Already busy dealing with customers in phone stores, train stations, and departments stores, Pepper the robot has now been put to work in two hospitals in Belgium. The android, which can understand and respond to a range of human emotions, started assisting visitors at two health facilities in Ostend and Liege on Monday. Pepper launched to great fanfare in Japan exactly a year ago, with the first batch of 1,000 units snapped up in just 60 seconds. The creation of Japanese telecom giant SoftBank and French robotics company Aldebaran SAS, the robot is being marketed as an assistant for businesses and also as a companion for families and those living alone. Standing 120-cm tall, Pepper can converse in a number of languages and also communicate via its torso-based tablet.

The market research firm expects the attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles to increase from 8 percent in 2015 (the vast majority of today's AI systems in cars are focused on speech recognition) to 109% in 2025. IHS sees multiple AI systems of various types to be installed in many cars. In the human-machine interface in vehicles, IHS believes AI will play a role in speech and gesture recognition, eye-tracking, driver monitoring and natural language interfaces. In the autonomous car, AI will advance machine vision systems, while it will also migrate in sensor fusion electronic control units (ECU). In a phone interview with EE Times, Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst, automotive semiconductors at IHS told us, "AI is viewed as a key enabler for real autonomous vehicles. Everyone in the automotive supply chain is getting pretty bullish."

Qiwen Cui tries out the'Farpoint' VR game during the opening day of the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center. LOS ANGELES -- The experiences on display during the Electronic Entertainment Expo are only the beginning. During this week's showcase of the video game industry's future, publishers revealed the first big wave of games leveraging the VR platform. However, it's still too early in the life of VR to tell what experiences will push consumers to strap on a headset and dive in to these digital worlds. "VR, as well as AR, are in very early days of adoption," says Digital World Research analyst P.J. McNealy.

Akihiro Kishimoto is a research staff member at IBM Research – Ireland working on a range of projects in artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed computing and search. His interest in these technical fields grew from his passion for board games. And while a student at the University of Tokyo, he and three of his fellow classmates designed ISshogi, a program to play the incredibly complex (and ancient) Japanese board game, Shogi. ISshogi won the World Computer Shogi Championships four times from 1997-2005. While studying AI at the University of Alberta, Akihiro was a member of the GAMES group (Game-playing, Analytical methods, Minimax search and Empirical Studies) in the Department of Computing Science, and worked with Jonathan Schaeffer and others to solve Checkers.

DVDs were first launched in Japan, Travelocity opened up as the first online booking agent, eBay, Ask Jeeves also opened their online doors and the Spice Girls had their first UK number-one. You get the point (well except the Spice Girls bit) – it was an inflection point with technology, and 20 years later we are that same point again with AI, sometimes referred to as cognitive technologies. At the time I was fortunate to work for a very innovative company who had developed the first generation of SaaS solution for managing supply chains. So as you can imagine I spent a lot of my time sat in meetings trying to convince executives the internet was going to change the world and they needed to innovate. What we forget (which seems silly now) is many of these execs either dismissed the technology, or worse, had convinced themselves they get it and have a solid plan.

Japan's electronics makers are beefing up efforts to recruit hard-to-find artificial intelligence experts -- a critical resource as connected technologies and services loom large on the industry's path forward. Growth in the number of college graduates with AI expertise -- typically math whizzes or engineers with additional knowledge of programming languages and data analysis -- has failed to keep pace with rising demand for such talent. The global supply is only in the tens of thousands, pitting companies expanding AI research operations against each other in the search for top recruits. Sony will next spring begin bulking up its ranks of such new graduates with a specialized recruiting framework for research and development in AI and machine learning. No limit will be set on the number of staff that can be hired, unlike under the company's normal recruiting system.

In fact, unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in infotainment and ADAS systems are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight. The attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and the vast majority were focused on speech recognition. However, that number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," said Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst-automotive semiconductors, IHS Technology. "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car." Specifically in ADAS, deep learning -- which mimics human neural networks -- presents several advantages over traditional algorithms; it is also a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles.

This paper considers global optimization with a black-box unknown objective function that can be non-convex and non-differentiable. Such a difficult optimization problem arises in many real-world applications, such as parameter tuning in machine learning, engineering design problem, and planning with a complex physics simulator. This paper proposes a new global optimization algorithm, called Locally Oriented Global Optimization (LOGO), to aim for both fast convergence in practice and finite-time error bound in theory. The advantage and usage of the new algorithm are illustrated via theoretical analysis and an experiment conducted with 11 benchmark test functions. Further, we modify the LOGO algorithm to specifically solve a planning problem via policy search with continuous state/action space and long time horizon while maintaining its finite-time error bound. We apply the proposed planning method to accident management of a nuclear power plant. The result of the application study demonstrates the practical utility of our method.

Innovation is among the key factors driving a country's economic and social growth. But what are the factors that make a country innovative? How do they differ across different parts of the world and different stages of development? In this work done in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF), we analyze the scores obtained through executive opinion surveys that constitute the WEF's Global Competitiveness Index in conjunction with other country-level metrics and indicators to identify actionable levers of innovation. The findings can help country leaders and organizations shape the policies to drive developmental activities and increase the capacity of innovation.

Despite the hardware news this week, E3 2016 is still all about the games. For gamers, that means a bounty of new trailers revealing gameplay and cinematic introductions to new worlds. Whether you're a fan of the PC, Xbox One or PlayStation, it's hard not to get excited about what's ahead. This may be the most buzzed-about trailer coming out of E3 2016. The first game from "Metal Gear Solid" creator Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami was always going to be a big deal, but then you add some really interesting visuals and a naked Norman Reedus, better known as Daryl from "The Walking Dead," holding a baby and that's a recipe for success.