Quick quiz: what do you visualize when you hear the word robot? Or perhaps one of the massive, spiderlike machines that assemble complex products ranging from automobiles to computers?

Sensetime, one of China's most impressive young machine-learning companies, is about to start developing new autonomous technologies for one of the world's biggest automakers. Sensetime is part of a crop of homegrown firms that shows just how vibrant the AI industry is becoming in China. When I visited the company's headquarters in Shenzhen earlier this year, I found it to have built a range of computer vision technologies and a formidable team of engineers. While Sensetime may not be well known outside of China, it is one of the world's most valuable AI startups, having received a $410 million funding injection in July, giving it a valuation in excess of $1 billion. The company provides vision technology to scores of big businesses in China, for everything from facial recognition for surveillance to augmented-reality programs for smartphones. It also has ambitions to grow internationally.

Matrix decomposition is a popular and fundamental approach in machine learning and data mining. It has been successfully applied into various fields. Most matrix decomposition methods focus on decomposing a data matrix from one single source. However, it is common that data are from different sources with heterogeneous noise. A few of matrix decomposition methods have been extended for such multi-view data integration and pattern discovery. While only few methods were designed to consider the heterogeneity of noise in such multi-view data for data integration explicitly. To this end, we propose a joint matrix decomposition framework (BJMD), which models the heterogeneity of noise by Gaussian distribution in a Bayesian framework. We develop two algorithms to solve this model: one is a variational Bayesian inference algorithm, which makes full use of the posterior distribution; and another is a maximum a posterior algorithm, which is more scalable and can be easily paralleled. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that BJMD considering the heterogeneity of noise is superior or competitive to the state-of-the-art methods.

There is a war a-brewin', but this war will be fought with wits and not brute strength. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin's declaration that "the nation that leads in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be the ruler of the world," the press and analysts have created hysteria regarding the ramifications of artificial intelligence on everything from public education to unemployment to healthcare to Skynet. Note: artificial intelligence (AI) endows applications with the ability to automatically learn and adapt from experience via interacting with the surroundings / environment. See the blog "Artificial Intelligence is not Fake Intelligence" for a more detailed explanation on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Fast Company article "How to Stop Worrying and Love the Great AI War of 2018," projected that the AI battle would ultimately boil down between the "AI Big 6": Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.

What will be the impact of artificial intelligence on our industries? How safe is artificial intelligence and how will we live with it?

In a world with limited doctors, emerging diseases and superbugs, and sharply rising costs, how can we successfully tackle health care problems at scale? This is just one of the critical challenges India's explosive startup community hopes to solve by implementing AI to serve the needs of the country's 1,324 billion citizens. The result of this effort will have huge implications for the U.S. and other health care ecosystems around the globe. To understand how dire the situation is, it's worth considering India's health paradox. The country's deep demographic dividend -- which occurs when the majority of a country's population consists of working-age individuals -- is driving rapid and unprecedented growth, but it is also a ticking time bomb.

While people fret about robots taking human jobs, machines in Japan are stepping in to fill vacancies amid the worst labor shortage in more than 40 years. That is creating an opportunity for up-and-coming startups focused on automating warehouse tasks. Nitori Holdings Co., the nation's biggest furniture maker, last week deployed 79 robots to move around shelves filled with products at its Osaka distribution center. The company, which introduced the country's first automated furniture warehouse in 1980, is looking to reduce its reliance on human labor. Japan's shrinking pool of workers helped push the number of jobs for every applicant to a ratio of 1.55 in October, the highest since 1973, according to the labor ministry. Inc. have been investing in warehouse automation for years, many Japanese logistics providers are now scrambling to catch up.

Honda Motor Co. said Thursday it signed a joint research contract with Chinese IT company SenseTime Group Ltd. to develop artificial intelligence technology for use in self-driving vehicles. Honda's subsidiary Honda R&D Co. signed a five-year joint research and development contract with the Hong Kong-based company, which is known for developing a technology that can recognize moving objects via "deep learning," considered one of the most advanced AI concepts. "The two companies will develop highly sophisticated automated driving technologies that will enable complex automated driving in urban areas," Honda said in a statement. Japan's third-largest carmaker by volume is aiming to develop fully self-driving cars by around 2025 amid increasingly fierce international competition. The technologies to be developed by Honda and SenseTime will be able to assess the driving environment, the behavior and intentions of pedestrians and vehicles, and use those factors to predict risk.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China expressed "strong dissatisfaction" with India on Thursday after the recent crash of an Indian drone in what the Chinese military said was Chinese territory, an incident that could cause further friction along the two countries' disputed border.

South Korea planned to introduce a new counter to North Korea's burgeoning nuclear weapons program: drones. South Korean news wire agency Yonhap reported Tuesday that the nation planned to roll out a new weaponized drone unit next year. "The Army plans to set up a special organization to lead the development of dronebots, establish a standard platform and expand the dronebot program by function," an Army official told Yonhap, asking not be named because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter. "To begin with, we will launch a dronebot combat unit next year and use it as a'game changer' in warfare." The drones primary function will be for surveillance -- North Korea has launched a number of ballistic missile tests this year and many of them came without warning.