A robot took over duties of guiding visitors to exhibition booths at the China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair recently. The "host" had no one in the background moving its parts by remote control. This robot is smart enough to "see" its surroundings because of laser radar embedded in the machine's software. Shanghai-based Slamtec manufactured the robot. The laser radar allows the robot to scan its surroundings in fractions of a second.

What do the leaks of unflattering emails from the Democratic National Committee's hacked servers during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the deafening hour-long emergency-warning siren in Dallas have in common? It's the same thing that links the North Korean nuclear threat and terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States: All represent the downsides of tremendously beneficial technologies -- risks that increasingly demand a robust policy response. The growing contentiousness of technology is exemplified in debates over so-called net neutrality and disputes between Apple and the FBI over unlocking suspected terrorists' iPhones. This is hardly surprising: As technology has become increasingly consequential -- affecting everything from our security (nuclear weapons and cyberwar) to our jobs (labor market disruptions from advanced software and robotics) -- its impact has been good, bad and potentially ugly. Technology has eliminated diseases like smallpox and has all but eradicated others, like polio; enabled space exploration; sped up transportation; and opened new vistas of opportunity for finance, entertainment and much else.

Indian outsourcer Infosys is hiring 10,000 American workers over the next two years, in the wake of a review of U.S. visa rules and an emphasis on local hires by the administration of President Donald Trump. Infosys said Monday it will open four new "Technology and Innovation Hubs" in the U.S., focusing on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, user experience, emerging digital technologies, cloud, and big data. The first such center is coming up in Indiana in August and is expected to create 2,000 jobs by 2021 for American workers, besides boosting the state economy. The company plans to hire both experienced technology professionals and recent graduates from major universities, and local and community colleges, besides setting up training programs in areas such as user experience, cloud, artificial intelligence, big data and digital offerings, and core technology and computer science skills. The American staff that the company plans to hire over the next two years is a small percentage of the over 200,000 staff the Bangalore company employed as on March 31 this year.

HONG KONG: Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings said on Tuesday it will open an artificial intelligence (AI) research facility in Seattle in the United States, to be led by former Microsoft scientist Yu Dong. Yu, who has been appointed as deputy head of Tencent's AI Lab division, will run the new lab as well as spearhead research in speech recognition and natural language understanding, the company said. Tencent, which owns the popular WeChat messenging app, is Asia's most valuable company with a market capitalisation of nearly $300 billion. Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent is one of a number of Chinese technology juggernauts that are stepping up efforts in AI research. Tencent's WeChat has more than 889 million monthly active users.

The driverless car race is getting even more crowded. Samsung has received the green light to start testing a self-driving vehicle in South Korea. The tech company will be testing a car fitted with sensors and cameras, according to a government statement Monday. It will use artificial intelligence to study how the vehicle deals with bad weather and obstacles. Samsung is the the first electronics company to receive government approval to test a driverless car on South Korean roads.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings said on Tuesday it will open an artificial intelligence (AI) research facility in Seattle in the United States, to be led by former Microsoft scientist Yu Dong.

South Korean robotics company Robotis and the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) announced the TurtleBot 3 at ROSCon last year in Seoul. We got to see a wide variety of prototypes, but Robotis was still in the middle of figuring out exactly what TurtleBot 3 was going to look like and what hardware it would include. The company told us at the time that they wanted the robot to be as open, modular, and customizable as possible, and we've been waiting excitedly to see what they came up with. Today, Robotis is finally ready to share the brand-new TurtleBot 3 with the world. And, surprise, there are actually two TurtleBot 3 models: Burger and Waffle, so named because that's kind of what each of them looks like, if you're willing to stretch your imagination a bit: A few weeks ago, Robotis shipped us test units of the two models, and after putting them together and playing a bit with them, we've got an in-depth review for you along with all the info about price and availability.

Some weeks ago, in this column, I had spoken of how today's information technology (IT) services workforce needs to be radically retrained or face retrenchment. While the thrust of that column was about changing today's process-bound technologists, I had started by harking back to the days when I had first learnt how to programme a computer, and had spoken of a man named Desmond, an Anglo-Indian poet and musician with whom I had been teamed up during that computer-training class. I ended the column by talking about how poets may displace programmers. I have also earlier spoken of the need to back women-led start-ups, arguing that the rate of success of such start-ups is reportedly higher than those led by men, and the fact that women are less likely to be financed creates an arbitrage opportunity for investors who are canny enough to see this opening. To give you an idea of the size of this gap, IBM Corp.'s research has evidently shown that women-led start-ups are likely to be 15% more profitable on average, but are 40% less likely to be funded. Any investor with a half a brain would jump on this opportunity, assuming of course that the other half of their brain could be used to pick the right bets from among the minuscule pool of women-led ventures (less than 8% of start-ups).

India's Infosys Ltd. said it plans to hire 10,000 American employees in the next two years, following criticism from the Trump administration that the company and other outsourcing firms are unfairly taking jobs away from U.S. workers. Infosys, which employs about 200,000 people around the world, will expand its local hiring in the U.S. while adding research capabilities. It plans to open four hubs in the country focused on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, with the first location to open in Indiana in 2017. That center is expected to create 2,000 jobs for American workers by 2021, the company said. The moves come after India's outsourcing firms have come under fierce attack for using foreign workers in place of American employees.

Computers are getting really good at learning things about the world and applying that knowledge to new situations, like being able to identify a cat in a photo. But researchers have recently discovered that there's a hitch: by adding some digital noise to an image, imperceptible to the human eye, it's really easy to trick a machine. Now, researchers have engineered a similar way to fool AI trained to understand human language. One can imagine how this might pose a risk if, for example, machines are one day autonomously vetting legal documents. In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, a team of computer scientists from the Renmin University of China in Beijing describes their system for fooling a computer trained to understand language.