A robotic arm moves a window for a Subaru branded vehicle on the production line of Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd.'s Gunma Yajima Plant in Ota, Gunma, Japan, on Thursday, March 30, 2017. Fuji Heavy, best known for its Subaru brand of cars, will change its name to Subaru Corp. from April 1. Despite what we hear from certain prominent politicians, most serious commentators tell us that robots, much more than imports, are the main root cause of disappearing jobs. If your job can be performed by every-more-capable robots, you are at risk. And, if your business is based on jobs that robots can take, you are at risk too.

Lenovo Group Ltd said it plans to pour $1.2 billion into the research and development of artificial intelligence, the internet of things and big data over the next four years－as the Chinese tech group scrambles to breathe new life into its PC, smartphone and other hardware businesses. Chairman Yang Yuanqing said in an interview with Japanese news outlet Nikkei that the Beijing-headquartered company aims to find a new growth engine through heavy R&D investment and partnerships with global giants such as Google Inc and Amazon.com The company is expected to unveil a new handset that comes with Amazon's voice recognition technology Alexa, and it now already sells a smartphone that uses Google's Tango augmented reality computing platform. Lenovo, which controls 20 percent of the global personal computer market, has been struggling to revive its profits amid a shrinking demand for PCs and intensified competition with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in the smartphone sector. But as the global artificial intelligence technology made significant progress in recent years, the Chinese company's chairman said his group realized that hefty investments into AI can help it reduce its reliance on PCs and raise the contribution of smartphones and other new business to 50 percent of total sales from the current 30 percent.

Financial Technology - or FinTech - Is Now Part of the @CloudExpo Program! Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 20th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, 2017, will find fresh new content in a new track called FinTech, which will incorporate machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and blockchain into one track. Financial enterprises in New York City, London, Singapore, and other world financial capitals are embracing a new generation of smart, automated FinTech that eliminates many cumbersome, slow, and expensive intermediate processes from their businesses. FinTech brings efficiency as well as the ability to deliver new services and a much improved customer experience throughout the global financial services industry. FinTech is a natural fit with cloud computing, as new services are quickly developed, deployed, and scaled on public, private, and hybrid clouds.

CTR prediction in real-world business is a difficult machine learning problem with large scale nonlinear sparse data. In this paper, we introduce an industrial strength solution with model named Large Scale Piece-wise Linear Model (LS-PLM). We formulate the learning problem with $L_1$ and $L_{2,1}$ regularizers, leading to a non-convex and non-smooth optimization problem. Then, we propose a novel algorithm to solve it efficiently, based on directional derivatives and quasi-Newton method. In addition, we design a distributed system which can run on hundreds of machines parallel and provides us with the industrial scalability. LS-PLM model can capture nonlinear patterns from massive sparse data, saving us from heavy feature engineering jobs. Since 2012, LS-PLM has become the main CTR prediction model in Alibaba's online display advertising system, serving hundreds of millions users every day.

Another week, and another bunch of "the robots are coming for our jobs" stories permeate the media sphere. While many of these reports are little more than future-gazing predictions, there are some real and tangible instances where it appears robots are currently out to steal humans' jobs. Robotics startup Marble debuted its road-faring machine this week in partnership with Yelp, with some customers in San Francisco now receiving their food orders via a little white, four-wheeled trolley. Above: Marble's robot can deliver your food, in partnership with Yelp's Eat24. The fairly nondescript vehicle is capable of navigating busy thoroughfares using in-built sensors and cameras, while simultaneously mapping the sidewalk to optimize its route.

Think of the ancient art of Kung Fu, and you may not immediately see a link with cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence. But a Hong Kong-based start-up is combining traditional methods of learning the Chinese martial art with AI technology that analyses the speed and strength of your punches and provides personalised, professional advice to hone your technique. "We chose Hong Kong to start our business as the city is rich in Kung Fu culture and we would like to revive Kung Fu by using AI technology," said Thomas Yu, the founder of JabJabX, an app that stores and analyses data in order to help users hone their technique. "Rather than pure observation, big data analysis can tell you your speed and strength as you learn Kung Fu, and provides more personalised advice." JabJabX is now in a "testing stage", but has drawn the interest of potential investors, said Yu, who won the Big Data for Business (B4B) Challenge organised by Cyberport in Hong Kong and Innobator in Shanghai.

While the flying car is yet to become commonplace, an Israeli firm believes its version of the much anticipated transport could seen be ferrying passengers around in the air. Called the CityHawk, the five seater could be ferrying four passengers using giant jet fuel powered fans. It is based on the Cormorant, a military craft set to ferry wounded soldiers from the battlefield. The radical design uses enclosed fans, allowing it to land and take off in enclosed spaces. Although initial versions will have a pilot, future craft will be able to fly themselves.

Inmates for years have thought of ingenious -- and sometimes very compromising ways -- to sneak contraband inside prison walls. They've bribed guards, used carrier pigeons, had relatives put the goods in body cavities and, of course, who can forget a classic routine: baking a file into a cake. But modern technology is quickly making life easier for inmates -- and less uncomfortable for family and friends -- looking to smuggle illicit goods onto prison grounds. Corrections officials across the U.S. have reported an uptick in the last few years of drones flying over penitentiary walls to deliver everything from cigarettes and pornography to drugs and weapons to inmates. Prison officials in Michigan last spring found a small toy drone on the grounds of the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center.

Last week, I spoke at the Swiss Mobile Association. The event was held at one of the oldest cross-functional research institutes Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute just outside Zurich. Prior to being involved in IoT and AI, I worked for many years in Telecoms. I believe that from an innovation standpoint – we are living in a post-mobile world. Today, just as the Web itself, Mobile is a mature industry.

A little over two years ago, Russia's largest search provider, Yandex, filed a complaint against Google for what it believed were anti-competitive practices. Now, Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service has given credence to Yandex's claims and "issued a prescription to Google in order to require the company to remove anti-competitive restrictions from its agreements with manufacturers," according to a press release. That means Google won't be able to pre-install apps on phones, control the default search engine or place its own apps on device home screens in the region. Furthermore: "Google will be committed to securing the rights of the third parties to include their search engines in the choice window." In a "few months," Google will have a home-screen search widget that will offer up any manner of search providers (yep, including Yandex) assuming they sign a commercial agreement for their inclusion in the query box. For its part, the FAS says that this is a good move to ensure everyone is on the same footing in terms of competition for app placement and web searches.