whether you're watching for trouble-makers, monitoring for parcel deliveries, waiting for friends to visit, or hiding from that weird neighbor who keeps asking to borrow your lawn mower, these dual-purpose video surveillance systems will help you keep an eye out. If your house has existing low-voltage doorbell wiring, take advantage of it for uninterrupted service.

The European Commission, an executive of the European Union, has announced it will be more than doubling its investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The commission will increase spending on AI by 70%, reaching €1.5bn (US$1.81bn) by 2020, in a bid to compete with Asia and the US, which are both investing at least three time as much.

London-based aerospace engineering company Rolls-Royce has found a better solution to fix the engine issues of airplanes without tearing them apart. Together with engineers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University, the company created robotics systems that are the size of bugs. The tiny robots, inspired by snakes and insects, are capable of crawling inside the plane's engine, making it easier to conduct diagnostics and repairs. The new tech is part of the company's IntelligentEngine project and was shown at the Farnborough International Airshow. "We are in the process of developing a number of miniature devices that enable us to get inside the jet engine to perform inspections or repairs," James Kell, a Rolls-Royce on-wing specialist, said in an interview.

As image recognition advances continue to accelerate, startups with a mind towards security applications are seeing some major interest to turn surveillance systems more intelligent. AnyVision is working on face, body and object recognition tech and the underlying system infrastructure to help companies deploy smart cameras for various purposes. "It's not just how accurate the system is, it's also how much it scales," Etshtein tells TechCrunch. "You can put more than 20 concurrent full HD camera streams on a single GPU." The Tel Aviv-based AI startup announced today that it has closed a $28 million Series A funding round led by Bosch.

Facebook said Friday it suspended a longtime partner that had used data from Facebook and other social networks to assist governments -- including Russia, Turkey, and the U.S. -- in monitoring public sentiment, a more cautious approach in the wake of a data privacy scandal. Facebook said it had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Boston-based company, Crimson Hexagon, but it was curtailing the company's access to its data while it investigated the matter. The preemptive move represents a shift for Facebook in the wake of the controversy over political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook said inappropriately collected the private profiles of more than 80 million Facebook users. The social network is under investigation from three different federal agencies over its work with Cambridge Analytica and, since the crisis erupted, has suspended more than 200 apps which had access to Facebook data. Crimson Hexagon, which primarily used public, aggregated data from people who made their profiles available for anyone to see, is the largest of this new wave of suspensions.

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. Can someone please teach me how to be that stylish? This week Rolls-Royce announced that they're working on small robots designed to inspect engines: What's getting a little bit lost in the announcement is that the robots themselves are based on (and perhaps, at this point, entirely identical to) Harvard's HAMR robot that we covered back in February: The Velodyne VLS-128 is the world's most advanced LiDAR sensor.

IBM yesterday announced that several new European clients have selected IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. New contracts signed with Spanish electricity grid operator Red Eléctrica de España, Italian elderly care provider Cooperativa Sole, Dutch telecommunications operator Tele2 and Israeli manufacturer of smart air conditioning Electra Group are examples of IBM's commitment to transforming business and improving operations with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled, IBM Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Red Eléctrica de España (http://www.ree.es/en), the sole transmission agent and operator of the national electricity system in Spain has selected IBM Watson IoT technologies as part of its Intelligent Asset Management initiative project. The electricity system operator's objective is to plan and optimize the maintenance and replacement activities of their strategic transmission assets (like substations and transmission lines) with the support of the IBM Watson IoT platform. With an IoT analytics solution that is designed specifically to help Energy and Utilities improve asset maintenance and utilization, a team from IBM Global Business Services (GBS) has begun implementation of the platform and is working in unison with REE to develop asset degradation models and design optimization plans specific to the electricity system operator's requirements.

Project Titan, Apple's secretive autonomous car program, is expanding. The Cupertino company has added 11 new test vehicles to its fleet in California, according to MacReports, boosting the total to 66. That's up from 55 in May. The program is rumored to be related to a self-driving platform Apple intends to provide to automobile manufacturers, though the company has yet to apply for an autonomous driving permit. It kicked off semiautonomous trial runs with three 2015 Lexus RX 450h SUVs roughly a year ago, in April 2017, after receiving licenses from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Apple CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg Television last year, in one of the few public descriptions of Project Titan.

Dating back to the 1960s, before the internet, MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum created the first ever chatbot. He designed a programme to copy human conversation by pairing scripted responses to text users entered into a computer and thus the chatbot was born. Becoming more conversational since the early days, Chatbots have revolutionised the customer experience with instant, personalised responses. Although they still lack some human aspects and the responses are not always perfect, we are able to see how beneficial they can be. In the past few years we've seen an increase in Artificial Intelligence chatbots across social platforms such as Facebook, when it launched bots for messenger in 2016, to voice experiences with smart speakers, such as the Amazon Alexa.

Grand Theft Auto has revealed its "After Hours" update, allowing players to run their own nightclubs. The new content – which will come to the online multiplayer part of the game on 24 July – features real DJs and the return of much loved characters. As with all GTA updates, the software will come free to anyone who has Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC, Xbox One or PlayStation 4. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.