People trying to comment on articles will now be forced to prove they understand what it's about. That's at least at Norwegian broadcaster NRK's website, which will present people who want to leave comments with a quiz that asks them about what the story is actually about. The creators of the quiz hope that asking people the questions will make sure that everyone on the comment actually understands it. 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.

CloudMinds, a Chinese startup developing cloud-intelligence-based services for robotics and other application areas, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round. Although no funder information was provided, seed financing was provided by SoftBank, Foxconn, Walden International and Keytone Ventures. Desktop Metal, a 3D metal printing startup based in Burlington, Mass., is gearing up to take its first product into production and raised $45 million from GV, BMW I Ventures and Lowe's Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $97 million. Other investors include NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lux Capital, GE Ventures, Saudi Aramco, and Stratasys.

With the growing popularity of chatbots, Facebook (FB) has set out on a bot search mission. The company is calling on IT (information technology) developers in the Middle East and Africa to participate in a challenge that would develop bots for its Messenger app (application). The company has lined up monetary and mentorship rewards for winners and finalists in the bot challenge, which begins later this year. Chatbots are particularly popular among Millennials and Generation Xers. According to Business Insider, 59.0% and 60.0% of US Millennials and Generation Xers, respectively, had tried chatbots as of late 2016.

This post highlights some of the possible economic implications of the so-called "Fourth Industrial Revolution" -- whereby the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to transform entire industries and sectors. Some economists have argued that, like past technical change, this will not create large-scale unemployment, as labour gets reallocated. However, many technologists are less optimistic about the employment implications of AI. In this blog post we argue that the potential for simultaneous and rapid disruption, coupled with the breadth of human functions that AI might replicate, may have profound implications for labour markets. We conclude that economists should seriously consider the possibility that millions of people may be at risk of unemployment, should these technologies be widely adopted.

The team behind Pepper, the humanoid robot from SoftBank Robotics, are planning a platform for the machine where developers create applications for everyday use, such as guarding your home or vacuuming the floor. Developers are already able to build Pepper apps using Android tools, however SoftBank Robotics is also considering opening up its Pepper platform -- similar to a mobile "app store" -- for developers to sell or market software to consumers, said Nicolas Boudot, EMEA sales director, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday. Boudot gave examples of home improvements or care for the elderly as potential software applications that could be created. However, he didn't give a time frame for when Pepper would become more widely available to developers. He said SoftBank Robotics is currently focusing on growing sales of the product, which costs $20,000 (about ¥2.3 million), to businesses.

I imagine if we were sitting in a room decades ago as farmers, we would rightfully be worried about our future employment. However, as the world evolved, new jobs were created in industries we never would have fathomed would exist. Brent Schutte is the chief investment strategist of Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. Today Americans seem to be at odds with themselves when it comes to their feelings on economic growth. People are worried about a future lack of economic growth due to a less productive workforce.

Zoho is advancing its ambitions to become an "operating system for business" with the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) and sales process automation to its enterprise software suite. The company today is announcing the addition of AI to Zoho CRM and introducing Blueprint, a sales process automation platform. It's also upgrading two features to platforms: Zoho PhoneBridge, which connects a customer's PBX system to the Zoho CRM system, and SalesSignals, which provides real-time information about the activities of customers and prospects. Founded as AdventNet by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in 1996, Zoho -- which rebranded in 2009 -- today offers a suite of online productivity tools and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. It is based in Chennai, India, with US headquarters in Pleasanton, Calif. Since last July, Zoho has opened two data centers in Europe -- one in Amsterdam and another in Dublin; gave its CRM platform a major facelift; introduced context-aware help desk software; launched a note-taking app for Mac users; and unveiled a payments solution that allows businesses to create customized, secure checkout pages.

Much of the artificial intelligence talk at Mobile World Congress is at the device level -- services based on voice recognition, in particular. But AI has a role deeper in the infrastructure, of course, and Ericsson touched on that to kick off the conference Monday morning. In Ericsson's traditional MWC opener for press and analysts, Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm understandably focused on 5G. But AI and machine learning were the second topic of his overview, an indication of how deeply Ericsson expects these technologies to change the network. Nokia is in the process of acquiring Deepfield, a deep learning startup, to help with traffic flows in software-defined networking (SDN).

Restricted Boltzmann machines~(RBMs) and conditional RBMs~(CRBMs) are popular models for a wide range of applications. In previous work, learning on such models has been dominated by contrastive divergence~(CD) and its variants. Belief propagation~(BP) algorithms are believed to be slow for structured prediction on conditional RBMs~(e.g., Mnih et al. [2011]), and not as good as CD when applied in learning~(e.g., Larochelle et al. [2012]). In this work, we present a matrix-based implementation of belief propagation algorithms on CRBMs, which is easily scalable to tens of thousands of visible and hidden units. We demonstrate that, in both maximum likelihood and max-margin learning, training conditional RBMs with BP as the inference routine can provide significantly better results than current state-of-the-art CD methods on structured prediction problems. We also include practical guidelines on training CRBMs with BP, and some insights on the interaction of learning and inference algorithms for CRBMs.

This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate of this procedure matches the well-known convergence rate of gradient descent to first-order stationary points, up to log factors. When all saddle points are non-degenerate, all second-order stationary points are local minima, and our result thus shows that perturbed gradient descent can escape saddle points almost for free. Our results can be directly applied to many machine learning applications, including deep learning. As a particular concrete example of such an application, we show that our results can be used directly to establish sharp global convergence rates for matrix factorization. Our results rely on a novel characterization of the geometry around saddle points, which may be of independent interest to the non-convex optimization community.