On April 13th 2016, Norway's Prime Minister was hosted in Singapore by Norway's leading multinational company DNV GL. The PM unveiled -The Hive- a fully autonomous drone docking station developed by SwarmX a one year old startup. Pulkit Jaiswal the 23year old CEO of SwarmX who I interviewed over skype as part of my coverage of the global event for tech startups Rise was understandably elated at the development. Pulkit with two other co Founders created SwarmX in April 2015. Prior to that, he spent three years building Garuda Robotics along with two other Founders.

Baidu Inc said on Tuesday that it has launched its first venture capital firm focusing on artificial intelligence - the Chinese online search behemoth's latest effort to stake out a spot in the burgeoning technology field. Called Baidu Venture, the new company will focus on early-stage projects in artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, according to a statement from Nasdaq-listed Baidu. Robin Li, Baidu's chief executive officer, is the chairman of the venture capital firm. For its first stage, the firm is equipped with an initial investment fund of US 200 million. Baidu said in its statement that the company would be an independent entity, separate from the company's existing investment and acquisition team, so that it could "use an innovative evaluation mechanism to speed up the decision-making process and make investments more efficient."

NTT Resonant Inc., the operator of Japanese web portal goo, said this week it has started a service using artificial intelligence to provide love-life advice. The corevo AI developed by the NTT group will answer questions related to love affairs asked through Oshiete goo, a user-driven question-and-answer community site. By analyzing more than 30 million questions and answers previously submitted by users, corevo will find out appropriate advice and convey it with human-like expressions. AI technology has "strength in quickly providing different answers customers are seeking," said Masahiro Wakai, president and chief executive officer of NTT Resonant. Wakai said the company intended to utilize the technology in areas other than love.

Nvidia (NVDA) on Tuesday unveiled a palm-sized AI computer to be used by China internet giant Baidu's (BIDU) self-driving cars. Among a series of AI and other announcements it made at a chip industry conference in China, Nvidia said the new Drive PX 2 artificial-intelligence platform for "AutoCruise" functions will let vehicles use "deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors." It said the product will let Baidu and other customers "accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles." Nvidia stock fell 1.5% in the stock market today, to 59.87, after rising 2% at the open. Baidu stock fell 1.2% Tuesday, to 181.90.

Kicking off the first in a series of global GPU Technology Conferences, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today at GTC China unveiled technology that will accelerate the deep learning revolution that is sweeping across industries. Huang spoke in front of a crowd of more than 2,500 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and press, gathered in Beijing for a day devoted to deep learning and AI. On stage he announced the Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerators for inferencing production workloads for AI services and, a small, energy-efficient AI supercomputer for highway driving -- the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise. The new Tesla GPUs deliver massive leaps in efficiency and speed -- 45x compared to CPU-only systems -- for inferencing production workloads for AI services like voice-activated applications and movie and product recommendation engines. And they do it at a fraction of the cost of CPU systems. Powered by our new Parker SoC, the new palm-sized, 10-watt DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise lets automakers accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles, with features such as live HD mapping, highway autopilot and autonomous parking.

NSA Chief Says Without Artificial Intelligence, Cyber'Is A Losing Strategy' by Giuseppe Macri, Artificial intelligence will play a big role in the future of U.S. strategy in cyberspace, according to National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who told Congress Tuesday that relying primarily on human intelligence "is a losing strategy." "[We're] very much interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, how we can do cyber at scale [and] at speed," Rogers testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. "Because if we're just going to take this largely human capital approach to doing business, that is a losing strategy." "It will be both incredibly resource intensive, and it will be very slow," Rogers added. "That is a big area of focus for us."

Bayesian methods for machine learning have been widely investigated, yielding principled methods for incorporating prior information into inference algorithms. In this survey, we provide an in-depth review of the role of Bayesian methods for the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The major incentives for incorporating Bayesian reasoning in RL are: 1) it provides an elegant approach to action-selection (exploration/exploitation) as a function of the uncertainty in learning; and 2) it provides a machinery to incorporate prior knowledge into the algorithms. We first discuss models and methods for Bayesian inference in the simple single-step Bandit model. We then review the extensive recent literature on Bayesian methods for model-based RL, where prior information can be expressed on the parameters of the Markov model. We also present Bayesian methods for model-free RL, where priors are expressed over the value function or policy class. The objective of the paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on Bayesian RL algorithms and their theoretical and empirical properties.

After more than 10 years since the release of "Robocop" the dreams of film creators are likely to become true. Of course, the humanity has not devised hi-tech cyborgs like the main character of the film. However, today complicated robots maintain public order and security in different parts of the world. Here you can get yourself acquainted with "robocops" which help police in real world. This year after annual Republican Convention the police of Cleveland allowed a robot named Griffin to patrol the streets.

Yi Wang was hearing the same refrain over and over: Why are English classes in China so expensive? The former Google product manager decided to do something about it and started an app called LiuLiShuo, which basically means "speaking fluently" in Mandarin. The app, which claims more than 30 million users, is one of scores of English-learning startups looking to disrupt China's hidebound language schools. To differentiate itself from products started by Internet giants like Baidu and Tencent, LiuLiShuo brings gaming and social media features to the genre. Users win points when they move to the next level and text each other encouragement and tips.

As one of the leading research hubs for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) worldwide, Macquarie University and US-based VoiceBox Technologies has announced an international research and development partnership. VoiceBox Technologies, is an award-winning pioneer of Contextual Natural Language Understanding (CNLU) and the leading innovator of next gen Voice Artificial Intelligence (Voice AI). VoiceBox is taking voice interaction NLU based systems to the next generation by employing AI techniques in advanced Semantic Language Understanding, large-scale data mining, Deep Neural Networks and advanced machine learning. Macquarie professor Dr. Mark Johnson has been named the Chief Scientific Officer of VoiceBox Australia and will lead the VoiceBox office as a Center of Excellence for Voice AI. Dr. Johnson is overseeing the advanced labs located on the university's campus in the heart of the Macquarie Park Innovation District (MPID).