New York – Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today said that it has launched ignio for SAP ERP to help customers run their operations in SAP more efficiently and effectively. As such, ignio becomes an "intelligent virtual expert," in understanding how customers use SAP ERP for business operations and significantly enhancing the value of customers' investments in the SAP platform. In particular, the continuous focus that ignio demonstrates to tackle IT challenges, such as support for SAP, will help to further advance the field of artificial intelligence in businesses." "ignio is built to learn, resolve and protect a company's enterprise IT infrastructure," said Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Global Sales for Software Products - TCS. "Many of our customers currently operate in an SAP environment. It builds a blueprint that binds together knowledge from the various SAP modules, establishing important intelligence that allows it to rapidly identify and address potential issues.

Men's dress clothing, mine included, can be a little boring. Like many male office workers, I lean toward clothes that are sharp but not at all showy. Nearly every weekday, I wear a dress shirt that is either light blue, white or has some subtle check pattern, usually paired with slacks and a blazer. The description alone could make a person doze. I used to buy my dress shirts from a Hong Kong tailor.

As the Pirates of the Caribbean movie juggernaut refuses to let Jonny Depp rest for more than a year or two, Ubisoft's Skull and Bones takes the ship battles of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and turns them into grand-scale, five-on-five multiplayer naval warfare. It'll be a standalone title when it launches in 2018, but ahead of open-beta testing, I got to enjoy some demo time at E3. Caution: slightly shallow gameplay waters ahead. The demo I saw was entirely multiplayer, but not everyone's ship was the same: I could choose from a mid-size Brigantine; a ramming vessel; the Sloop-of-War, which is like the sniper of pirate ships with long-range cannons; or the tank ship, the Frigate, which is slow but powerful. Raiding ships is surprisingly well-suited to squad fights, and due to my Black Flag experience, I knew exactly what I was doing. Playing with other E3 attendees offered a glimpse of how everyone could pillage the high seas.

A new rumor, which several tech pundits already have a hard time believing, suggests that Apple may replace its Siri AI assistant feature with the Google Assistant feature. Tech blog Androidguys reported the claim Thursday, suggesting that Google Assistant could replace Siri at some point, but that for the upcoming iPhone may have both Siri and Google Assistant as options users can choose. Still, several iPhone enthusiasts have already scoffed at the idea. The rumor comes at an interesting time, nearly one month to the day since Google announced Google Assistant support for the iPhone during its I/O Keynote presentation. With this support, iPhone users will be able to download Google Assistant from the Apple App Store, but Google made no indications that its Assistant feature would run on iPhones natively.

It'll be a tough journey – previous robots sent in to the ruined nuclear reactor didn't make it back.

A host of bizarre biomedical robots turned up at ICRA 2017, IEEE's flagship robotics conference, which took place earlier this month in Singapore. We saw swallowable robots that poke the stomach with needles and worm-like robots that explore the colon. Equal parts unnerving and fascinating, these bots aim to help people--perhaps in ways we hope we never need.

If you get into a car accident in China, you can simply pull out your smartphone, take a photo, and file an insurance claim with an AI system. That system, from Ant Financial, will automatically decide how serious the ding was and process the claim accordingly with an insurer. It shows how the company--which already operates a hugely successful smartphone payments business in China--aims to upend many areas of personal finance using machine learning and AI. The e-commerce giant Alibaba created Ant in 2014 to operate Alipay, a ubiquitous mobile payments service in China. If you have visited the country in recent years, then you have probably seen people paying for meals, taxi rides, and a whole lot more by scanning a code with the Alipay app.

Movement is a tricky thing in virtual reality. If you move too quickly, you risk getting sick and disoriented. Because of that, most developers have opted for teleporting in VR games: the act of pointing to a spot that you can see, and instantly warping there. Vindicta, a room-scale HTC Vive shooter from Beirut-based Game Cooks, has another idea for movement: just swing your arms. Holding down the Vive's touchpad buttons gets you moving slowly in the game, and if you want to move faster, you just need to swing your arms as if you were running in place. It's a bit odd at first, but it didn't take long for me to get the hang of it.

Sweden's answer to the F-35 has taken its maiden flight, maker Saab has revealed. During the 40-minute flight over the eastern parts of Östergötland, the latest Gripen executed a series of maneuvers to test its systems, including extending and retracting its landing gear. The Gripen E'Smart Fighter' is aimed at markets not yet cleared to buy the troubled Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The latest version of the Gripen fighter jet has been unveiled by Swedish aircraft maker, Saab. The Gripen E 39-8 prototype has a 15.2 metre (50ft) long body and a wingspan of 8.6 metres (28ft).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I suppose you could decide that this project from MIT's Tangible Media Group isn't really a robot, but I think it's arguably robotic enough (and definitely cool enough) that we can let it slide for this week: We present AnimaStage: a hands-on animated craft platform based on an actuated stage. Utilizing a pin-based shape display, users can animate their crafts made from various materials.