The outsourcing industry in the Philippines, which has dethroned India as the country with the most call centres in the world, is worried that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will eat into the $23 billion sector. AI-powered translators could dilute the biggest advantage the Philippines has, the wide use of English, an industry meeting was told this week. Other AI applications could take over process-driven jobs. The Philippines' business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is an economic lifeline for the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people. It employs about 1.15 million people and, along with remittances from overseas workers, remains one of the top two earners of foreign exchange.

Public perception of artificial intelligence technology, in 2017, seems to lie somewhere at the intersection of existential fear and cautious optimism. Yet there's a growing movement of people who believe AI is crucial to the evolution of our species. Ray Kurzweil, Google's guru of AI and futurism, spoke last week at the Council for Foreign Relations, in an intimate Q&A session. His views on the future of humanity might seem radical to a public that's been cutting its teeth on doomsayer headlines featuring Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning about World War III. He's quick to point out that today, right now, is the best our species has ever had it.

Over the past year or so, earbuds with translation tech have been popping up everywhere, signaling the evolution of an industry. Headphones are now capable of being more than just a means to deliver music -- if the tech is good enough, they can act as a bridge between disparate cultures, bringing people together to foster mutual understandings. The new Bluetooth-enabled Mars wireless earbuds, a collaborative project from Line Corporation and Naver Corporation (a leading internet provider in Korea and Line's parent company), aim to do just that. Boasting real-time ear-to-ear translation of 10 different languages, Mars is unique in that it is designed for each person to wear one earbud (as opposed to needing two pairs). The earbuds were named a CES 2018 Best of Innovation Honoree at CES Unveiled New York on Thursday, November 9. Scheduled for release in early 2018, Mars support Line's Clova artificial intelligence, a virtual assistant which takes cues from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Analyzing the temporal behavior of nodes in time-varying graphs is useful for many applications such as targeted advertising, community evolution and outlier detection. In this paper, we present a novel approach, STWalk, for learning trajectory representations of nodes in temporal graphs. The proposed framework makes use of structural properties of graphs at current and previous time-steps to learn effective node trajectory representations. STWalk performs random walks on a graph at a given time step (called space-walk) as well as on graphs from past time-steps (called time-walk) to capture the spatio-temporal behavior of nodes. We propose two variants of STWalk to learn trajectory representations. In one algorithm, we perform space-walk and time-walk as part of a single step. In the other variant, we perform space-walk and time-walk separately and combine the learned representations to get the final trajectory embedding. Extensive experiments on three real-world temporal graph datasets validate the effectiveness of the learned representations when compared to three baseline methods. We also show the goodness of the learned trajectory embeddings for change point detection, as well as demonstrate that arithmetic operations on these trajectory representations yield interesting and interpretable results.

With President Trump's visit to Beijing this week, there's been a lot of nervous talk about China's growing wealth and trade. The country will soon overtake the US to become the world's largest economy, and its government is aggressively pushing innovation in everything from solar power to artificial intelligence to electric cars. But one of China's most important industries is also one of its oldest: rice. It's unclear how much rice the POTUS enjoyed during his visit, but some seems likely--not only given his reported love of the stuff, but also its role in Chinese culture. People began cultivating the grain in China nearly 10,000 years ago. Today, rice is its biggest crop, with farmers growing roughly 200 million tons--more than any other country, and nearly a third of the world's supply--every year.

Artificial intelligence is starting to change the way we live and work. From a chatbot being granted official residence in Tokyo to Waymo's truly driverless cars zipping around Phoenix, AI is just beginning to amaze and inspire. This evolution is driven by data. According to IBM, 90% of the World's data has been created in the past 2 years. Slowly but certainly, these evolutions are now permeating the legal industry: 54.6% of big firms (1000 attorneys) are using tools with an AI-component (Altman Weil).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Takahiro Nozaki and colleagues of the Faculty of Science and Technology and Haptics Research Center at Keio University developed a haptic-based avatar-robot with a General Purpose Arm (GPA) that transmits sound, vision, movement, and importantly, highly sensitive sense of touch (force tactile transmission), to a remotely located user in real time. "This'real-haptics' is an integral part of the Internet of Actions (IoA) technology, having applications in manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, and nursing care," says Nozaki.

John Markoff covered technology for The New York Times for 28 years. He is currently a Berggruen Institute fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "You don't get it," he said. "In China, they'll be lucky if the robots come just in time." For the previous decade, I had been reporting on the rapid expansion of new AI technologies into the workplace and how they were about to displace not only blue-collar manufacturing jobs but, for the first time, white-collar knowledge workers like lawyers and doctors. But that night, Kahneman alerted me to a largely unexamined aspect of the AI-fueled automation debate.

The Shenzhen-listed iFlyTek said on Thursday its intelligent doctor's assistant, which works similarly to IBM's Watson, has become the first AI robot to pass the exam taken by medical students training to become licensed doctors in China. "We have leapfrogged IBM's Watson in becoming the first AI [robot] to qualify as a human doctor. Watson hasn't passed such a licensing exam in the United States," said Liu Qingfeng, the chairman of iFlyTek, which is headquartered in central China's Anhui province. The robot, called the iFlyTek Smart Doctor Assistant, achieved a score of 456, higher than the mark of 360 required to pass the Clinical Practitioner Examination. After showing AI's power in the exam, Liu said the company was going to use the technology, which allows machines to talk and even think like humans, to "empower the world" by starting to change the education, medical care and law industries.

"Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. We just don't know," said Professor Stephen Hawking at this week's Web Summit in Lisbon. Along with many benefits, said Hawking, artificial intelligence (AI) brings many "dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many". The physicist called for new regulation to ensure humanity could prevent AI from threatening its existence. "Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful, but also on the benefit of humanity," he added.