As more people shoot pictures and videos from consumer drones, researchers in Singapore have found a way round the frustrating task of framing and taking photos while manually piloting the craft. More than 2.8 million consumer drones are expected to be sold this year, up from 2 million last year, says research firm Gartner. Most carry some kind of camera. Picture taken November 27, 2017. The user tells the drone to take photographs from different angles of the subject, such as a statue. Next, the shot is composed by moving objects on photos from a sample gallery.

Singapore is attracting the world's leading artificial intelligence talent because of its status as a cosmopolitan society and strong state backing for technology research, according to the head of the private equity firm building a mega hub in the city for start ups involved in the sector. Joel Ko, co-founder and chief executive of Marvelstone Ventures, said Alibaba's announcement last week that it would site one of its global AI research facilities in Singapore was a shot in the arm for the republic's ambitions to become a regional focal point for the fast growing industry. Singapore-based Marvelstone on Monday dovetailed the announcement by the Chinese conglomerate – owner of the South China Morning Post – by revealing it was setting up an AI hub of its own in the city state, which would incubate 100 start ups every year. It said its hub would be "the world's biggest" when it opens next year. The two facilities are independent of each other, but Ko said "there could be an opportunity for partnership and collaboration" with Alibaba and other technology giants.

Presumably, Robin Li wanted attention last summer when he decided to launch Baidu's bid for the future of self-driving cars from the front seat of a car that was driving itself. He wanted to draw attention to Apollo, the company's new set of artificial intelligence-driven tools, which Li hopes will come to power vehicles everywhere. Having launched China's dominant search engine, Li is a celebrity in his home country. But even Li didn't anticipate the amount of attention he would get. Automated motoring is still very much forbidden in China, and Li was livestreaming a video that showed him breaking the law.

Artificial intelligence companies have shown off their tracking technology at the World Internet Conference in China - giving a glimpse of how citizens are being watched everyday. Companies such as China's facial recognition start-up Face showed how their technology is already being used to identify and describe people. For the first time, the'Big Brother' conference was attended by top executives like Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Jack Ma of Alibaba. Guided by the hand of the state, tracking technology has become widely accepted in China and this vast data collection could mean these companies have an edge over American competitors. One company present at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen was Face which used its technology to identify people in the audience's gender, hair length, colour and clothing.

Hearing consumers' frustrations may be unpleasant for business operators, but within such feedback lies a hidden trove of information that can be used to improve products and services. Tokyo-based startup Insight Tech is betting on that concept, making what at first glance appears to be a bizarre offer: Sell us your complaints. "We basically buy any complaints," said the firm's president, Tomohiro Ito, in an interview with The Japan Times. The company collects people's grumbles and converts them into big data, which is analyzed by artificial intelligence systems. Insight Tech utilizes the analysis to provide consulting services for firms seeking to market products. "We believe there is an expectation behind dissatisfaction," Ito said.

"We want to enable more intuitive and natural interaction with the flying drone to take photos autonomously - even for the novice user who has not used drones before," said Ziquan Lan, one of four researchers behind the project.Their innovation, called XPose, works in several stages. The user tells the drone to take photographs from different angles of the subject, such as a statue. Next, the shot is composed by moving objects on photos from a sample gallery.

A KDDI Corp. employee holds a smartphone to demonstrate the company's augmented reality (AR) voice assistant service at the CEATEC Japan 2017 exhibition in Chiba, Japan. Particularly when it comes to customer experience, money talks. When it comes to money -- the CEO decides. So the priorities of the CEO matters -- because what the CEO focuses on grows. And generally there's a lot of pressure on the CEO from the board to make quarterly dividends. With so much board focus on quarterly profits and growth, it's hard for the CEO to truly focus on customer experience -- which involves long-term investments, or being misunderstood by wall street for long periods of time.

For the first time ever, Nintendo Co.'s games will be playable on gaming hardware that wasn't made by the Kyoto-based company. In a new initiative limited to China, Nintendo has begun distributing classic Wii and Gamecube titles through Nvidia Corp.'s gaming tablet Shield, the game-maker said in a statement. The device went on sale Tuesday in mainland China with three classic Nintendo games, including "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess," "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" and "Punch-Out!!," which were released globally roughly a decade ago. It's a significant shift for Nintendo, which has kept its homegrown games exclusively for its own home and handheld consoles since the early 1980s. The maker of Wii, DS and Switch machines only reluctantly began releasing mobile titles for third-party smartphones last year. With China surpassing the U.S. as the world's largest gaming market, pressure has been building on Nintendo to bring its titles to the mainland.

Nissan Motor Co. said it will test an autonomous ride-hailing service on public roads in Japan in March, aiming to officially start the "robot taxi" rides in the early 2020s. The carmaker will put two Leaf electric cars, equipped with sensors and cameras and autonomous driving software developed by DeNA Co., on roads in a designated part of Yokohama, where Nissan is based. Nissan will ask the general public to participate as passengers through a booking application on smartphones, said Kazumasa Fujita, a manager at Nissan's corporate strategy department. The trial is the first concrete step in Nissan and DeNA's joint robot taxi project, which was announced in January. The cars will be more advanced than Nissan's current semi-autonomous system known as ProPilot, which enables single lane automated driving on highways.

Industrial Robotics and Automation - According to Jacobs, "while many believe robotics has only recently become a viable technology, some firms have been involved in the space for decades. Industrial automation sector includes robotics companies in the Asia Pacific." Non-Industrial Robotics - " We view robotics & AI as a transformational theme because its disruptive force is not limited to industrial manufacturing. Health care is one non-industrial segment that is rapidly adopting robotics technology," said Jacobs. Unmanned Vehicles and Drones - "Although militaries remain the predominant users of drone technology, commercial usage is accelerating as firms incorporate drones into parcel delivery, agriculture, inspections, and emergency response. According to the FAA, commercial drone usage is expected to grow 10-fold from 2016 to 2021," said Jacobs.