Omron's table tennis robot is getting smarter Forpheus, the mighty table tennis robot developed by Japan's Omron, is getting smarter. An updated version on show at the Ceatec electronics show this week has artificial intelligence to become a tougher opponent. In the new version, the robot attempts to rank a player according to their perceived skill as a beginner, intermediate player or advanced. It does this by looking at the speed of the served ball, its trajectory, rotation and the body motion of the player with cameras, and does so with 90 percent accuracy, according to Omron. The machine uses that information to customize its return ball, softer and easy for beginners, faster and more unpredictable for advanced players. The use of artificial intelligence has also improved the robot's game.

Like many of the students around them, robots at Carnegie Mellon University are constantly learning -- learning how to think, how to move, and how to be more like humans. "It's sort of this wonderland of innovation," says 60 Minutes producer Nichole Marks in the video above. "Everywhere you go, every corner of the campus, there are robots -- robots in the hallways, robots picking things up, robots talking to you." Marks and correspondent Charlie Rose visited the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh while reporting their two-part story on artificial intelligence, or A.I., for this week's episode of 60 Minutes. What they found in the old steel town was a glimpse into the future, says Rose.

The following script is from "Artificial Intelligence," which aired on Oct. 9, 2016. Charlie Rose is the correspondent. The search to improve and eventually perfect artificial intelligence is driving the research labs of some of the most advanced and best-known American corporations. They are investing billions of dollars and many of their best scientific minds in pursuit of that goal. All that money and manpower has begun to pay off. In the past few years, artificial intelligence -- or A.I. -- has taken a big leap -- making important strides in areas like medicine and military technology. What was once in the realm of science fiction has become day-to-day reality. You'll find A.I. routinely in your smart phone, in your car, in your household appliances and it is on the verge of changing everything. On 60 Minutes Overtime, Charlie Rose explores the labs at Carnegie Mellon on the cutting edge of A.I. See robots learning to go where humans can'... It was, for decades, primitive technology.

This overview article is devoted to the study of a trend which is growing rapidly in popularity in the IT industry - chatbots, and the role of Microsoft in their development process. The article will cover the history of chatbots, peculiar properties of bots, the main, and also some unexpected spheres of their application, perspectives and technology limits. We have deliberately chosen Microsoft as the main platform for comparative research. The company does a lot of work in the field of promotion and development of intelligent bots. One of the main steps in this direction is a framework for creation of custom bots Microsoft Bot Framework platform - independent and open source; Microsoft presented it at the Build 2016 exhibition. Generally, a chatbot is a program that can imitate a meaningful dialogue with the user via text or speech in the language known to the user. The goal of such a dialogue, is often to answer the user requests and execute bot commands. Not being something substantially new, chatbots however, are positioned in the marketplace as a sort of know-how activity.

Google wants to change how it relates to enterprise customers, and it's going to use Google Cloud to do so. Today at an event in San Francisco, it made announcements about machine learning, Kubernetes, and expansion of its Google Cloud Platform presence. But the bigger-picture news is that cloud will be taking a leading role at the company. Google is bringing together its massive Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with a new application platform called G Suite (formerly Google Apps). And it's hiring 1,000 people to boost its cloud business. This is all under one big umbrella called Google Cloud.

At last year's Spark Summit conference, Patrick Wendell, a software engineer at Databricks Inc. and a contributor to the Apache Spark open source project, said the technology's data processing capabilities are impressive but its real power lies in the Spark library components that sit on top of the core engine. "The future of Spark is the libraries," he said. "That's what the community has invested in and where the innovation is coming from." Sure enough, this month's Spark Summit 2015 event prominently featured case studies in which users explained how they're putting the libraries to work in Spark analytics applications. The Spark platform comes with four distinct libraries -- Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, a graph processing library called GraphX and a machine learning one known as MLlib -- that include pre-built algorithms and programming capabilities designed to streamline data preparation, exploration and analysis tasks. The libraries enable users to automate certain tasks and eliminate some of the coding that typically would be required.

For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market. A research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. Boeing CEO vows to beat Musk to Mars Boeing Co. once helped the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Now the company intends to go toe-to-toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri Glenn Chapman (AFP/File) Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

The Fisker Karma was one of the world's hottest plug-in hybrid supercars when it debuted in 2011 - and now its creator Henrik Fisker has announced plans to launch an electric sports car with a 400-mile range next year. Meanwhile, Mercedes is taking aim at the Tesla Model X with its new Generation EQ SUV, which touts 400 horsepower and an all-electric driving range of 300 miles. The International Space Station is getting ready to test a brand new ion thruster that can be powered by space junk, and teenage inventor Boyan Slat has modified a C-130 Hercules aircraft with high-tech sensors to spot plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Solar power is getting cheaper by the day - and two groundbreaking projects in China and Abu Dhabi have pushed the price down 25% in just five months. In other energy news, Poland just unveiled a glowing, bright blue bike lane that's charged by the sun.

Putting Industry 4.0 into practice has become a universal lesson throughout the industry. However, most Industry 4.0 interpretations in recent years have mainly focused on the data side of things. To extend beyond the focus, this year at the 2016 Taipei International Industrial Automation Exhibition, NEXCOM will demonstrate how it harnesses the technology of edge to cloud connectivity, cloud-based machine learning and cognitive computing to tap into the power of big data analytics to improve factory operations. The first step to Industry 4.0 transformation is to establish connectivity between all the devices and equipment in a factory, then integrate cloud computing, big data analytics and artificial intelligence to create cyber-physical systems for building a smart factory. On the surface, Industry 4.0 may seem simple, but the underlying transformation must take various variables into account, such as robots, motion control systems, device connectivity and communication protocols.