With a little personal shopping assistance, Operator thinks Chinese citizens will pounce on American products sold through its conversational shopping app. The promise of becoming the guided commerce layer connecting China with the US has earned the two-year-old a 15 million series B round at a 100 million pre-money valuation. "We're making commerce borderless", Operator CEO Robin Chan told me. GGV Capital, which specializes in US-China startups, led the round and its partner Hans Tung will become a board observer. Tung praised Operator's "mass-market-first approach" and its understanding of "the value of creating a global company from the start" rather than trying to bolt China onto an app built for the US.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

With rising security challenges in the global commons, there is growing interest in the subject of "intelligent" weapons systems. This is especially so in the maritime realm, where recent studies have shown that precision-guided weaponry and networked systems are likely to play an increasingly important role. Even while accepting autonomous systems as the future of maritime warfare, however, many find the subject of "intelligent weapon systems" to be deeply contentious. A good point of departure for the discussion on autonomous combat systems is a recent report in the Chinese media about the development of a family of cruise missiles with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. In August this year, a Chinese daily reported that China's aerospace industry was developing tactical missiles with inbuilt intelligence that would help seek out targets in combat.

For children with speech and language disorders, early-childhood intervention can make a great difference in their later academic and social success. But many such children--one study estimates 60 percent--go undiagnosed until kindergarten or even later. Researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions hope to change that, with a computer system that can automatically screen young children for speech and language disorders and, potentially, even provide specific diagnoses. This week, at the Interspeech conference on speech processing, the researchers reported on an initial set of experiments with their system, which yielded promising results. "We're nowhere near finished with this work," says John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor in Electrical Engineering and senior author on the new paper.

Sure, dolphins use sonar, whiz through the ocean at incredible speeds, and battle sharks. Last week, a study published in Russia's St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics claimed to have recorded two dolphins doing just that. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, exchanged a series of vocal pulses that resembled "a conversation between two people," wrote the study's author, Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station. What's more, Yana and Yasha were exceedingly polite, listening to one another at turns without interrupting. "As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language," Ryabov wrote.

NEW YORK – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan's aging, shrinking population was not a burden, but an incentive to boost productivity through innovations like robots, wireless sensors and artificial intelligence. Abe's comments on Wednesday came days after official data showed that Japan has 34.6 million people aged 65 and older, or 27.3 percent of the population -- the highest proportion among advanced nations. "I have absolutely no worries about Japan's demography," Abe said in a prepared speech at a Reuters Newsmaker event, noting that nominal gross domestic product had grown despite losing 3 million working-age people over the last three years. Japan may be losing its population. But these are incentives for us," he said. Because we will continue to be motivated to grow our productivity," Abe added, citing robots, wireless sensors, and Artificial Intelligence as among the tools to do so.

What are the implications for the digital marketing industry, and what methods can digital marketers use when creating scripts for their own brand's bot? Digital marketing'bots' and'AI's are just scripts, integrated into an app interface. They rapidly scan the user's text input and deliver a response, pre-designed and pre-loaded by their creators. Bots and AIs have typically performed a customer service role, answering queries and directing users to helpful contacts and resources. Now, increasingly, they are also used to participate in or even initiate sales conversations.

Salesforce has officially unveiled Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it says will help users of its platform serve their customers better. Billing the technology as "AI for everyone", Salesforce is putting Einstein's capabilities into all its clouds, bringing machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing into each piece of its customer relationship management platform. In Salesforce's Sales Cloud, for instance, machine learning will power predictive lead scoring, a new tool that can analyse all data related to leads -- including standard and custom fields, activity data from sales reps, and behavioural activity from prospects -- to generate a predictive score for each lead. The models will continuously improve over time by learning from signals like lead source, industry, job title, Web clicks and emails. Another tool will analyse CRM data combined with customer interactions such as inbound emails from prospects to identify buying signals earlier in the sales process and recommend next steps to increase the sales rep's ability to close a deal.

How will artificial intelligence systems change the way we live? This is a tough question: on one hand, AI tools are producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and leukemia detection. There is extraordinary potential to do much more in the future. On the other hand, AI systems are already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people's everyday lives. AI and decision-support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions, from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.