In the face of AI exerts repeatedly predicting the rise of sex robots, it's increasingly difficult to insist that such machines strictly belong to a far-off, dystopian future. But some robotics experts predict we'll soon be doing far more than having sexual intercourse with machines. Instead, we'll be making love to them--with all the accompanying romantic feelings. At this week's "Love and Sex with Robots" conference at Goldsmith University in London, David Levy, author of a book on human-robot love, predicted that human-robot marriages would be legal by 2050. Adrian Cheok, computing professor at City University London and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, says the prediction is not so farfetched.

Samsung is in need of a show-stopper phone after the fiasco of its Galaxy Note 7's exploding. Now, new rumours suggest that its upcoming Galaxy S8 will use its built-in AI assistant in all of the phone's pre-installed apps. The voice-guided assistant, reportedly named'Bixby', could be used for a wide variety of functions in a similar way to Apple's Siri. The Samsung Galaxy S8 will use its built-in AI assistant in all of the phone's included Samsung-made apps, reports suggest. For instance, the assistant could be used in the Gallery app to show photos of the beach.

A teary-eyed Mala Sharma felt vindicated as she stood outside a school for impoverished children in India. A student had snatched the Adobe Systems executive's iPad and had a go with the company's simplest video editing program. He nailed it, creating a quick video that Sharma said amused his teacher and peers. For years, Adobe has been the dominant provider of expensive editing tools to professional content producers. But the recent experience in India with her company's newer, consumer-oriented app showed Sharma firsthand the value of expanding efforts to make tools approachable to anyone.

A teary-eyed Mala Sharma felt vindicated as she stood outside a school for impoverished children in India. A student had snatched the Adobe Systems executive's iPad and had a go with the company's simplest video editing program. He nailed it, creating a quick video that Sharma said amused his teacher and peers. For years, Adobe has been the dominant provider of expensive editing tools to professional content producers. But the recent experience in India with her company's newer, consumer-oriented app showed Sharma firsthand the value of expanding efforts to make tools approachable to anyone. "I stood there with tears in my eyes because I felt like in that minute Adobe touched and changed that child's life," Sharma said.

A teary-eyed Mala Sharma felt vindicated as she stood outside a school for impoverished children in India. A student had snatched the Adobe Systems executive's iPad and had a go with the company's simplest video editing program. He nailed it, creating a quick video that Sharma said amused his teacher and peers. For years, Adobe has been the dominant provider of expensive editing tools to professional content producers. But the recent experience in India with her company's newer, consumer-oriented app showed Sharma firsthand the value of expanding efforts to make tools approachable to anyone.

Ambar presses her hand to her forehead, nose crinkled in concentration as she considers the question on her screen: how many sevens in 91? The ten-year-old has been grappling with it for about a minute when she smiles: "13!". Her tutor responds by posting a large smiley cat picture on her screen – the virtual equivalent of a pat on the back. He is sitting on the other side of the world in an online tutoring centre in India. Ambar, who attends Pakeman primary school in north London, is one of nearly 4,000 primary school children in Britain signed up for weekly one-to-one maths sessions with tutors based in India and Sri Lanka.

People's homes could soon be listening in on them in case they commit a crime. Devices like the Amazon Echo are being used by police as a way to potentially gather information when investigating murders, according to new reports. Police have already requested the data from an Amazon Echo speaker that was in the house of a man being investigated for murder, according to a new report from The Information. Investigators believed that the speaker might have captured important data about what happened the night of the attack. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 36/43 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

When many people think about IBM Watson, they remember the computer that won Jeopardy in 2011. It was cool, but of dubious value in the Real World. Watson has gone from a game show novelty to a tool in use in many industries, from medicine to cooking. At last week's World of Watson conference in Las Vegas, over 17,000 attendees learned how far the technology of cognitive computing has come. In fact, IBM's chairman, president, and CEO Ginni Rometty pointed out that the current market for cognitive technologies has grown 16X in the past four years, to US$32 billion, and is expected to hit US$2 trillion by 2025.

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, aims to gain the upper hand in the budding field of artificial intelligence with a new lineup of chip products in 2017, a senior executive said. Vice President Raejeanne B. Skillern's comments came as Intel's main rival in the AI chip market, Nvidia, is working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on chip products that can handle massive amounts of video, images and voice recognition tasks. "Nvidia has gotten a very tiny piece of the market right now," Skillern told the Nikkei Asian Review in early December. "We take the competition very seriously. While Intel controls 98% of the global market for data center server chips, Nvidia's graphics-oriented products have become the preferred option for internet titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, along with researchers striving to train computers to recognize complex patterns and objects.

Every year, we reach new heights in dating technology, as apps, platforms, and gadgets become more deeply entangled in our relationships. No doubt, dating in 2017 will not be materially different from what it was like in 2016--a year tends not to make a lot of difference--but we can certainly glean a picture of what sex and love will look like in the not-so-distant future and beyond. In a way, pop culture is already showing us. One of the most acclaimed TV dramas of the year, HBO's Westworld, is set in an enormous Dionysian amusement park in which humans indulge their sexual and emotional fantasies with lifelike robots. We're not there yet, but this past April, a Hong Kong designer unveiled his very own humanoid robot that looked remarkably similar to actress Scarlett Johansson.