The girls were dancing on a neon tank, wearing sequined bikinis lit up by red and green laser light. A strobing fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead like the acid-trip kissing cousin of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, with more sequined women dangling from it, trapeze-style. Flashing robots had preceded them -- wheeling through the room, pumping their fists at the crowd -- while the audience, seated on tiers of glittery red plastic swivel chairs, waved glow sticks. As the music throbbed, twin walls of video screens threw up bizarre images. The Technicolor dream machine the women were using as a stage displayed, at the end of its barrel, a rainbow-colored star -- just where, on an ordinary tank, the death comes out. But this was no ordinary tank. It was a fixture of the one-hour show that takes place three times a night at Robot Restaurant, a kind of eye-melting Japanese dinner theater, a cabaret show of such migraine-inducing decadence that Las Vegas falls silent before it. On this hot Tokyo night in July 2013, two Americans, Roger Ver and Nicolas Cary, sat in the crowd. As far as Cary could tell, they were the only gaijin in the place. He was drinking a beer, while Ver, as usual, was abstaining. Their unappetizing bento boxes sat untouched: you don't go to Robot Restaurant for the food. In the midst of the cartoonish spectacle -- earlier, a woman wielding an oversized mace had ridden in on a stegosaurus to battle two heavily armored robots -- they had business to discuss.

Instagram has updated the mobile version of its website, giving users a reason to delete the app. The biggest new feature of Instagram's mobile site is the ability to post pictures. Previously, it only offered basic functionality, such as browsing updates, liking posts, following users and checking notifications. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.

A suicide prevention group will dispatch a drone to monitor remote areas around Tojinbo in Fukui Prefecture -- whose lonely cliffs remain romanticized in popular imagination as a destination where people go to end their lives -- in the hopes that the technology will enhance efforts to minimize the suicide rate. Retired police officer Yukio Shige, the 73-year-old head of the nonprofit group, said that although there has been a decline in the total number of people leaping off the cliffs in recent years, suicide remains a persistent problem. "This year we have managed to stop five people from committing suicide but five is a very small number; it's only one per month," Shige said, adding that far more still think about killing themselves. "So far we've monitored (Tojinbo) by ourselves but with the use of drones we could reach places that the human eye can't see." The group's 16 members -- made up of retired police officers, academics and company workers -- patrol the cliffs six times a week, from 11 a.m. until sunset.

Earlier this month, Kik CEO Ted Livingston said payments are all that's needed for chatbots to live up to last year's hype. He says the technology is in "a holding pattern until we get mobile payments," but insists he's seen enough "magic" to know it's only a matter of time until bots become the next big commerce platform. Livingston's comments make a lot of sense, too. Not having payment on an eCommerce platform is a bit of a problem, for obvious reasons, but is this really all that's standing in the way of chatbots changing the way people shop online? All you have to do is look at China, where WeChat accounts for 35% of all time spent on mobile, to see what bots can do for commerce.

Amazon is reportedly planning to release a new version of its smart speaker Echo on Tuesday that includes a screen for making video calls. The original Echo is a digital assistant that can play spoken song requests, answer questions about a sports score, report the weather or read the news. Amazon is expected to announce a new Echo smart home speaker on Tuesday. The big difference: it'll come with a screen that allows users to make video calls, The Wall Street Journal reports. The 7-inch touch screen will also display answers to spoken questions with Google-like search results, the Journal adds.

When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.

Each of these areas already features a significant level of complexity, so the following description of data mining and artificial intelligence applications has necessarily been restricted to an overview. Vehicle development has become a largely virtual process that is now the accepted state of the art for all manufacturers. CAD models and simulations (typically of physical processes, such as mechanics, flow, acoustics, vibration, etc., on the basis of finite element models) are used extensively in all stages of the development process. The subject of optimization (often with the use of evolution strategies[31] or genetic algorithms and related methods) is usually less well covered, even though it is precisely here in the development process that it can frequently yield impressive results. Multi-disciplinary optimization, in which multiple development disciplines (such as occupant safety and noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH)) are combined and optimized simultaneously, is still rarely used in many cases due to supposedly excessive computation time requirements.

Headlines about mass data breaches have become ominously routine, and yet password convenience still trumps security for most people. That's why, year after year, the world's most popular log-on remains "123456," a password so obvious it accounted for 17 percent of the 10 million compromised passwords analyzed by Keeper Security, which sells a log-in management service. The answer, of course, is to get rid of passwords altogether. Biometric technology--especially fingerprint scanners--have been steadily replacing the need to type in a password, which can easily be guessed by hackers wielding smart algorithms. Now, with the world increasingly embracing voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, companies are starting to create technology that recognizes a person's speech patterns. Facial recognition is starting to catch on as well.

On 12th January, MEPs voted for a set of regulations to be drafted to govern the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence, hot off the back of the UK government setting up a commission to look at the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Across continents, the law is unclear and differing and is likely to evolve in this area. In late 2016, in the UK, the Commons' Science and Technology Committee published a report on robotics and artificial intelligence. The report recommended that a standing Commission on Artificial Intelligence be established to examine the social, ethical and legal implications of recent and potential developments in AI. As of 12th January, MEPs from the parliament's legal affairs committee passed Mady Delvaux's report into robotics and AI.