Video is the world's largest generator of data, created every day by over 500 million cameras worldwide. That number is slated to double by 2020. The potential there, if we could actually analyze the data, is off the charts. It's data from government property and public transit, commercial buildings, roadways, traffic stops, retail locations, and more. The result would be what NVIDIA calls AI Cities, a thinking robot, with billions of eyes trained on residents and programmed to help keep people safe.

In 2015, two American engineers, Gui Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein, set out to build a giant human-piloted combat robot called Mk. II MegaBot that could drive on tank tracks and fire 3-pound projectiles. The robot was pretty cool, they thought, but who would they fight? So they decided to challenged the only other giant piloted robot in the world to a duel. That robot was a 4-metric-ton mech known as Kurata and built by Suidobashi Heavy Industry in Japan. The Japanese accepted the challenge.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Keisoku Research Consultant Co. will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Keisoku Research Consultant, Co. offers research and consulting in a wide range of civil engineering-related fields from information construction to preservation of cultural properties. JETRO and prefectures of Japan (Nagano, Shizuoka, Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Oita) will present more than twenty cutting-edge technology companies for partnership opportunity with U.S. businesses. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.

Ever since the Apple iPhone X was revealed amid much fanfare at the Apple event last month, reports have emerged indicating that its production might be slowed down due to the shortage of parts. However, a new report indicates otherwise. A DigiTimes report Tuesday, citing supply chain sources, said the yield rate for iPhone X has been substantially improving, and shipments of the smartphones are expected to grow, starting next month. "The first batch of iPhone X devices has already been shipped out from Foxconn Electronics' site in Zhengzhou (Henan, China). With production yield rates for certain key components such as 3D sensing modules improving, shipments of the device have increased gradually and will meet Apple's demand ahead of the Christmas and New Year's holidays," the sources told the publication. Earlier reports stated that Apple was purportedly slowing down production so as to gauge the market response to the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, which were revealed along with the iPhone X last month.

IBM scientists Thomas Brunschwiler and Rahel Straessle are developing machine learning algorithms to interpret the IoT data. COPD, is a progressive lung disease which causes breathlessness and is often caused by cigarette smoke and air pollution. By 2030, it is expected to be the third leading cause of death worldwide, with 90% occurring in low and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that by 2020 the expected cost of medical care for adults in the US with COPD will be more than $90 billion, mainly due to complications and multiple hospitalizations, many of which are preventable with better healthcare management and more personalized and frequent patient support. Management and prevention of COPD is the focus of a new research project presented today at the 19th annual IEEE Healthcom Conference, in Dalian, China.

Sony Mobile Communications Inc. announced Tuesday it will begin selling a new communications robot targeted at families next month, furthering its foray into the trending robot market. "We've developed this product based on a theme of making it a new member of the family," Hiroshi Ito, deputy head of the smart products division at Sony Mobile, said during a news conference in Tokyo. "We'd like to propose a new way of communication with this that makes communication more fun for families." Dubbed Xperia Hello, the robot will hit store shelves Nov. 18 and is expected to sell for around ¥150,000. The 21-cm conical-shaped robot can perform various functions such as using its camera to recognize people's faces and then chatting with them.

Matt Oehrlein and Gui Cavalcanti, co-founders of the robotics company, MegaBots, with giant robots MK2 (left) and Eagle Prime. Matt Oehrlein and Gui Cavalcanti, co-founders of the robotics company, MegaBots, with giant robots MK2 (left) and Eagle Prime. Two years ago an American robotics company challenged a Japanese robotics company to a duel. This long-awaited match between the monstrous robots -- built by MegaBots Inc. of the U.S. and by Suidobashi Heavy Industry of Japan -- will be broadcast on Tuesday via the online steaming site, Twitch. It's billed as the "first ever giant robot fight." "This is a personal dream of mine come to life," says engineer Gui Cavalcanti, MegaBots' co-founder.

Manufacturing industries have shut-downs, both routine and sudden, when a large number of employees is involved in finishing a multitude of tasks. Each employee quite often works independently of the other and what they do is shared either in daily or weekly team meetings. But what if each one knew what the other was doing even without having to attend the meetings. That is what Maximl Labs Pvt Ltd, a start-up being incubated at the Incubation Cell in IIT Madras, seeks to address with a cloud-based software product, SyncOps, short for synchronising operations. Having studied the working of refineries and steel plants, the idea was to identify friction points, provide real-time actionable insights to all concerned, says Pankaj Pawan, 27, Founder and CEO, Maximl Labs.

Yesterday I had the chance to meet Andreas Liebl, partner at UnternehmerTUM, who launched a programme Applied.AI, wherein people from across the world are invited to apply. If you are an engineer, or a professional, and wish to launch an application or gain expertise in the field of AI, this is the programme for you. The institute was founded by entrepreneur Susanne Klatten in 2002 and is supported by several corporations such as Nvidia, Mercedes Benz and SAP, to name a few. What I found interesting about the institute is that not only do they train you, but can also support you, should you wish to start up. The institute has a venture capital arm that can facilitate investments towards startups with promising ideas.

One of the most controversial psychological studies in recent memory appeared last month as an advance release of a paper that will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinsky, both of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, used a deep neural network (a computer program that mimics complex neural interactions in the human brain) to analyze photographs of faces taken from a dating website and detect the sexual orientation of the people whose images were shown. The algorithm correctly distinguished between straight and gay men 81 percent of the time. When it had five photos of the same person to analyze, the accuracy rate rose to 91 percent. For women, the score was lower: 71 percent and 83 percent, respectively. But the algorithm scored much higher than its human counterparts, who guessed correctly, based on a single image, only 61 percent of the time for men and 54 percent for women.