Sanbot is lurking around IFA again. The little robot helper won us over last year, but something seems different this time round. And, this one wants to hang out with you -- yes, you. You see Qihan, the China-based company behind the new child-like machine, has a range of robots for various tasks. There's Sanbot King Kong, which is designed to man reception desks at hotels, and deliver food for restaurants, among other business-oriented jobs.

Tech companies are competing to develop the first viable passenger-carrying sky taxis, whether manned or pilotless, but how soon could these clever copters really be whizzing over our cities? And would you trust one? Dubai is racing to be the first to put drone taxis in the air. In June, its Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) signed an agreement with a German start-up Volocopter to test pilotless air taxis towards the end of this year. The firm has received 25m euros (£22m; $30m) from investors, including German motor manufacturer Daimler, to develop the 18-rotor craft capable of transporting two passengers at a time.

China has rapidly become a global leader in robotics and automation. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which provided these figures, is forecasting that "from 2018 to 2020, a sales increase between 15 and 20 percent on average per year is possible for industrial robots." And these projections don't include service robots for professional and B2B use, and personal use such as toys, drones, mobile gofers, guides, home assistants, and consumer products like robotic vacuums and floor and window cleaners. According to a report released by China Robot Industry Alliance (CRIA) at the big World Robot Conference in August in Beijing and reported by China Daily, China's industrial robot market is expected to reach $4.22 billion in 2017 representing more than 110,000 new industrial robots. At the same press conference, CRIA also reported that China's service robot market will reach $1.32 billion this year, up 28% percent from 2015.

SunTec describes itself as one of the few future-ready software product companies with its technology feet firmly rooted in the Indian IT landscape, but still wary of the hypothesis of'singularity.' The 27-year-old Kerala-based firm has offices in Singapore, Dubai, the UK, Germany and the US. 'Singularity' threat The unlisted firm has a presence in financial services, digital communication services, travel, logistics and retail, and counts 95 per cent of clients from a revenue perspective to be global. This number will be slightly higher from the perspective of its recent entry into the GST scheme of things locally, says K Nanda Kumar, founder and CEO. Explaining his concerns about'singularity', he said this is a stage where artificial intelligence would overtake human intelligence.

This paper presents convergence analysis of kernel-based quadrature rules in misspecified settings, focusing on deterministic quadrature in Sobolev spaces. In particular, we deal with misspecified settings where a test integrand is less smooth than a Sobolev RKHS based on which a quadrature rule is constructed. We provide convergence guarantees based on two different assumptions on a quadrature rule: one on quadrature weights, and the other on design points. More precisely, we show that convergence rates can be derived (i) if the sum of absolute weights remains constant (or does not increase quickly), or (ii) if the minimum distance between distance design points does not decrease very quickly. As a consequence of the latter result, we derive a rate of convergence for Bayesian quadrature in misspecified settings. We reveal a condition on design points to make Bayesian quadrature robust to misspecification, and show that, under this condition, it may adaptively achieve the optimal rate of convergence in the Sobolev space of a lesser order (i.e., of the unknown smoothness of a test integrand), under a slightly stronger regularity condition on the integrand.

Appier, a Taiwanese startup that helps companies harness artificial intelligence to make marketing decisions, announced today that it has raised a $33 million Series C round from an impressive roster of Asian investors. They are SoftBank Group Corp., Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI (the Singapore Economic Development Board's corporate investment arm) and Hong Kong-based financial services firm AMTD Group. This brings Appier's total funding so far to $82 million. Lead investors in its previous rounds included Sequoia Capital and Pavilion Capital. Appier co-founder and CEO Chih-Han Yu says its Series C will be used to grow its engineering and research and development teams in countries outside of Taiwan, including Singapore.

Meet Todai Robot, an AI project that performed in the top 20 percent of students on the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo -- without actually understanding a thing. While it's not matriculating anytime soon, Todai Robot's success raises alarming questions for the future of human education. How can we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than AI? Could an AI pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo? Noriko Arai oversees a project that wants to find out. Could an AI pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo?

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a top-tier annual conference in machine learning. The 2016 edition of the conference comprised more than 2,400 paper submissions, 3,000 reviewers, and 8,000 attendees, representing a growth of nearly 40% in terms of submissions, 96% in terms of reviewers, and over 100% in terms of attendees as compared to the previous year. In this report, we analyze several aspects of the data collected during the review process, including an experiment investigating the efficacy of collecting ordinal rankings from reviewers (vs. usual scores aka cardinal rankings). Our goal is to check the soundness of the review process we implemented and, in going so, provide insights that may be useful in the design of the review process of subsequent conferences. We introduce a number of metrics that could be used for monitoring improvements when new ideas are introduced.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook revealed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) machines had developed their own language to communicate in a more efficient fashion. The response was wide-scale scaremongering from pundits who lamented the evolution of computers. It might be a while before robots take over, but a recent study from Oxford University suggests that robots and AI will replace most human tasks by as early as 2051 and all human jobs by 2136. Technology has already progressed enough to give us driverless cars, robot police and autonomous delivery drones, but the true impact will go beyond making large swaths of the population redundant and drastically alter our society as we know it – from education and health care, to the criminal justice system. "Traditionally, to get a computer to do something, you had to write code and algorithms, but AI is different...the algorithm works independently," said Duncan Angove, president of software company Infor at a recent conference in New York.

IMAGE: MouseAge.Org provides tools for cross-species analysis, and provide correlations between health and appearance. Tuesday, 29th of August, 2017, Baltimore, MD - Insilico Medicine, Inc, a Baltimore-based next-generation artificial intelligence company, today announced its participation in the MouseAge.org The scientists from Insilico Medicine will collaborate with scientists from Harvard, Oxford, Youth Laboratories, the Biogerontology Research Foundation, and other institutions to enable scientists worldwide to derive more information from rodent studies, develop novel biomarkers of aging and various diseases in mice, develop tools for cross-species analysis, and provide correlations between health and appearance. The project campaign has been launched today at research crowdfunding platform Lifespan.io. The project was conceived by Vadim Gladyshev, Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine.