Hi-tech employees attend Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in Tel Aviv last month, held for the first time in Israel. Israel will miss out on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence if the government fails to allocate more money for research-and-development in building supercomputers, a local executive from tech firm Nvidia warned. While countries such as China and Japan have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building the world's fastest supercomputer – which can run at a speed of 130 petaflops, performing some 130 quadrillion (million billion) calculations per second, according to CNN – Israel has failed to invest enough to keep up with the AI arms race.

The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit . China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up "Big Brother" technology. Seagate Technology PLC, Qualcomm Inc. and United Technologies Corp. were among the foreign companies to show their wares at the 16th China Public Security Expo, where prospective customers included Chinese police, government officials and businesses.

Are you a talented Data Scientist? Are you seeking an opportunity to work on exciting Machine Learning projects? Do Are you currently working in Singapore, holding a work visa? A cool and innovative Machine Learning company are rapidly expanding their in-house research and consulting teams and are seeking to recruit a number of Senior Data Scientists. Your role will be to help design and develop new proof of concepts for enterprise-scale organisations who are seeking to enhance their AI/Deep Learning capabilities.

Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Thursday introduced a speaker and two robots as part of its Raven series in a serious push into the highly competitive smart home market. The products, introduced at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, are powered by the company's DuerOS conversational artificial intelligence technology. That system is similar to virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, the Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana. The smart speaker is called Raven H and will be available for purchase in December for about 1,699 yuan ($256). Design-wise, the speaker looks like a stack of thin, colored square blocks and it comes with a touch-sensitive light-emitting diode (LED) display controller.

Indian ride-hailing firm Ola said it has tied up with Microsoft to build a connected-car platform and will use the U.S tech giant's Azure cloud-computing service to power its in-car entertainment offering. Microsoft is separately also in talks over a potential investment in Ola, a source told Reuters, declining to be named as the discussions are private. The new connected-vehicle platform, for cars that have internet access, will have features to aid navigation and to flag when vehicle maintenance is required, Ola said in a statement on Tuesday. "Both companies will collaborate to take this platform to car manufacturers globally to integrate with vehicle systems," Ola said, making the announcement during a visit to India by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Ola, which has been locked in a fierce battle with rival Uber for a bigger piece of India's $12 billion taxi market, has said it would invest in artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities, which include technologies like its in-car entertainment platform called Play that allows riders to choose music and stream videos.

Artificial intelligence (AI) poses the greatest threat to the oil and gas industry over the next five to 10 years, according to Microsoft's oil and gas director for the Middle East and Africa.

Robots may keep Tesla's CEO up at night, but companies around the globe are interested in putting them to work, according to new research from Tractica. In a press release Tractica, the market intelligence firm, announced its forecast that more than 23,000 robots will be deployed for customer service applications from last year through 2022. During the forecast period, the robots will generate $451 million in revenue. Nearly half of all the customer service robots will be found in Asia Pacific, but there will also be growth in the U.S. and Europe. "Fewer than five years ago, hardly anyone had seen or heard of robots in public and commercial spaces, as most of the developments were restricted to research labs," says research analyst Manoj Sahi in the press release highlighting results of its latest research.

The Orthopaedic and Prosthetic Centre in Taiz offers hope for the seriously injured in Yemen's war.

Most people still don't know who or what Teenage Engineering is. But, those that do probably think of them as a music company -- the iconic OP-1 synthesizer, OD-11 speaker and line of tiny Pocket Operator synths have earned Teenage Engineering that reputation. But more than that, the company is made of of people who love getting weird with hardware design; pushing the boundaries of what can be created is in Teenage Engineering's DNA. The two new products Teenage Engineering just unveiled at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, China most definitely fit with that ethos. Simply referred to by the single letters "H" and "R," the easiest way to identify devices is to call them smart speakers.

Recently, crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective paradigm for human-powered large scale problem solving in various domains. However, task requester usually has a limited amount of budget, thus it is desirable to have a policy to wisely allocate the budget to achieve better quality. In this paper, we study the principle of information maximization for active sampling strategies in the framework of HodgeRank, an approach based on Hodge Decomposition of pairwise ranking data with multiple workers. The principle exhibits two scenarios of active sampling: Fisher information maximization that leads to unsupervised sampling based on a sequential maximization of graph algebraic connectivity without considering labels; and Bayesian information maximization that selects samples with the largest information gain from prior to posterior, which gives a supervised sampling involving the labels collected. Experiments show that the proposed methods boost the sampling efficiency as compared to traditional sampling schemes and are thus valuable to practical crowdsourcing experiments.