Chinese AI professor Yang Qiang has been elected to the role of chairman of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), one of the world's top academic gatherings in the AI field. It will be the first time a Chinese national has acted as the head of the IJCAI since its establishment in 1969. Born in 1964, Professor Yang is the vice chairman of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI), an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) fellow and dean of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Yang's two-year term will begin immediately after the closing of this year's IJCAI meeting on August 25 and last until the 2019 conference. He will mainly be in charge of holding the annual conference, coordinating with AI associations in different countries and managing the AI Journal magazine, Sohu reported. A highly selective event, each IJCAI conference presents three awards to outstanding scientists for their contributions in the artificial intelligence field, as well as certain awards recognising the highest-quality papers.

Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in "The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series." With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China's ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers.

When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it's simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be looking at some significant engineering investment. On-demand, serverless computing enables developers to try out a fleet of devices on IoT gateways with ease.

HONG KONG: It's 2050 and the world revolves around you. From the contents of your fridge to room temperature - digital assistants ensure your home runs smoothly. Your screens know your taste and show channels you want to see as you enter the room. Your car is driverless and your favourite barman may just be an android. Predictions for an AI-dominated future are increasingly common, but Antoine Blondeau has experience in reading, and arguably manipulating, the runes - he helped develop technology that evolved into predictive texting and Apple's Siri.

Participants run ahead of Puerto de San Lorenzo's fighting bulls during the third bull run of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, northern Spain. Each day at 8:00 am hundreds of people race with six bulls, charging along a winding, 848.6-metre (more than half a mile) course through narrow streets to the city's bull ring, where the animals are killed in a bullfight or corrida, during this festival, immortalised in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" and dating back to medieval times and also featuring religious processions, folk dancing, concerts and round-the-clock drinking. Iraqi women, who fled the fighting between government forces and Islamic State (IS) group jihadists in the Old City of Mosul, cry as they stand in the city's western industrial district awaiting to be relocated

Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby has added voice commands for UK users for the first time. The artificial intelligence-powered assistant first appeared on Samsung's Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones earlier this year and enables users to ask questions and quickly access different parts of their smartphone using command prompts. Until now, voice commands had only been available in the US and South Korea, with only text and camera-based feature accessible to users outside these countries. But the UK is now one of more than 200 countries included in the expansion, which can be triggered by saying "Hi, Bixby". Similar to other smart assistant's including Apple's Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, Bixby understands and responds to voice commands on scheduling, news updates and weather reports, as well as launching apps on a user's smartphone.

Some of the most popular robots on the market are'dangerously easy' to hack, experts are warning. Seattle-based cybersecurity firm IOActive Inc. discovered several consumer and industrial robots can easily be turned into bugging devices or even weapons with just a little hacking, with one even able to cause a skull fracture if taken over by someone with malicious intention. The machines studied include robots from Softbank Robotics, UBTECH Robotics, Universal Robotics, Asratec Corp, ROBOTIS, and Rethink Robotics. Seattle-based cybersecurity firm IOActive Inc. discovered several consumer and industrial robots can easily be turned into bugging devices or even weapons with just a little hacking Overall, these vulnerabilities lead to a plethora of dangers, including the possibility they could be hijacked and used as secretive listening devices or even weapons. For example, Universal Robots's industrial devices are designed to work directly alongside humans, but IOActive was able to remotely disable the robot's key safety features in a way that could result in someone programming it to injure nearby humans.

Google will unveil a new Pixel Chromebook as well as a miniature version of Google Home at its upcoming hardware event, according to a source. If true, that would make the new laptop the fist Pixel-branded computer since 2015 and would mean the new Pixel 2 phone wouldn't be the only big release of the event. The firm is also reportedly getting ready to launch smart headphones with direct access to Google Assistant, although it is not clear if it will be revealed alongside the other new devices. It is believed Google is also getting ready to announce smart headphones that will give users direct access to Google Assistant, similar to the futuristic technology in the film Her. The Google product is codenamed Bistro.

Robots excel at predictable, repetitive tasks, and what could be more predictable and repetitive than death? In Japan, a plastic moulding company called Nissei Eco (which also does funeral arrangements, I guess) is planning to introduce SoftBank's Pepper robot as a cheaper substitute for human priests reading sutras at Buddhist funerals. The average cost of a funeral in Japan is somewhere between two and three million yen, as of the most recent study of the industry, which is nearly a decade old. That works out to between US $25,000 and $30,000, which is twice or even three times as expensive as the average funeral in the United States. Like most things, much of the cost is related to the fact that there are humans involved who you have to pay to be there because they'd almost certainly rather be somewhere else.

A gelatinous sea creature called a salp knows this better than anyone, forming long chains of neurologically connected individuals that work together for the greater good. That is, eating and not dying. A new study helps unravel the complexities of the salp's jet-powered, aggregate lifestyle, showing how a creature that's actually dozens of individuals manages to get around at all. Salps have a goofy way of going about life. Each individual in a chain can reproduce sexually to produce a solitary individual, which you can think of as a barrel.