So you thought robots are mainly used for building cars. Sure, that will remain true for a while, but from now and into the future, robots will help us get back on our feet should we have a stroke. Eventually, they could tend to the bed-ridden, or even replace psychiatrists. This is what I learned today by going to Toyota's Tokyo headquarters. Today, Toyota demoed its Welwalk WW-1000 robot, a machine that can rehabilitate stroke victims some 60% faster than regular physiotherapy.

Back in March, the Volkswagen Group dropped rendered concept images of its futuristic Sedric, an autonomous vehicle that would take riders to their destination at the touch of a button -- no human driving required. At Auto Shanghai 2017, VW showed off a real version of its autonomous concept vehicle. As previously shown, the automater has completely removed the cockpit in favor of pure passenger space, which would which would make it capable of level 5 autonomous driving. The VW Group wants Sedric's autonomous driving to be so simple that passengers press a button to get it going. The automaker recently announced its partnership with smartwatch maker Mobvoi, which will craft the AI digital assistance interface getting plugged into Sedric, as well as VW's other self-driving cars down the line.

Matrix completion models are among the most common formulations of recommender systems. Recent works have showed a boost of performance of these techniques when introducing the pairwise relationships between users/items in the form of graphs, and imposing smoothness priors on these graphs. However, such techniques do not fully exploit the local stationarity structures of user/item graphs, and the number of parameters to learn is linear w.r.t. the number of users and items. We propose a novel approach to overcome these limitations by using geometric deep learning on graphs. Our matrix completion architecture combines graph convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to learn meaningful statistical graph-structured patterns and the non-linear diffusion process that generates the known ratings. This neural network system requires a constant number of parameters independent of the matrix size. We apply our method on both synthetic and real datasets, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.

We study strictly proper scoring rules in the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. We propose a general Kernel Scoring rule and associated Kernel Divergence. We consider conditions under which the Kernel Score is strictly proper. We then demonstrate that the Kernel Score includes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy as a special case. We also consider the connections between the Kernel Score and the minimum risk of a proper loss function. We show that the Kernel Score incorporates more information pertaining to the projected embedded distributions compared to the Maximum Mean Discrepancy. Finally, we show how to integrate the information provided from different Kernel Divergences, such as the proposed Bhattacharyya Kernel Divergence, using a one-class classifier for improved two-sample hypothesis testing results.

USA Today's Ed Baig tries out Samsung's new smartphone before it hits store shelves. NEW YORK-- Will the Note 7 battery fiasco choke sales of Samsung's latest smartphone? On redemption Friday, the day when consumers could start getting the company's first major phones since the twice recalled and ultimately discontinued Note 7 phablet, analysts expected heavy demand for the new Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S devices. Newly released research from SurveyMonkey and Creative Strategies found the Note 7 recalls had no impact on the interest in the Galaxy S8 and S for 53.7% of those surveyed. Among current Samsung smartphone users, 65.2% were unbothered by the Note 7 recall.

Margaret Atwood on why'The Handmaid's Tale' is more relevant now than ever When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985, reproductive rights were under siege and acid rain was corroding the forests and rivers. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reasoned that if you took all this to its logical end, you could wind up with a theocracy, not a democracy, and a population rendered sterile by its own poisons. So her novel of speculative fiction imagined a hyper-religious nation where young women who were still fertile were rounded up and confined to the human equivalent of puppy mills, forced to bear the children of powerful men. Well, here we are in 2017, and women's rights to control their own bodies are at risk again, the environment is threatened again -- and "The Handmaid's Tale" is more popular than ever. It became a feature film in 1990, and this April 26, Hulu launches "The Handmaid's Tale" as a 10-episode series. Why is this book, like George Orwell's "1984," finding a new and large and attentive following?

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. After seeing this video, I'm convinced that RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya will be the best robot competition in the history of the universe. NASA's humanoid robots are too big and expensive to spend their time doing human-robot interaction studies, so students at Rice University built NotBot to take their place: It's not at all surprising that a human in a robot suit is much more capable than an actual robot for many (if not most) applications.

People are being warned about an old phishing technique capable of duping even the most clued-up internet users. Web developer Xudong Zheng recently created a fake version of apple.com, Most people would have no issue clicking on the link, which appears to be completely legitimate. However, its actual URL is: "xn--80ak6aa92e.com". This may or may not be the site you are looking for!

Nearly two dozen agency and brand execs have joined a newly created group to discuss how artificial intelligence will change marketing. Last month, The Weather Company hosted the first meeting of the Cognitive Media Council, which aims to better understand how AI can apply to marketing strategy. The goal: to identify how cognitive computing can be used in advertising and identify key opportunities and challenges associated with using the emerging technology that's quickly become one of the most hyped areas of modern-day marketing. According to Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman, when IBM acquired The Weather Company in January 2016, it came under the umbrella of IBM's Watson division with the mandate to create cognitive solutions. With its Watson supercomputer, IBM has increasingly been varying its use of AI, creating a number of APIs for advertising and matching social influencers with brands. It's also showing how it can branch out into other intersections of art and science, such as when Watson ingested the works of Spanish architect Antonin Gaudí to help design a sculpture at this year's Mobile World Congress tech conference in Barcelona.

Artificial intelligence algorithms can now replace social media marketing agencies, paint a "new Rembrandt", project the image of a perfect mother, compose commercially viable music and even direct ads, trailers and short films. Just how worried should creatives be? According to Matt Webb, global chief technology officer at Mirum, an AI algorithm is theoretically capable of mining data from a brand and a brief and combining it with information gathered to solve problems. In that sense, AI could conceivably answer a creative brief, he concludes. The reasoning and processes used to teach AI to compose music turn out to be remarkably similar.