Taiwanese electronics juggernaut and leading Apple supplier Foxconn announced Wednesday that it intends to invest $10 billion in a new manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, where it plans to make LCD panels bound for computers, healthcare devices, and even vehicles. The White House touted the announcement as a victory for senior adviser Jared Kushner's Office of American Innovation, and marked it as a milestone in President Trump's promise to bring manufacturing back to the United States. "Foxconn joins a growing list of industry leaders who understand that America's capabilities are limitless and that America's workers are unmatched," President Trump said at the White House announcement, flanked by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou. Yet, the 3,000 jobs Foxconn says it will create in Wisconsin aren't the kind of manufacturing jobs that so many laid off auto and steel workers have been clamoring for. Nor are they a pathway to the American-made iPhone President Trump promised during the 2016 election.

A new week brings a fresh Google initiative targeting AI startups. We started the month with the announcement of Gradient Ventures, Google's on-balance sheet AI investment vehicle. Two days later we watched the finalists of Google Cloud's machine learning competition pitch to a panel of top AI investors. And today, Google's Launchpad is announcing a new hands-on Studio program to feed hungry AI startups the resources they need to get off the ground and scale. The thesis is simple -- not all startups are created the same.

Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers will order travelers to take all devices larger than a cellphone out of their bag and put them in a bin by themselves. Prior rules required only laptops to be removed for separate screening. Officials say it gives X-ray screeners a clearer picture of the devices. Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles (stock image) TSA said the new rules have been in place in a pilot project at ten American airports and will expand to all US airports in the months ahead.

Apple has already begun test manufacturing of the three new iPhones it will unveil in September, it has been claimed. Previous reports have said the firm may be forced to delay its eagerly anticipated iPhone 8 until later in they year. However, it now appears the firm is back on track, with the handset expected to be revealed in September. According to Twitter leaker Benjamin Geskin, all three new 2017 iPhone models have begun trial production, including the iPhone 7s, iPhone 7s Plus, and iPhone 8. According to Twitter leaker Benjamin Geskin, all three new 2017 iPhone models have begun trial production, including the iPhone 7s, iPhone 7s Plus, and iPhone 8.

As it is typical for any realpolitik, citizens are becoming less relevant in digital realpolitik. They are personally targeted in advertising and surveillance efforts by corporations and governments. Individuals per se are getting lost in big numbers. The individual is just one amongst billions of Facebook users, and just one amongst billions of contributors to Google searches. Governments are increasingly speaking about digital sovereignty and less about the empowerment of individuals. Citizens are becoming more and more the object of digital growth and less and less the engine behind it, as it has been since the early days of the Internet. On a promising note, realpolitik provides a more realistic picture of interests and risks as well as winners and losers resulting from Internet developments. It is in this way that realpolitik can contribute to creating the basis for more solid and sustainable Internet development. Governments are likely to continue striking deals with Internet companies in order to recuperate some taxes. The bilateral deals could be the building blocks for a more structured approach to revenues from the digital economy.

A new week brings a fresh Google initiative targeting AI startups. We started the month with the announcement of Gradient Ventures, Google's on-balance sheet AI investment vehicle. Two days later we watched the finalists of Google Cloud's machine learning competition pitch to a panel of top AI investors. And today, Google's Launchpad is announcing a new hands-on Studio program to feed hungry AI startups the resources they need to get off the ground and scale. The thesis is simple -- not all startups are created the same.

Singapore and MIT have been at the forefront of autonomous vehicle development. First, there were self-driving golf buggies. Now, leveraging similar technology, MIT and Singaporean researchers have developed and deployed a self-driving wheelchair at a hospital. Spearheaded by Daniela Rus, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, this autonomous wheelchair is an extension of the self-driving scooter that launched at MIT last year -- and it is a testament to the success of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART, a collaboration between researchers at MIT and in Singapore. Rus, who is also the principal investigator of the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group, says this newest innovation can help nurses focus more on patient care as they can get relief from logistics work which includes searching for wheelchairs and wheeling patients in the complex hospital network.

After launching an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital fund earlier this month, Google is today announcing a new program that helps machine learning-centered startups by providing tuned mentorship and support. The Launchpad Studio (via TechCrunch) is a part of the broader Google Launchpad Accelerator program that provides equity-free support, all-expense-paid training at the Googleplex, and access to Google engineers, resources, and mentors. This latest program specifically provides resources and answers to problems that AI startups face, including not enough data and lack of product talent to complement technical skill. To address this, Launchpad Studio offers prototyping assistance, specialized data sets, and simulation tools, in addition to the other resources that are a part of the program. In contrast to the just launched Gradient Ventures, this program does not provide funding, only technical know-how. Meanwhile, Google's latest VC fund also provides technical mentorship, in addition to access to a wider ranger of Googlers.

You see, the way most of these chatbot services have implemented the technology is not at all in line with the latest advances in the technology of bleeding edge chatbot technologies. While many of them would love to make use of character based recurrent neural networks, local attention mechanisms, and generative methods, stability of this technology is just not quite there yet. So, we are left with the solution provided to us: Take the high dimensional space of characters in sentences, and convert it to a low dimensional space, like part of speech tags. Meanwhile you can use pattern matching on the type of tags, frequency of tags, and order of tags to do relatively advanced pattern matching, and get pretty good results, as long as there are not too many patterns flying around in the model. Nevertheless, we have all invested our future endevours into the upcoming A.I. boom, and we want to be part of it right now, deploying our chatbots and getting in while the getting is good.

The traditional Japanese art of origami transforms a simple sheet of paper into complex, three-dimensional shapes through a very specific pattern of folds, creases, and crimps. Folding robots based on that principle have emerged as an exciting new frontier of robotic design, but generally require onboard batteries or a wired connection to a power source, making them bulkier and clunkier than their paper inspiration and limiting their functionality. A team of researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University has created battery-free folding robots that are capable of complex, repeatable movements powered and controlled through a wireless magnetic field. "Like origami, one of the main points of our design is simplicity," says co-author Je-sung Koh, Ph.D., who conducted the research as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute and SEAS and is now an Assistant Professor at Ajou University in South Korea. "This system requires only basic, passive electronic components on the robot to deliver an electric current--the structure of the robot itself takes care of the rest."