Brise Care BV is an innovative European based startup that focuses on transforming ordinary air purifiers into intelligent home health guardians, announces the crowdfunding launch of their newest product, BRISE. The product will be available for funding starting November 30, 2016 for 30 days at http://kck.st/2eVSbMf The BRISE will retail for €489, but during the campaign, limited Super Early Bird rewards will be available for as low as €339. Plus, we've been invited to TechCrunch London on 6th December to showcase BRISE to the international technology community. So just how smart is BRISE?

KUALA LUMPUR: Most of us know Pepper as a spice or Iron Man's girlfriend, but visitors at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre got to meet a different kind of Pepper. The 1.2m-tall robot, created by SoftBank Robotics, was brought by MasterCard to the two-day Global Entrepre neurship Com munity (GEC) 2016 exhibition to promote the Master Card-Cyberjaya cashless society initiative. Visitors flocked to see the robot, which is meant to revolutionise traditional payment systems. According to MasterCard, consumers can initiate an engagement simply by greeting Pepper and pairing their MasterPass account by tapping the Pepper icon within their digital wallet or scanning a QR code on a tablet held by Pepper. After the pairing, Pepper can assist cardholders by providing personalised recommendations and offers, as well as additional information on products.

The spacecraft, whose name means stork in Japanese, will deliver some 5.9 tons of supplies, the heaviest load transported by a Kounotori ship. It is the largest among the cargo ships owned by Japan, the United States and Russia. Friday's launch, which followed Russia's failure in the launch of a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress supply ship on Dec. 1, has raised the success rate of Japan's H-2 rocket launches to 97.3 percent. Of the 37 launches so far, all but one succeeded. In addition to water and food, Kounotori 6 will also deliver Japanese-made large lithium-ion batteries to replace batteries used at the ISS, experimental equipment for a new cooling system and equipment to measure cosmic radiation in real time.

The 50 minute documentary included a scene where Miyazaki and former Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki attend a presentation by CGI team at Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The presentation shows Dwango's recent experiment with an animation program that learns via artificial intelligence. In this case, a human model was used and the program learned to make it move forward and at a more rapid rate while ignoring concepts like'pain.' The result was an unsettling, zombie-like creature. Miyazaki was immediately repulsed, calling the animation "an insult to life itself."

I always liked to do something with my hands, and once in grades 4-5, I decided to build a robot. It was made of plywood, and almost my height. The robot was equipped with a vibration motor (brushes for clothes as his feet plus eccentric motors), so that he could move. His eyes were light bulbs with a conical reflector made from a tin can. He raised his hand when you came closer to him, thanks to a photo diode reacting to changes in lighting which was built into his chest.

Requirements that banks and financial institutions comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements is a global challenge which blockchain technologies hold significant potential to help address. However, NYSE-listed IBM may change this, given that earlier in November it announced an an announcement during the Singapore FinTech Festival about its blockchain project with Singapore fintech startup KYCK!. KYCK! is a startup, co-founded by three Singaporeans to provide users with information pertaining to the Southeast Asian exchanges and access to brokerage demo accounts with easy on-boarding opportunities. As former sales traders, the co-founders personally experienced the inefficiencies of the customer on-boarding process due to stringent financial compliance requirements. This gave them the idea of starting a business that focuses on improving the client on-boarding process and enhancing the overall customer experience by deploying secured and appropriate technology capabilities.

The Nihon Ki-in (Japan Go Association) announced on Nov. 29 that it will hold the "World Go Championship" in March next year in which top Go players from Japan, China and South Korea will compete against artificial intelligence (AI) software. The first-prize winner will receive 30 million yen. From Japan, 9th-dan Yuta Iyama, who holds the Honinbo qualification and six major titles, and "DeepZenGo," a Go software developed in Japan, will take part in the championship. It has not been decided on who will take part in the event from China and South Korea. The championship will be held at the Nihon Ki-in Kansai general headquarters in Osaka's Kita Ward from March 21 to 23.

If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it's that predictions, more often than not, are incorrect. With that simple statement I turn my attention to 2017 and what may or may not happen. Looking into next year is likely looking into a foggy crystal ball -- everything's a little murky, but you have an idea of where things are headed. The biggest topic of the coming year is artificial intelligence. Everyone from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk to Tom Cruise and Kanye West is talking about A.I.

All of it coming at you day and night in a never-ending stream that moves so fast that it becomes a screaming blur that makes you want to bang your head against a brick wall until the lost consciousness finally silences the machine and provides you with some degree of sanctuary from the madness. With this in mind, it seems clear that Americans are suffering from information overload, right? Well, according to the latest Pew numbers, only 20 percent of us feel overloaded by the glut of information we encounter on a continual basis. And that surprisingly low number is actually down pretty dramatically from a decade ago. The NextDraft newsletter is now on WIRED.com.

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. What you're not seeing here is the person on the other end of this, operating the robot remotely. I feel like there's a market for this sort of thing in stadiums.