China Internet Trends 2017 Edith Yeung August 2017 2. Selected by Inc's Magazine as one of the Silicon Valley's investors you must know, Edith Yeung is the head of 500 Startups Greater China and partner of 500 Mobile Collective Fund. Edith invested in over 40 mobile, VR, AR, AI and machine learning startups, including Hooked - #1 reading app for millennium, DayDayCook - #1 Asian Cooking media and platform, Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), AISense, and many more. Before 500, Edith was the head of marketing for Dolphin Browser, a Sequoia- backed mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. Edith also worked with many Fortune 500 companies such as Siebel, AMS, AT&T Wireless and Autodesk. There are so many Chinese people...

Commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman has constituted a task force on artificial intelligence to prepare for industrial revolution 4.0 and digitise the manufacturing sector. "With rapid development in the fields of information technology and hardware, the world is about to witness a fourth industrial revolution," Sitharaman said on Friday. The minister, in a press statement, said that the power of big data, high computing capacity, artificial intelligence and analytics will be used to digitise manufacturing in India. A panel comprising experts, academics and researchers has been formed to explore the possibilities to leverage artificial intelligence for development across various fields. The taskforce is headed by V Kamakoti of Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and includes 17 more members from various government departments and private companies such as HCL Technology and Tata Consultancy Services.

A robot named Pepper was featured in the Tokyo Int'l Funeral & Cemetery Show, performing Buddhist Funeral rites. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A robot named Pepper was featured in the Tokyo Int'l Funeral & Cemetery Show, performing Buddhist Funeral rites.

China aims to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. If it succeeds, it will be in no small part thanks to the expertise developed by US firms operating in China. Of China's top 10 employers in AI, half are American, according to a report (link in Chinese) by LinkedIn's China team. The researchers counted positions in AI fields including deep learning, voice recognition, and natural-language processing. Among the top US firms in China hiring AI talent are IBM, Intel, and Microsoft (the parent of LinkedIn).

ABOARD THE USS NIMITZ -- High above the Persian Gulf, an Iranian drone crosses the path of American fighter jets lining up to land on the USS Nimitz. The drone buzzes across the sky more than a mile above the massive aircraft carrier and is spotted by the fighters. But for the senior Navy commanders on the ship, the presence of the enemy drone so close is worrying. Their biggest fear is the surveillance aircraft will start carrying weapons, posing a more direct threat to U.S. vessels transiting one of the world's most significant strategic and economic international waterways. "It's just a matter of time before we see that," said Navy Rear Adm. Bill Byrne, commander of the carrier strike group that includes the Nimitz.

Two former Googlers are guaranteeing workers in the tech industry that they get interviews with their dreamer employers thanks to artificial intelligence. The past year or so has seen AI deployed to tackle a broad range of issues, and with their startup Leap.ai, ex-Google engineers Richard Liu and Yunkai Zhou believe it can be used to crack the hiring conundrum in tech. As things stand now, LinkedIn is the 800-pound gorilla that defines online recruitment. But it is far from perfect. Since head-hunting options inside LinkedIn, which sold to Microsoft for over $26 billion last year, are often quantitative rather than qualitative, working the service is typically a manual process that can be time intensive.

During the London 2012 Olympics the Transport for London (TfL) network needed to manage 18 million local journeys made by spectators. One can only imagine the volume of data generated during this time; the data and analytics, mostly from the games, was utilized by TfL to predict the number of people who were likely to use public transport during that time, in order to ensure that the system was running effectively. With the evolution of technology changing the way we live and work, it is only a matter of time before governments around the world upgrade their infrastructure to offer citizens efficient services through smart cities, where enormous amounts of data moves within complex information supply chains. Yet, smart cities are not about constantly introducing new technologies. Data sources are everywhere around us, ranging from smart phones and computers, to Global Positioning System (GPS) and social media sites.

A Japanese company has introduced a new role for SoftBank's humanoid robot'Pepper' - a Buddhist priest for hire at funerals. Chanting sutras in a computerized voice while tapping a drum, the robot was on display on Wednesday at a funeral industry fair - the Life Ending Industry Expo - in Tokyo. Nissei Eco Co., an unlisted plastic molding maker, wrote the chanting software for'Pepper', which was introduced by SoftBank Group Corp. in 2014. With Japan's population ageing and shrinking, many Buddhist priests receive less financial support from their communities, prompting some to find part-time work outside their temple duties, said Michio Inamura, Nissei's executive adviser. A Buddhist monk looks at a'robot priest' wearing a Buddhist robe during its demonstration at Life Ending Industry EXPO 2017 in Tokyo A'robot priest' wearing a Buddhist robe stands in front of a funeral altar during its demonstration at Life Ending Industry EXPO 2017 in Tokyo The funeral robot could step in when a priest was not available, he said.

Killer robots might be coming for us, but not if Elon Musk has his way. In a letter to the United Nations, Musk championed the cause for 116 entrepreneurs and AI experts to set guidelines for future robots that can make decisions about killing humans. Of course, everyone went into hysterics. The "killer robots" phrase somehow became the norm for many headlines, even though Musk was actually hoping to form a committee (called the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems). Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare.

The problem of low rank matrix completion is considered in this paper. To exploit the underlying low-rank structure of the data matrix, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian prior model, where columns of the low-rank matrix are assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and a common precision matrix, and a Wishart distribution is specified as a hyperprior over the precision matrix. We show that such a hierarchical Gaussian prior has the potential to encourage a low-rank solution. Based on the proposed hierarchical prior model, a variational Bayesian method is developed for matrix completion, where the generalized approximate massage passing (GAMP) technique is embedded into the variational Bayesian inference in order to circumvent cumbersome matrix inverse operations. Simulation results show that our proposed method demonstrates superiority over existing state-of-the-art matrix completion methods.