Small enough to fit in the cup holder of your Corolla, the robot is described by Toyota (TM) as "a miniature communication partner developed to provide companionship." Named Kirobo Mini, the 4-inch high gizmo can apparently chat away and even respond to facial expressions. "Oh no, what has happened?" it asks in response to a young woman's downcast face in a Toyota video. The world's biggest automaker plans to put Kirobo on sale in dealerships across Japan next year for around 400 before tax. It didn't mention any plans for introducing it in other countries.

From job automation to fears of a robot uprising, the growth of artificial intelligence has spurred numerous concerns over the future of humanity, many of which have long been stoked by science fiction. But now, the tech giants of Silicon Valley are working to take on the most pertinent challenges before they can even arise. Researchers with Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have teamed up to create a new group, known as the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, to develop a standard of ethics for the development of AI. Researchers with Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have teamed up to create the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. 'The objective of the Partnership on AI is to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society,' a statement said.

IBM Australia is looking to maintain its first-mover advantage in the burgeoning enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) space by putting more resources behind its cognitive drive. The vendor has spent 2016 arming its commercial operation with a new team that has the industry domain knowledge to drive Watson harder into specific verticals. Its local Research team has revealed involvement in cutting-edge projects for IBM's nascent Watson Health business, as well as around neuromorphic computing, which is seen as the next evolution of Watson. Since IBM created the US 1 billion ( 1.3 billion) Watson Group in 2014, the vendor has been selling business on the benefits of cognitive computing, while at the same time trying to create as many applications and use cases for the technology as it can. While these efforts were initially internally-driven, the growth of Watson over the past two years has increased the number of people and organisations working with the technology, with a growing amount of this work being done behind the scenes.

Elon Musk named his electric-car company after the engineering genius Nikola Tesla, but the sweeping nature of his vision to replace fossil fuels is reminiscent of Thomas Edison, Tesla's arch-rival. After creating the incandescent bulb, the home electric meter, and one of the first alkaline batteries, Edison spent much of his personal fortune building factories to produce them--all in the service of a grand plan to electrify society using his direct-current transmission technology. Eighty years before Musk was born, Edison was urging U.S. cities to set up networks of charging stations so those newfangled horseless carriages could run on electricity rather than gasoline. For Musk's fans and investors, the comparison should not be entirely comforting. In the course of a few short years, the Wizard of Menlo Park was unceremoniously forced out of the electricity game. After he stubbornly refused to embrace the transmission technology that became the foundation of the U.S. grid and focused increasingly on developing inventions such as the phonograph and the motion picture, his board of directors merged his Edison General Lighting with a rival to create today's General Electric--leaving the 46-year-old Edison with no management role.

A former cabinet minister has likened Russia's role in Syria to the Nazi regime in 1930s Spain, ahead of an emergency Commons debate on the humanitarian situation in Aleppo. Andrew Mitchell accused Russia of "shredding" international law with its bombing campaign in the country. The Tory MP also accused Russian forces of committing a war crime by attacking a UN relief convoy last month. The three-hour emergency debate will be held later in the day. The northern city of Aleppo has become a key battleground in Syria's bloody five-year civil war.

Original or replacement, power down your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone. Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. LOS ANGELES -- Just how bad is the situation with Samsung and its Galaxy Note 7 woes? Samsung has halted production and sales of its water-resistant, high-end smartphone as the company and U.S. regulators investigate reports of overheating replacement Note 7s. These are the devices that Note 7 buyers swapped for the first run of the large, high-powered phones after a massive consumer recall, also linked to overheating batteries. Some 2.5 million worldwide of the Note 7, Samsung's "phablet," with a 5.7 inch LCD, as of early September when Samsung said it would exchange the 850 phones.

If you already tried to upload some of your pictures to OneDrive, you may be aware that Microsoft's cloud storage service is able to automatically tag your photos and categorize them, group them by location, and more. By adding more data to user-generated content, Microsoft's artificial intelligence tools also make it easier for OneDrive users to find relevant pictures using OneDrive's search feature. But could artificial intelligence accomplish the same sort of magic with video content? That's exactly what Chia-Wen Lin and Min Sun, professors in the Electrical Engineering department of National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, are trying to do. In a new blog post on the Microsoft Research blog, the company explains that both professors partnered in 2015 with Dr. Tao Mei, lead researcher in multimedia at Microsoft Research Asia who worked on a new image recognition, segmentation, and captioning dataset called COCO (Common Objects in Context). Professor Sun created a video title generation method based on deep learning to automatically find the special moments--or highlights--in videos, and generate an accurate and interesting title for the highlights.

MOSCOW--When Russian clubgoers flocked to the country's biggest electronic music festival this summer, they didn't have to bring a camera or even their phones. Instead, festival organizers used facial-identification technology to pick out revelers and send them their pictures directly to their phone. All they needed to do was opt in, by sending a selfie. The technology is the product of NTechLab, a Moscow-based firm whose algorithm to identify facial features is getting attention in the broader information technology world. NTechLab co-founders Artem Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov believe the possible uses of their technology are almost endless, and mostly positive: from allowing police to search for criminals in real time, to helping amusement parks identify and sell photos to their guests.

Sometimes it's the simplest studies that reveal how deeply culture shapes our thinking. Take a 2009 experiment involving only a researcher, a child, and a two-word instruction.1 The researcher announces, "Let's dance!" and demonstrates a series of movements: He holds his hands together at eye level and extends them--first to the left, then to the right, then to the left twice, counting with each movement ("One, two, three, four!"). After a few tries, eventually all the children could do the dance on their own. Now comes the test: The researcher spins the child around, to face the other way, and asks her to perform it again.

Charlie Rose has interviewed the most important people in the world, from Vladimir Putin and Larry David. But last week, he did something unprecedented: he interviewed a robot. On his 60 Minutes report on artificial intelligence, Charlie Rose interviewed Sophia, who is made by David Hanson, head of Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong. The robot is made to look like a real person, modeled after its creator's wife, as well as Audrey Hepburn, with natural skin tones and a realistic face, though its gadget brain is exposed, and the eyes are glazed over in that creepy robotic detachment. Despite its facial expressions (or lack thereof), Sophia manages to be entertaining, to even have a sense of humor of its own.