SoftBank Group is promising new services for its Pepper robot that will appeal to business users and help bring the humanoid to storefronts and reception areas. The company is developing a customer support package and a service that allows businesses to manage a fleet of Peppers, Fumihide Tomizawa, chief executive officer of SoftBank Robotics, said in an interview in Tokyo on Monday. The wireless carrier and Internet company investor will reveal more details of the service at the SoftBank World event July 30 and 31, he said. When Pepper went on sale to Japanese consumers on June 20, all 1,000 units sold out within one minute. SoftBank is targeting businesses to increase the robot's installed base which Tomizawa estimates would have to be in the hundreds of thousands to support a community of developers and an application store modeled on Apple Inc.'s.

The trouble with machines is, they do things better than we do. "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth," said the third-century B.C. Greek inventor Archimedes, lever in hand. The Earth has been moving ever since, ever faster. Still, from his time to ours, through mechanical evolutions and technological revolutions, a machine remained a machine. Lever or electric vacuum cleaner, inclined plane or automobile -- or personal computer or smartphone, for that matter -- humans commanded, machines obeyed.

Yuji Honkawa knew the humans were losing by April 2010. No matter how fast he sent orders to be filled at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, a machine beat him. Unemployed after 20 years dealing in equities at seven different brokerages, the 47-year-old Honkawa watched as the market sped up and automated traders went from generating 10 percent of orders at the start of 2010 to as much as 72 percent last year. Among the men and women he competed with to get prices for clients, 80 percent have left the industry, he estimates. "It's kind of like the Terminator," Honkawa said in an interview.

LOS ANGELES – Automakers intending to develop driverless cars need to work as much on software design as mechanical engineering, according to the researcher leading Nissan Motor Co.'s automated-vehicle program. Making cars that are "deliberative" in assessing road conditions, rather than just reactive, requires artificial intelligence, said Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan's Silicon Valley research center in Sunnyvale, California. Nissan, which aims to sell vehicles that can drive themselves by 2020 or sooner, is developing software to read and filter sensor data much as a human brain does, he said. "What the auto industry has to come to is a shift from thinking about the car as a physical, mechanical system," Sierhuis said in an interview Tuesday at the Automated Vehicles Symposium in San Francisco. "Autonomy, autonomous systems, is about understanding how humans do that, and then replicating it with software."

WASHINGTON – When robots play soccer, it looks like a game played by 5-year-olds: they swarm around the ball, kick haphazardly and fall down a lot. However, robot teams have made strides in recent years, and some researchers believe the humanoids could challenge the world's best players in a decade or two. "Maybe in 20 years we could develop a team of robots to play against the best World Cup teams," said Daniel Lee, who heads the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab, which is seeking a fourth consecutive RoboCup in Brazil this month, the premiere event for robotic soccer. Robotic soccer, says Lee, is more than fun and games. It involves artificial intelligence and complex algorithms that help provide a better understanding of human vision, cognition and mobility.

"Singularity" is an odd word. Then 20th-century physicists got hold of it and situated it at the very boundary of space-time, to the eternal bafflement of the lay mind. A singularity became the inexplicable, infinitely charged nothing out of which the universe grew following the Big Bang. A new "singularity" now looms -- the moment, fast approaching, when our machines surpass us in intelligence. Conservative futurists -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- see it coming around 2045.

Internet service provider Exetel has unveiled a new customer support system that uses artificial intelligence to solve user connection and other support issues online. The Calliope system, developed by Exetel and the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, is the result of an eight-year bid to bake intelligence into the ISP's customer management systems. The new system was developed over the past two years at the institute, and aims to respond to simple questions that would otherwise be fielded by call centre staff. Exetel CEO Steve Waddington told Sri Lankan media last week that by automatically answering common user issues online - often by pointing them to a centralised wiki of support information - the new system freed up support engineers' time and reduced the company's support costs. Waddington drew parallels between the system and the'Siri' feature on Apple iPhones, which translated user requests in natural language - as opposed to set commands - to deliver answers from a variety of sources.

Canadian financial services firm Manulife Financial Corp. is banking on artificial intelligence being a significant asset for its next project. The company's Toronto-based Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is collaborating with Silicon Valley-based Nervana Systems on a new AI-based application that could help portfolio managers analyze the high volume of online information, financial news, emails, and documents they receive when researching investments. "If you think about all of the things that a portfolio manager or researcher might look at when making decisions… a lot of it is social data – emails, industry reports, stock and economic data," Ace Moghimi, Manulife's Boston-based head of innovation, North America, told ITBusiness.ca. "The system we're putting in place essentially uses natural language processing, supported by an underlying deep learning neural network, to go through vast stores of unstructured data, allowing researchers to analyze the information much faster than they would be able to on their own," he said. The project's genesis lies within the LOFT division itself, which researches ways that Manulife can incorporate emerging technology and unconventional business processes into its products and services – and its Toronto-based data scientists were particularly taken with AI and deep learning, Moghimi said.

For 20 years, computer scientists have been working on improving ways to search among reams of video clips for a particular shot. New research by IBM, Microsoft, and academic teams studying the problem could bring them a step closer to that goal. At a conference in Cambridge, England, last week, an IBM researcher gave the first public demonstration of a computer system called Marvel that uses statistical techniques to learn about relationships between colors, shapes, patterns, sounds, and other clues from video footage that can help identify its content. IBM's prototype then labels the footage so users can go back and find individual shots. That could be a boon not only to TV news producers but intelligence analysts watching surveillance video and even PC users editing home movies.

General Motors' implementation of flexible robotic automation in Ternstedt, N.J., started U.S. manufacturing on the path to realizing a future depicted in a 1923 play by Karel Capek. In "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robot), Capek's vision was for millions of mechanical workers -- robots (as derived from the Czech words for work or workers). Although U.S. robot numbers are not yet measured in millions, the industrial automatons are nonetheless playing strategic roles in U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, says Jeffrey A. Burnstein, executive vice president, Robotic Industries Association. RIA estimates that more than 171,000 robots are now at work in U.S. factories, placing the U.S. second only to Japan in overall robot use. Worldwide, there are more than a million industrial robots in operation, Burnstein notes.