There are few places better positioned to become a "smart city" than Singapore. That's an easy statement to justify. Singapore is an island city-state just 30 miles across that has been governed by the same party for decades. Putting the implied democratic flaws to one side, the geography and political stability of Singapore have aided the city in preparing for the future. Two years ago, those preparations got a name: "Smart Nation," an ambitious program to push the city, its residents and its government into the digital age.

It might look like a small UFO, or even a large robotic vacuum, but this device could be the next big breakthrough in urban commuting. Called Carr-E, this electric rideable platform is capable of carrying 265 pounds, tops speeds of 11 mph and travels for 14 miles on a single charge. This innovative personal transportation system fits neatly in the trunk, allowing users to grab the device and finish the last few miles of their journey. Carr-E is an electric rideable platform that can carry 265lbs, tops speeds of 11 mph and travels for 14 miles on a single charge. Carr-E is a electric rideable platform can carry 265 pounds, tops speeds of 11 mph and travels for 14 miles on a single charge.

Yesterday, Yandex announced that they launched something similar to the Google RankBrain - well, they didn't say that, I am. They launched what they call Palekh which is name of a Russian city, the flag of that city is of a firebird, which you can see in the image above. Why the firebird, well, it has a long tail and this algorithm aims at improving the quality of the results for long tail queries. Yandex told us that they handle about 100 million queries per day fall under the "long-tail" classification within their search engine. That is about 40% of all the queries performed on that search engine.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don't expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon -- they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans.

It's Halloween and that means every article you come across will have some spooky twist. That is, until the smell of turkey starts to fill the streets. But witches and demons are no longer the threat they once were. In recent years, Halloween has summoned eerie thoughts and ideas about "the rise of the machines." So, in the spirit of the spookiest day of the year, here are some of the latest articles discussing the present and future of Machine Learning.

When you're in virtual reality and start associating your limb and head movements with your onscreen avatar, that digital recreation really becomes an extension of who you are. ObEN is a startup launching out of HTC's new Vive X accelerator that is hoping to craft a more complete digital version of its users so that they can be drawn deeper into VR immersive experiences. The startup uses AI to recreate a user's face photo-realistically in 3D based on nothing more than a selfie, while also capturing the tone and intonation of a user's voice based on just a little voice recording. Today, the company is announcing $7.7 million in Series A funding led by CrestValue Capital and other Chinese investing partners. ObEN is looking to use the funds to build its team and scale its product a bit. A big problem with avatars in VR and video games more broadly relates to a problem called the "uncanny valley," a term that refers to when a digital human avatar ends up appearing really unsettling because its realistic, but just not quite familiar enough.

Most of us can recognize an object after seeing it once or twice. But the algorithms that power computer vision and voice recognition need thousands of examples to become familiar with each new image or word. Researchers at Google DeepMind now have a way around this. They made a few clever tweaks to a deep-learning algorithm that allows it to recognize objects in images and other things from a single example--something known as "one-shot learning." The team demonstrated the trick on a large database of tagged images, as well as on handwriting and language.

This brings the three-year-old company's total funding to over $8 million. Photo taken by Alex Villafania The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) is planning to incorporate research into artificial intelligence (AI) in its 2017-2022 development agenda in an effort to ramp up the country's science and technology research programs. DOST Secretary Fortunato de la Peña said during the recent National Research and Development Conference that they intend to incorporate AI into the Philippine Development Plan called "Ambisyon Natin 2040." Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing (MEVIS) in Bremen, Germany have developed software that uses deep learning to facilitate the detection of tumours in progressive cancer treatment images. The package will be demonstrated in Chicago at the world's largest radiology meeting, RSNA, on 27 November to 2 December.

Huawei's slice of the worldwide mobile pie isn't as big as it used to be, but hey -- at least it keeps getting better at making big phones. We didn't know it would be the last Nexus phone, but the 6P was a solid sendoff. Then came the enormous Mate 8, which was incredibly well built (even if the company's EMUI interface sometimes made me want to jam a fork in my eye). With the new Mate 9, however, Huawei is trying to do things a little differently. Case in point: the phone will eventually launch in the US, a first for the company's flagship phablets.

A coffee shop that is set open in Switzerland where customers can receive oral sex while they drink is considering using robots rather than real-life prostitutes. The outlet, which is due to be up and running in Geneva by the end of the year, was due to see men order a coffee before choosing their prostitute on an iPad. Patrons would pay more than £40 for the hot drink and sex act, according to the firm Facegirl, which is modelling the idea on similar establishments in Thailand. However, as the cafe has yet to receive the seal of approval from authorities in Geneva, the company behind the plans say they could use sex robots instead of women to carry out the services on offer. Bradley Charvet from Facegirl told the Local that he had already been in contact with an American firm that manufactures the lifelike robot-women that cost up to £2,400.