San Francisco bar Folsom Street Foundry typically serves cocktails and hosts social events well into the night. But before the sun came up on Wednesday morning, it held a dance party with a high-tech twist. Daybreaker -- the organization that holds morning dance parties, which start with a 6 a.m. Watson is used in hospitals, banks and classrooms, but the company showed off its playful side for hundreds of early risers in the Bay Area. The system assigned workouts, powered the dance floor, created breakfast recipes, and pulled data from social media as an LED sun rose inside. Upon registering, participants used Watson's Personality Insights service to analyze their strongest personality traits based on tweets or a short survey.

An illustrated artificial neural network (ANN) (CC BY SA 4.0 LearnDataSci via Wikimedia Commons) The system's'neural network' is advanced, but its abilities are being exaggerated by observers I have a fascination with translation, primarily because I have an interest in languages. I'm what I like to call "an aspiring polyglot," with the implication that I don't have time to practice (and reach complete fluency in) the few foreign languages I have some knowledge of, yet I give myself plenty of time to learn about said languages, how they are all different and by extension how they all work. As a technology- and startups-focused journalist, that makes the evermore popular topic of machine translation (MT) and "translation memory" fascinating, giving me the chance to cover companies like Austrian startup LingoHub (an essential service for apps) or Portuguese startup Unbabel (the next-level stuff they're doing is very cool). I can ask people how they communicate with lovers from other countries and report on developments like Google Translate's upgrade from "phrase-based machine translation" (PMT) with a "neural machine translation" (NMT). "Google Translate invented its own language to help it translate more effectively," wrote UX developer Gil Fewster on Medium, with the bold emphasis his own.

A Chinese city started using a robotic traffic policeman to catch jaywalkers yesterday. The droid, stationed at a crossroad in the city of Xiangyang, central China's Hubei Province, has been programmed to stop and tell off pedestrians who run the red lights. Local authority hoped that the robotic traffic officer could help correct Chinese people's bad habits while crossing roads. Robocop: A robotic traffic police officer was put to use yesterday at a traffic junction in central China's Xiangyang city The robotic cop can send signals through its arm gestures, give verbal warnings to jaywalkers and flash lights as reminders, stated in a report in gmw.cn. The head of the robot serves as a surveillance camera which can record offensive behaviour on the road. It is stationed on a refuge island at a crossing on Tanxi road to monitor the pedestrians of Xiangyang.

FILE - This April 29, 2016 file photo shows honoree Francis Ford Coppola at a handprint and footprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. The director has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $900,000 for what he says will be an "immersive, psychedelic horror roll-playing game" based on his classic 1979 Vietnam War film, " Apocalypse Now." (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File) The Associated Press

The 1556 earthquake that killed an estimated 830,000 people in the Shaanxi Province is but the deadliest example of China's long history with the natural disaster. The 1920 Haiyuan quake killed 273,000; the 1976 Tangshan earthquake claimed about 232,000 lives. Whether or not they hold to the historic view that earthquakes indicate heaven's displeasure, the modern Chinese aren't sitting idle as the ground trembles. Starting in the mid-1960s, the country established a system to improve prediction capabilities, response training, and public communications to reduce the impact of calamities. They enlisted satellites to shape post-disaster responses, but since quakes have a habit of knocking out the ground-based systems that deliver their images to those who need them, a view from space isn't always much help.

OSAKA – Japanese motor maker Nidec Corp. said Thursday it plans to invest ¥100 billion ($878 million) on robots and supercomputers to eliminate overtime work for its 10,000 group employees in Japan by 2020. The company, which commands a high global market share for small precision motors, is known for its culture of hard work, with founder and Chairman Shigenobu Nagamori setting an example by working from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. But with its workforce diversifying through aggressive midcareer recruitment and acquisitions of overseas companies, Kyoto-based Nidec is taking steps to enhance the work-life balance of its employees. To implement the change, Nidec plans to allocate about ¥50 billion each for its manufacturing division and its noncore division, including development and personnel units. At its factories, the company plans to introduce cutting-edge facilities using robots to reduce operational hours.

Sky is going to let people watch all of its TV channels without a satellite dish for the first time ever. The company is going to let people watch its full TV service through broadband instead of installing an entire satellite dish on their house. The move is apparently an attempt to stop the rate of "churn" at Sky – how many people join the service and then leave. The announcement came as Sky revealed surging numbers of people leaving to competitors like BT – up to 11.6 per cent from 10.2 per cent last year. Those same results showed a 9 per cent fall in earnings because of the increased price of football rights.

A Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people's relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt. The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as "non-factoid" questions are difficult for AI to address. "Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions," says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. "Questions about love, especially in Japan, can often be a page long and complicated. They include a lot of context like family or school, which makes it hard to generate long and satisfying answers."

One of the big topics that was discussed in financial technology (fintech) circles at length in 2016 ― and will continue to be discussed at even greater length as we enter 2017 ― is artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning is emerging as the field within AI that is seeing the most amount of real-world applications and use cases among financial institutions, especially in the area of fraud. Take, for example, a historic event that unfolded in March 2016 that demonstrated the power of machine learning: the victory of program AlphaGo of Google DeepMind over professional gamer Lee Se-dol. This exciting technological breakthrough demonstrates how far AI has come, even in just the past year, and how it is now able to catch humans out. It's true, though, that the idea of computers learning autonomously has been around for decades.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols -- lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish -- and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date. Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered.