The oft-delayed giant robot fight has finally taken place. On Tuesday, Team USA's mechs scrapped it out with Japan's behemoth in an abandoned steel mill for the world to watch. There could only be one victor, and it proved to be the red, white, and blue. Yes, the MegaBots team representing America came out on top, but not before three gruelling rounds of robopocalypse. Those who tuned into Twitch to view the action, saw Team USA's Iron Glory get knocked down by Japan's Kuratas bot straight out the gate. In the second round, the MegaBots pilots came back with the newer Eagle Prime machine, itself decked out with a mechanical claw and gattling gun.

There have been many "ages" throughout human history, most notably the industrial age and the digital age. Now, we have officially entered the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Within this AI age are many technologies, including machine learning and deep learning. These are fundamentally transforming and altering the business landscape. Its ability to revolutionize the world has been likened to what electricity did in its day.

SHANGHAI – From toilet-paper dispensers to fast-food restaurants, travel and crime-fighting, China is taking the lead in rolling out facial-recognition technology. Advocates say it makes life easier, quicker and safer. Opponents say it is another example of how the Chinese government keeps a sinister and increasingly close eye on its 1.4 billion people. Shanghai and other cities have recently started deploying facial recognition to catch those who flout the rules of the road. Jaywalkers at some intersections have their images flashed up on a nearby screen for public shaming and must pay a fine of 20 yuan ($3) to have it removed.

Istanbul, a city of 14 million people and a crossroads of cultural exchange dating back millennia, may also be where Turkey's next major earthquake strikes. Cities along the North Anatolian Fault, which stretches from eastern Turkey to the Aegean Sea, have experienced an advancing series of strong quakes during the past 80 years, beginning in 1939 when a devastating 7.8-magnitude rupture leveled the city of Erzincan and killed 33,000 people. Most recently, in 1999, 7.4-magnitude quake near the city of İzmit left 17,000 dead and half a million homeless. A few months later, another shock hit Düzce, 60 miles away. Brendan Meade, an applied computational scientist and associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, recently built a computer model of conditions in the North Anatolian Fault.

If you're working in the creative industries and wondering whether artificial intelligence is going to affect your world – even take your job – you could do worse than talk to Chris Chong. He's one of that feted breed, the serial entrepreneur and that of course means failure as well as success. "The creativity of entrepreneurship is always trying to stand on the edge of madness and innovation," he told Spikes Asia 2017. That meant "trying to see where the world will be in two to three years, and trying to position a company so that it takes advantage of those emerging trends." Chong's latest project is SumoStory, built upon the emerging trend of AI capabilities, plus the frustrations that he has personally encountered as an entrepreneur.

WASHINGTON – The imminent fall of the Islamic State's de facto capital leaves America a multitude of tasks to restore stability in the Middle East, starting with pockets of remaining IS resistance in Syria and Iraq. Then there are the more deeply rooted problems, not fixable by guns or bombs, that allowed extremism to rise and flourish: Syria's civil war and Iraq's intractable political, religious and ethnic disputes, which turned violent again this week. The challenge is more than the U.S. can handle alone. It likely will keep some troops in Iraq for years to come to train and advise the army, police and other members of security forces that imploded when IS fighters swept across the Syrian border and captured Mosul in June 2014. The militants also have footholds in Afghanistan and beyond.

Robots have become central to the cleaning-up operation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, six years after the tsunami that triggered the nuclear meltdown.

This article proposes a Bayesian nonparametric method for forecasting, imputation, and clustering in sparsely observed, multivariate time series. The method is appropriate for jointly modeling hundreds of time series with widely varying, non-stationary dynamics. Given a collection of $N$ time series, the Bayesian model first partitions them into independent clusters using a Chinese restaurant process prior. Within a cluster, all time series are modeled jointly using a novel "temporally-coupled" extension of the Chinese restaurant process mixture. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are used to obtain samples from the posterior distribution, which are then used to form predictive inferences. We apply the technique to challenging prediction and imputation tasks using seasonal flu data from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating competitive imputation performance and improved forecasting accuracy as compared to several state-of-the art baselines. We also show that the model discovers interpretable clusters in datasets with hundreds of time series using macroeconomic data from the Gapminder Foundation.

Analyzing the underlying structure of multiple time-sequences provides insight into the understanding of social networks and human activities. In this work, we present the Bayesian nonparametric Poisson process allocation (BaNPPA), a generative model to automatically infer the number of latent functions in temporal data. We model the intensity of each sequence as an infinite mixture of latent functions, each of which is the square of a function drawn from a Gaussian process. A technical challenge for the inference of such mixture models is the identifiability issue between coefficients and the scale of latent functions. We propose to cope with the identifiability issue by regulating the volume of each latent function and derive a variational inference algorithm that can scale well to large-scale data sets. Our algorithm is computationally efficient and scalable to large-scale datasets. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed Bayesian nonparametric model through experiments on both synthetic and real-world data sets.

Toyota has announced its "Concept-i" series, its artificially intelligence-equipped cars of the future offering a sneak preview into how A.I. and its drivers will interact. To be unveiled at the 2017 Tokyo Motor Show later this month, Toyota's Concept-i series comprises of three all-electric concepts. They include a city-friendly "i-Ride" show car operating in pedestrian zones, a Segway-style "i-Walk" upright scooter, and the wheelchair user-friendly Concept-i 4-seater from last January's International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). All three models will feature an A.I. interface called AI Agent, a piece of software that recognizes and analyzes a driver's emotions, actions, and tone of voice to learn preferences and perform tasks on its own without verbal commands. Some of these functions may include suggesting a destination, changing cabin conditions, or activation of a rhythmic seat massage if the technology senses its driver to be under stress.