As soon as you approach Pepper, a four-foot-tall robot, she starts sizing you up. Thanks to facial recognition capabilities, Pepper can determine your gender and age bracket. And as you begin asking her questions, she can draw from a vast volume of cloud-based information to give what she thinks are relevant answers. If you smile, she can tell the conversation is going well and that you're finding her answers helpful. If you don't, she might ask you if she's misunderstanding your requests.

Donald Trump has promised to "unlock the mysteries of space" in his time as President. The commitment came as one of a range of vague commitments made as part of his inauguration speech. Following a long passage in which he berated politicians for talking too much, President Trump said that "The time for empty talk is over". "Now arrives the hour of action," he said. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

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. This virtual reality film transports you to Boston Dynamics' headquarters and puts you right next to SpotMini (they have four of them!) and Atlas as they walk, run, and playfully crash into each other. It's really cool footage, even if you get totally sick like we did.

South Korean Go players will be banned from using smartphones during official tournaments in the future, and it's all thanks to Google's AlphaGo AI. The Korea Times reports that the Korea Baduk Association -- baduk being the local name for Go -- is currently drafting new rules that will outlaw smartphone use in matches. While the organization is fully aware you can't carry AlphaGo around in your pocket at the moment, it's preempting a time when certain AI tools that can give players a competitive edge do become available on smartphones. It may seem strange that smartphone use is permitted in official Go competitions as it stands, but then there's basically no precedent for digital tools being of any help to experienced players. Though IBM's Deep Blue chess computer beat world champ Garry Kasparov in 1997, the number of variables and strategic complexity of Go have kept programmers from creating bots that exhibit anything more than an amateur skill level.

It is set to be a monumental battle for the next generation of smart assistants. Samsung has fired the latest salvo in its AI phone battle with Apple, revealing more details of Bixby, it's competitor for Siri. The AI is said to have visual search capabilities to analyze the images, identify objects and performing optical character recognition on visible text. Although the Samsung Galaxy S8 reveal is around the corner, many users are still feeling the burn from the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. However, the firm may redeem itself, as the flagship smartphone is rumored to have an assistant more powerful than Apple's Siri Bixby could be used for a wide variety of functions in a similar way to Apple's Siri.

In 2015, it was all about big data but venture capital (VC) investments in China will move increasingly into artificial intelligence (AI) this year, a KPMG study found. "Back in 2015, you get a lot of data points. Now, we're moving into the second phase where companies are trying to capture data, analyse the data...and monetize it," a KPMG China partner, Lyndon Fung, told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Thursday. He cited self-driving cars as an example of artificial intelligence technology that is poised to transform lives. In the report released last week, KPMG found investment by VCs in China reached a record high in 2016, despite a global slowdown.

For decades, researchers have been pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against the top game players in the world. The heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em variant of poker may be the final frontier in the battle of man vs. machine over games. And it may be about to fall. In 1997, IBM chess computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, IBM Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Ruttner, the two winningest Jeopardy players in that game show's history.

A U.S. Air Force pilot grasps a flight control and weapons firing stick while preparing to launch a MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), from a ground control station in the Persian Gulf region on January 7, 2016. At 12:01 p.m. on January 20th, drone geek Maynard Holliday won't be a Pentagon robot expert anymore. One of the roughly 4,000 Obama appointees out of a job on Friday, Holliday is wrapping up two and a half years of work designing and buying drones for the Pentagon. A self-proclaimed Star Trek-loving science nerd who grew up obsessed with the thought of one day traveling into space himself, today Holliday's much more interested in a smaller kind of'space race' happening here on Planet Earth. As he shuffles his way out of Washington, he says he's got one big worry about the future of military drone warfare: What happens when and if killer drones go on autopilot?

The history of video games has seen many fine upstanding leaders, prime ministers and presidents. Stoic Marion Bosworth from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 who instigates the fight back against cyber terrorist Raul Menendez; The President in Saint's Row IV who must defend their country against an alien invasion; and who can forget President Ronnie in Bad Dudes who remains steadfast in his love of burgers, even after being kidnapped by DragonNinja? But sometimes these digitised demagogues fare less well, and understandably, it's these more troublesome characters that have come to mind this week. So here are what we feel are the six worst US presidents in games history. Add your own candidates in the comments section.

Amazon is virtualising its Dash buttons, allowing shoppers to order items with the click of a mouse rather than the push of a button. Though it's a logical decision, it still seems an unusual one, as much of the intrigue around physical Dash buttons has been generated by the product's sheer weirdness. Physical Dash buttons are arguably more useful too, as they allow you to shop without having to fire up Amazon on your computer or smartphone first. For the uninitiated, the Dash button is a small, Wi-Fi-connected piece of hardware you can stick anywhere in your house, and use to order a specific product from a specific brand with a single push of a button. 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.