With artificial intelligence applications in the retail industry, China's convenience stores have great market potential and will usher in a golden era, per a report the China General Chamber of Commerce released today. Smart retailing services with AI advanced quickly last year, and more plans for the efficient operation of unstaffed convenience stores will surface in the next three to five years, the report said. The Chinese gross domestic product's growth rate will remain around 6.7 percent, while retail sales of consumer goods will increase by 10.1 percent, CGCC said. The effects of rising household consumption will expand further, and such consumption will be a major contributor to China's economic growth, the report said. Spending on tourism, sports, culture, entertainment, wellness and pensions will grow rapidly this year, and the retailing and catering sectors will develop steadily while integrating with the aforementioned fields, CGCC Vice Chairman Fu Longcheng said.

Artificial intelligence from a Chinese tech giant has defeated the country's best player of the board game Go, despite giving the grandmaster an advantage -- matching and perhaps surpassing Google's efforts last year. The artificial intelligence (AI) developed by Chinese company Tencent beat world number-two Go player Ke Jie last week with a two-stone handicap, the official People's Daily newspaper reported. Handicaps are used in Go to even out the difference in skill level between players. Google's AlphaGo AI beat Ke last year just months after defeating fellow grandmaster Lee Se-dol of South Korea -- however AlphaGo has never competed against top-level players using a handicap. AlphaGo has since been placed in retirement, with Google instead focusing its energies on its self-teaching AlphaGo Zero machine, which mastered the complex game in 40 days last year.

Today is history in the making with the launch of Stethee, the world's first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled stethoscope system, a made in Malaysia medical device for the global market. Stethee is also the first device in the world that evolved from the traditional stethoscope which has not been updated in the last 200 years. It will disrupt how we listen to the heart and lungs with detailed and accurate analysis. This cutting edge and innovative stethoscope will also empower remote and rural healthcare through simple and yet precise surveillance and detection of heart and lung diseases. The Stethee system includes three core products: the Stethee Pro, Stethee Vet and Stethee Edu.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has unveiled the next stage in its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts with the opening a new AI research lab in Beijing. The move comes one month after the company announced a fresh $4 billion in funding, taking the company's total inbound investment to nearly $20 billion since its inception. At the time, the company said that it planned to use the cash to increase its push into AI and support its global expansion. At a launch event in Beijing today, Didi Chuxing said that its new AI Labs was set up to "push the boundaries of transportation innovation," working in conjunction with the AI hub it launched in Silicon Valley last March. Indeed, the U.S. has emerged as a key area of focus for Chinese technology companies looking to expand their AI initiatives, with internet giant Baidu opening a Silicon Valley arm dedicated to self-driving cars back in 2016, before expanding its presence in the area with a new AI research base a year later.

Based on almost half-a-billion connected devices it sells every year, Samsung Electronics will lead the consumer-centred Artificial Intelligence (AI) world, a top company official has said. "Samsung will begin an exciting journey open to boundless possibilities in new user experiences by integrating AI into the open IoT ecosystem it is currently developing," Larry Heck, Head of Artificial Intelligence, Samsung Research America said on Friday. Citing examples of various Samsung products showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier in January, the expert said the South Korean tech giant is highlighting its latest innovations in its vision to drive IoT supported by AI, Yonhap News Agency reported. "Moving forward, Samsung will continue to remain focused on holistically integrating AI into a connected setting, such as the home or the office, in contrast to other players primarily pursuing implementation of AI on a few devices and services," he said. Heck said the company's perspective on AI is to build an ecosystem that is user-centric rather than device-centric, as many IoT devices with AI support will generate a vast array of usage patterns and scenarios in the future.

Global spending on robotics and drones is expected to grow 22.1%, year-on-year, to reach $103 billion by the end of 2018, an International Data Corporation report said. The report also said that the spending will more than double to $218.4 billion by 2021, with a compounded annual growth rate of 25.4%. According to the market research firm, robotics spending, which is expected to touch $94 billion in 2018, will account for over 90% of all spending between 2017 and 2021. Industrial robotic solutions will account for the largest share of robotics spending, with over 70% of the total amount, followed by service and consumer robots. "Industrial robots are becoming more intelligent, human-friendly and easier to work with," said Jing Bing Zhang, research director, robotics at IDC. "This has accelerated their rapid expansion in the manufacturing industry, beyond automotive, especially in high-tech manufacturing, which requires light-weight robots with higher precision, flexibility, mobility and collaborative capability."

In December, Motherboard reported that a Redditor called "deepfakes" was using machine learning to create pornography in which adult actresses' faces were somewhat realistically replaced by female celebrities. The process is similar to the Paul Walker face-mapping from "Furious 7" or the young Carrie Fisher scene from the end of "Rogue One." The example given at the time was a typical porn video where the actress's face was replaced by Gal Gadot of "Wonder Woman" fame. Since then, the technology has been streamlined to the point where even the least technical people can put faces into a new app and make whatever celebrity porn they want to make, Motherboard reported Wednesday. The future is terrible: Now everyone is making AI-generated fake porn with other people's faces https://t.co/AWYVkDENRd

What will AI's role be during this busiest of all seasons? The festive season means many things to many people; to retailers and e-tailers, it means things are about to get busy. This is true no matter when the festive shopping season begins. In India, for example, it runs from mid-August to January; in the US, it traditionally stretches from Thanksgiving to just after the New Year. Retailers of all sorts are already adapting their approach by timing sales and tying them into holidays or other festive events (e.g.

Doctors can prevent one of the most common causes of blindness in young children -- but only when they can detect it. The disease, called retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP, affects the youngest, smallest and most vulnerable infants. These are preterm babies born before 31 weeks who weigh less than 2¾ pounds. Doctors can treat ROP if they catch it early enough, but there's no objective way to determine which cases need treatment. Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer thinks AI can make a difference.

We investigate deep generative models that can exchange multiple modalities bi-directionally, e.g., generating images from corresponding texts and vice versa. A major approach to achieve this objective is to train a model that integrates all the information of different modalities into a joint representation and then to generate one modality from the corresponding other modality via this joint representation. We simply applied this approach to variational autoencoders (VAEs), which we call a joint multimodal variational autoencoder (JMVAE). However, we found that when this model attempts to generate a large dimensional modality missing at the input, the joint representation collapses and this modality cannot be generated successfully. Furthermore, we confirmed that this difficulty cannot be resolved even using a known solution. Therefore, in this study, we propose two models to prevent this difficulty: JMVAE-kl and JMVAE-h. Results of our experiments demonstrate that these methods can prevent the difficulty above and that they generate modalities bi-directionally with equal or higher likelihood than conventional VAE methods, which generate in only one direction. Moreover, we confirm that these methods can obtain the joint representation appropriately, so that they can generate various variations of modality by moving over the joint representation or changing the value of another modality.