'Trust me, I'm a robot': Officials, UN agencies, NGO's, industry leaders, and AI experts have met in Geneva to discuss ethical, societal and policy issues related to AI. Picture: AFP / Fabrice COFFRINI Sophia smiles mischievously, bats her eyelids and tells a joke. Without the mess of cables that make up the back of her head, you could almost mistake her for a human. The humanoid robot, created by Hanson robotics, is the main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week on how artificial intelligence can be used to benefit humanity. The event comes as concerns grow that rapid advances in such technologies could spin out of human control and become detrimental to society. "Sophia" is an artificially intelligent (AI) human-like robot developed by Hong Kong-based humanoid robotics company Hanson Robotics.

The robot market in China is increasingly diverse,

SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named "Diamond Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. In an era of historic innovation fueled by unprecedented access to data and technology, the low cost and risk of entering new markets has leveled the playing field for business. Today, any ambitious innovator can easily introduce a new application or product that can reinvent business models and transform the client experience. In their Day 2 Keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Mercer Rowe, IBM Vice President of Strategic Alliances, and Raejeanne Skillern, Intel Vice President of Data Center Group and GM, discussed how clients in this new era of innovation can apply data, technology, plus human ingenuity to springboard to advance new business value and opportunities. Speaker Bios Mercer Rowe is Vice President, Strategic Partners for IBM's Cloud Business Unit.

ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is an annual academic conference covering advances in robotics. It is one of the premier conferences in its field. This year, I was invited to attend to its 2017 edition in Singapore. With a superb organization and a beautiful location, the event included conferences of leading researchers and companies from all around the world, as well as workshops and an exhibitors area. This latter is where I spent most of my time, as I love direct interaction with the companies and research centres.

Japanese car giant Honda has broken down its plans for fully autonomous vehicles, confirming that it intends to introduce cars that require no driver intervention by 2025. In a statement, the company clarified that it will install its autonomous freeway drive system in vehicles by 2020, giving itself an additional five years to develop vehicles that can handle all necessary road conditions without human assistance. Like many other car makers, Honda's self-driving systems rely on a mixture of cameras, LiDAR and radar sensors. Using these technologies, it aims to meet standards set out by SAE International, an automotive standardization body. Autonomous freeway driving meets SAE Level 3, enabling drivers offload driving tasks but remain prepared to take back control.

Rand Corporation reported in 2016 that autonomous cars would need to be tested over 11 billion miles in order to prove that they're better drivers than humans. With a fleet of a hundred cars running 24 hours a day, that would take 500 years, according to the report. That seems both improbable and impractical, so companies like Cognata are filling the autonomous vehicle testing void with virtual miles. The need to establish the reliability of autonomous vehicles in short order has prompted Emerge Innovation Capital, Maniv Mobility, and Airbus Ventures to invest $5 million in funding in Cognata. The company's simulation system uses artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision to create a virtual environment for testing cars without drivers -- no roads required.

Gigabyte is one of the biggest motherboard makers in the world, and we visited the company's factory in Taiwan to find out how they're manufactured. About a quarter of Gigabyte's motherboard output comes from its Nan Ping factory about an hour west of Taipei. About 400,000 motherboards come off the assembly line every month. Robots remove a lot of the most complex work from humans. However, a surprising amount of construction is still done by hand: the insertion of many larger components, for instance, and visual checks of the motherboards. Humans and machines often work together.

Welcome to your Thursday morning. Russia has a vending machine for that. I think we know the answer. You might not notice the brighter screen, but the performance is noticeably better.A day with Apple's new iMac (no, not the Pro) Executive Editor Dana Wollman left WWDC on Monday with an iMac. The bad news is that it's not the iMac Pro.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese education authorities have gone high-tech to catch cheaters as millions of high-school students take their "gaokao", the annual university entrance exam seen as key to landing a lucrative white-collar job.

The president of Honda Motor Company has said his firm will aim to develop fully self-driving cars by around 2025, amid increasingly fierce international competition to produce autonomous vehicles. "We hope to establish technologies (for fully automated cars) by around 2025," President Takahiro Hachigo told reporters earlier in the week at the company's research and development center in Tochigi Prefecture. Honda is now aiming to develop fully automated "level 4" cars that require no steering wheel or brake operations under specific conditions such as the time of day, location and type of weather. "Level 4" cars are just one step short of "level 5" vehicles, which make driving completely autonomous with no restrictions. Japan's third-largest automaker by volume is struggling to gain a competitive edge in self-driving technology over its global rivals.