The researcher hired by Toyota Motor Corp. to spearhead its robotics and artificial intelligence efforts says the automaker's production principles can be applied to build affordable helper robots for rapidly aging societies. Robot makers are struggling with the same scale challenges that the auto industry overcame with the "miracle" that occurred when Henry Ford developed the assembly line, according to Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute. Toyota's vaunted production system later showed how to make cars both more cheaply and reliably, despite mistake-prone humans' role in manufacturing, he said. "My thought is, if the Toyota production system can be applied to cars, maybe it can also be applied to robots, because they're quite similar," Pratt told reporters Friday in Tokyo. He's particularly sanguine about the prospects for devices that would help the elderly age where they live.

Sitting on the Fintech panel at today's ASIFMA capital markets conference in Hong Kong, I had a small epiphany. By "we" I mean anyone involved in Finance or Fintech. If you work in a field with real A.I. applications such as image processing, robotics, industrial automation or such, keep pretending like you know what you're talking about. Why are we even talking about A.I. in the first place? To the lay man, which let's face it most investors are, A.I. sounds magical.

There may have been question marks surrounding last week's annual video games expo – E3 in Los Angeles – with some publishers not hosting booths, but gamers need not fear: it was as bombastic as ever and promised much for the year ahead. EA and Activision did not have huge stands, for once, while Nintendo – usually one of the show's biggest exhibitors – had just one game to unveil, but the show was still filled with new hardware, blockbuster sequels and inventive IP. EA held a press conference across two continents, releasing details of Battlefield and Titanfall updates; Activision, too, used E3 to announce the return of the popular platform game Crash Bandicoot; Nintendo's lone project was the enchanting and ambitious open-world game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There were original games on display, too. Microsoft announced two new Xbox One machines.

In this Friday, June 17, 2016 photo, Gill Pratt, chief executive of Toyota Research Institute, speaks to reporters at Toyota Motor Corp.'s Tokyo office. The U.S. robotics expert tapped to head Toyota's Silicon Valley research company says the 1 billion investment by the giant Japanese automaker will start showing results within five years.

The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on June 19 that Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology professor Choi Jae-shik recently developed an artificial intelligence system and is going to unveil it at an academic seminar this month. According to the professor, the system is capable of predicting the future prices of houses, future stock prices, foreign exchange rate movements and the like after reading newspaper articles, business reports and so on and then automatically drawing up reports in English. "The system will become capable of drawing up the same reports in Korean at some point in time next year and writing news articles in the near future," the professor remarked. Earlier, an AI system capable of stock price prediction has been developed by the MIT and the University of Cambridge. This system, however, is limited in accuracy because it predicts future prices by analyzing correlations between the prices of stocks owned by someone and the others based on numerical data such as past prices.

The latest entrant into the new space race has a wingspan longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers in their earliest flights. Its landing gear has a total of 28 wheels. And the local county had to issue special construction permits for the scaffolding needed to build what would be the world's largest airplane. Only someone like Paul Allen -- the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, dreamer and space enthusiast -- might attempt to build something like this: a twin-fuselage behemoth as wide as a football field that, fully loaded, would weigh 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 737 engines and have 60 miles of wiring coursing through it. Called Stratolaunch, the plane would be bigger than Howard Hughes' famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947. But Allen's creation comes as the space industry is being disrupted by entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who like him, aim to revolutionize space travel.

ROOBO, a fast-growing hardware and AI startup headquartered in Beijing, today unveiled a prototype of its newest product, a "pet robot" called Domgy. For the unfamiliar, ROOBO is the company behind Pudding, a voice-controlled, educational robot for kids. Pudding is used to teach kids vocabulary, geography, jokes and more. The company also makes the Idealens virtual reality headset, Skyseries drone and Runbone earbuds. Since its founding in 2014, ROOBO has grown to 300 employees, with 7 worldwide offices, including one in Seattle.

Machine learning algorithms are optimized to model statistical properties of the training data. If the input data reflects stereotypes and biases of the broader society, then the output of the learning algorithm also captures these stereotypes. In this paper, we initiate the study of gender stereotypes in {\em word embedding}, a popular framework to represent text data. As their use becomes increasingly common, applications can inadvertently amplify unwanted stereotypes. We show across multiple datasets that the embeddings contain significant gender stereotypes, especially with regard to professions. We created a novel gender analogy task and combined it with crowdsourcing to systematically quantify the gender bias in a given embedding. We developed an efficient algorithm that reduces gender stereotype using just a handful of training examples while preserving the useful geometric properties of the embedding. We evaluated our algorithm on several metrics. While we focus on male/female stereotypes, our framework may be applicable to other types of embedding biases.

"It's happening," TechCrunch announced on their website Sunday. "The TechCrunch team landed in Tel Aviv and we're in the starting blocks for the TechCrunch Meetup Pitch-Off in Tel Aviv on Wednesday June 22. And it's going to be an awesome event." Panels and meetings include discussions with an Israeli venture capitalist firm, a medical nanofiber technology company, a firm that deals with artificial intelligence, and another that is focused on the technology that gave the world self-driving cars, in addition to a host of others. Additionally, attendees will participate in an intimate fireside chat with Israel's ninth President, Shimon Peres.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--At a shopping mall here one recent Friday, six-year-old Ruby Dowling made friends with a friendly egg-shaped robot. "This robot is nice," said Ruby, as a group of children encircled it. It wasn't surprising that the bot, named K5, inspired this response--it had been designed to look approachable. When it was surrounded and needed to return to work as the mall's security guard, though, the K5 did something its small admirers never expected. It let out a screech that scattered them in all directions.