Japan has a new cafe where customers can enjoy coffee brewed and served by a robot barista. The robot named Sawyer debuted this week at Henna Cafe in Tokyo's downtown business and shopping district of Shibuya. The shop's name in Japanese means "strange cafe." The single-armed robot scans a ticket purchased from a vending machine and greets the customer. "Would you care for a delicious coffee?" the barista, with a screen showing a pair of cartoon eyes, asks in a flat tone.

In January, Google launched a new service called Cloud AutoML, which can automate some tricky aspects of designing machine-learning software. While working on this project, the company's researchers sometimes needed to run as many as 800 graphics chips in unison to train their powerful algorithms. Unlike humans, who can recognize coffee cups from seeing one or two examples, AI networks based on simulated neurons need to see tens of thousands of examples in order to identify an object. Imagine trying to learn to recognize every item in your environment that way, and you begin to understand why AI software requires so much computing power. If researchers could design neural networks that could be trained to do certain tasks using only a handful of examples, it would "upend the whole paradigm," Charles Bergan, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm, told the crowd at MIT Technology Review's EmTech China conference earlier this week.

This paper presents a framework for exact discovery of the top-k sequential patterns under Leverage. It combines (1) a novel definition of the expected support for a sequential pattern - a concept on which most interestingness measures directly rely - with (2) SkOPUS: a new branch-and-bound algorithm for the exact discovery of top-k sequential patterns under a given measure of interest. Our interestingness measure employs the partition approach. A pattern is interesting to the extent that it is more frequent than can be explained by assuming independence between any of the pairs of patterns from which it can be composed. The larger the support compared to the expectation under independence, the more interesting is the pattern. We build on these two elements to exactly extract the k sequential patterns with highest leverage, consistent with our definition of expected support. We conduct experiments on both synthetic data with known patterns and real-world datasets; both experiments confirm the consistency and relevance of our approach with regard to the state of the art. This article was published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and is accessible at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10618-016-0467-9.

Much has been said and written about disruptive technologies and how they are shaking things up across industries. But it is clear by now that businesses have to constantly track the course of technological innovation, which is coming through at a rapid pace making their strategies and planning almost obsolete, to understand what future has in store for them. The entire banking industry is now being disrupted by new technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI), above all else, has taken it precedence. One can clearly see an increased enthusiasm across the industry to introduce AI into business owing to the potential of this cutting-edge technology to transform the way banks do business. Drawing inspiration from the country, which is at the forefront of the global technological revolution, leading banks in the UAE have also joined their international counterparts in applying the intelligent technology in their day-to-day operations. Nonetheless, a sector-wide adoption is still far from reality.

Manufacturing giant Foxconn has said it will make a major investment in artificial intelligence-based R&D as it looks for new business growth opportunities in a cooling global smartphone market, Nikkei reports. "We will at least invest some 10 billion New Taiwan dollars ($342M) over five years to recruit top talent and deploy artificial intelligence applications in all the manufacturing sites," said chairman Terry Gou. "It's likely that we could even pour in some $10BN or more if we find the deployments are very successful or can really generate results." Gou added that the ambition is to become "a global innovative AI platform rather than just a manufacturing company". Data put out this week by Strategy Analytics records a 9 per cent fall in global smartphone shipments in Q4 2017 -- the biggest such drop in smartphone history -- which the analyst blames on the floor falling out of the smartphone market in China.

Welcome back to Gaming IRL, a monthly segment where several editors talk about what they've been playing in their downtime. This month, we spend too much time taking photos in Assassin's Creed Origins, lose ourselves in Yakuza 0's side stories, and ask the important question: "Tinder or Reigns?" I like to play a little game whenever I'm posted up somewhere with ample people-watching opportunities: It's called "Tinder or Reigns?" Playing Reigns: Her Majesty looks a lot like scrolling through Tinder -- one thumb swiping left or right -- and I enjoy guessing which app people are actually using as they're lost in their phones. I deeply hope (but supremely doubt) most folks are playing Reigns.

Hundreds of millions of jobs affected. Trillions of dollars of wealth created. These are the potential impacts of a coming wave of automation. In this episode of Moving Upstream, we travelled to Asia to see the next generation of industrial robots, what they're capable of, and whether they're friend or foe to low-skilled workers.

One sureshot – and, perhaps, foolish – way to test autonomous, or driverless, vehicle technology is to step in front of a four-wheeler equipped with it. If the tech works, the vehicle will stop or steer itself away. If it doesn't, you could be roadkill. One of the writers of this story chose to test an autonomous van at the premises of Hi-Tech Robotic Systemz, a Gurugram tech company that has been working on driverless cars for some 12 years. When he stepped in front of it, the van either stopped or drove past avoiding him. It's early days and you won't see much about them but autonomous vehicles are here in India.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Foxconn, one of Apple's main suppliers, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd said on Friday it aims to invest T$10 billion ($342 million) in artificial intelligence (AI) and related spheres of industrial internet. "Our investment for R&D and technology investment absolutely won't be weak. We hope in the next few years to invest T$10 billion in the AI application and related spheres of the industrial internet," executive Vice President Fang-ming Lu said at a press conference. "We have an AI team but it's still not enough. We need more and more talent," Lu added.

Think about this – today, there are millions of smartphones, internet users, connected devices, and the number is just increasing by the hour. There is a historic shift in the way digital is becoming a part of our lives – from digital payments, to the way we shop or even interact with each other. Fueled by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain – this new era of digitization is producing data which is outstripping human capacity to understand the meaning and value hidden within that data. Data, in all forms, is expanding as a resource to be utilized. Industries and professions are exploring several new possibilities and the potential value of this data is boundless.