Beijing authorities aren't messing around when it comes to stopping the theft of toilet paper. Facial recognition technology has been deployed at one of the city's busiest tourist spots to prevent what The South China Morning Post referred to as "toilet paper kleptomania." High-definition cameras installed at the city's Temple of Heaven restrooms capture facial images and then reportedly prevents any one person from taking more than 60 centimeters (or about 23 inches) of paper within a nine-minute period, according to the report and other news outlets. If the same person appears during that period, the toilet paper dispenser stops working. Presumably, this photo session takes place at the entrance to the restroom, so some degree of privacy is maintained while patrons go about their business.

As a business technology professional, you need to manage your company's information resources 24x7 while juggling concurrent projects and staying up to speed on changes in the technology and in your chosen field. You're stretched thin but continue to seek out professional learning opportunities that you can fit into your crowded schedule. That's where IBM InterConnect 2017, 19-23 March 2017, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada, can be just the experience for you. This annual conference is your opportunity to learn about new methodologies, tools and practices for data engineering in the era of cloud data services, cognitive computing, data science and big data analytics. Here are the top five reasons why your peers are registering for IBM InterConnect 2017. At IBM InterConnect 2017, you can learn to advance your business through cognitive technologies.

Robots are where it's at lately with funding, especially so in China. Vertex Ventures China has led a $14 million financing of a Chinese warehouse and logistics robot, Geek . Prior investors Banyan Capital and Shanghai Volcanic Stone Capital participated in the funding. Meanwhile, a Shenzhen-based education and robotics startup, Makeblock, raised $30 million in a Series B round from Shenzhen Capital Group and Evolution Media China. Makeblock, essentially a robot-building kit for kids, has drawn $36 million in funding and is gearing up for expansion into new markets and education hardware.

The first robot cop is expected to join Dubai's police force in May. Officials in Dubai unveiled plans to introduce a robotic police officer to the United Arab Emirates during a policing forum recently and said they intend to have robot cops serving as about 25 percent of the force by 2030. The robot officer, which will be the first of its kind in the UAE, is an example of officials' plan to turn Dubai into one of the safest cities on Earth with the help of technology and robots. Authorities also announced plans to introduce a DNA data bank in effort to track criminals. "We planned for a security system for the future of the city to tackle future crimes. By 2025, Dubai will be one of the best five cities in the world on security level," said Director of the Future Shaping Centre of Dubai Police Brigadier Abdullah Bin Sultan said during the event held on March 13.

The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. China and India, the two largest countries in the world, have populations totalling around one billion. In four years, by 2022, India is predicted to have the largest population in the world, surpassing China. This means we need new ways to grow food that are smarter and helps regulate our use of land, water and energy in order to feed the planet and avoid a global food crisis. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute believe the answer lies in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots.

There's little doubt that the tech industry, like many industries, has unequal representation when it comes to gender. This has enormous impact across a range of areas, deeply affecting people's lives based on unconscious assumptions society should have moved away from. Melinda Gates noted at this year's Code Conference: "When I graduated 34% of undergraduates in computer science were women… we're now down to 17%." While the tech industry is building 3D printers and electric cars, it still hasn't built bridges for equal representation. As experts have noted, it's too easy to blame an absence of women or women having no interest in tech.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves--constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it's been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

I recently visited China on a business trip. While there, I decided I wanted to get a pedicure. My search turned into quite the adventure -- one that involved cutting edge translation technology, and a key word lost in translation. Google and Baidu (which is often referred to as China's Google) have built voice translation apps, available here and here. You speak into them, they listen and then they translate into the language you choose.

Add this one to the growing pile of evidence that the world is slowly transitioning into a sci-fi dystopia: a billionaire entrepreneur with a side-line building space rockets has been showing off piloting a 13-foot-tall robot. Amazon CEO and fifth richest person in the world Jeff Bezos got behind the wheel (well, dual joysticks) of the bot at the retailing giant's annual robotics conference. He tweeted out the picture above earlier this morning, saying: "I just got to pilot an awesome (and huge) robot thanks to Hankook Mirae Technology." Other conference attendees videoed the event, and Bezos can be seen waving around the robot's arms and asking: "Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?" Reports that Bezos then told the crowd to "bow down before your new king and master, Metal Jeff" are unsubstantiated. Bezos was showing the robot off at MARS -- an annual invite-only conference run by Amazon and dedicated to machine learning, home automation, robotics and space exploration.

A student at Nottingham Trent University has created virtual reality software designed to help people with speech impediments. His software provides exposure therapy, placing users in a variety of scenarios and challenges them to confront social anxieties in VR. According to Mr Walkom, repeated exposure to such situations in a virtual environment can prepare users for anxiety-provoking real-life situations, enabling them to overcome their fears. 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. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.