Japan's Sony said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence (AI) business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a U.S. startup. The electronics maker has invested an undisclosed sum in California-based Cogitai. The year-old firm, founded by three researchers, focuses on technology that allows machines to learn continually and autonomously from interaction in the real world. The move comes a time when major technology companies such as Facebook, Apple, and Alphabet's Google are spending aggressively on AI ventures. "From an objective perspective, we are lagging behind," Hiroaki Kitano, chief executive of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, said in an interview. "But there are still unexplored areas -- some in cyberspace but vastly more in the physical world," Kitano said.

We more or less knew this day was coming, and apparently it is coming to Russia first. An app called FindFace will run a facial recognition algorithm on any photograph -- say, of a stranger on the Moscow subway -- and correlate it with the membership of Vkontakte, Europe's largest social network. In effect, it allows users to find out the name and other information of any person they see in public. Kabakov says the app could revolutionise dating: "If you see someone you like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a friend request." Widespread, simple facial recognition technology has implications far beyond dating stalking.

Everyone in San Francisco these days wants to build a self-driving car. So in a company town that prides itself on going against the grain, this startup wants to build a self-driving truck. On Tuesday, several former Google, Tesla and Apple engineers announced they had quit their prestigious jobs to start Otto, which aims to sell automation kits for the massive semi-trailers that crowd America's highways. The company says it has logged more than 10,000 test miles and recently tested its truck on a Nevada highway. Self-driving startups have become commonplace in the latest tech boom as many engineers have lost interest in simply building apps and robotics technology becomes cheaper.

The first is that human labor cost must exceed the cost of purchasing and using the alternative technology. In Roman Alexandria the cost of employing humans to do manual work was very low, a reflection of the fact that the supply of labor was much greater than the demand for producing goods and services. It was a lot cheaper to pay someone to do something, or indeed to buy a slave, than buying and using one of Hero's steam engines. In 18th century England labor costs were rising as more hands were needed to keep up with the global demand of goods, particularly as England, and soon to follow Europe, established trade posts and colonies around the world. Fast forward to the 21st century: for the past few decades the world economy has enjoyed low inflation and global growth thanks mostly to China, and the millions of Chinese workers who migrated from the rural areas to the urban cities and started working on factories.

Imagine a world in which you could not walk past someone on the street without them being able to identify you. This is already a reality for some people, thanks to a new website designed in Russia. 'FindFace' uses a new algorithm to identify anyone from their profile picture using only a photograph, with 70 per cent accuracy. 'FindFace' uses a new algorithm to identify anyone from their profile picture using only a photograph, with 70 per cent accuracy. The website works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte - a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union with more than 200 million accounts.

Fujitsu Laboratories today announced the development of technology that can be easily set up and autonomously carry on a dialogue, based on AI technology, while accurately understanding a user's request and naturally eliciting the necessary information. The technology is intended primarily for customer service support. With previous technology, dialogue with computers required preparations of dialogue scenarios laying out how to respond when certain things are said, and business systems usually operated based on these scenarios. Now Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new technology that can structurally extract the relationships between word meanings of input text to deal with the multiple meanings, ambiguity and other problems particular to Japanese language expressions, enabling a highly accurate understanding of users' speech and realizing smooth dialogue. In addition, by properly incorporating information from external databases, such as linked open data (LOD), while also using a knowledge-based dialogue creation technology that automatically learns response options for natural dialogue from records, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed technology that can autonomously conduct dialogue.

The naval base at La Spezia in northern Italy is in an advanced state of decay. The grand Mussolini-era barracks are shuttered; the weeds won their battle with the concrete some time ago. But amid the crumbling masonry, there is an incongruously neat little building, shaded behind a line of flags, with smartly outfitted security men behind its glass doors. This is Nato's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). As one battleship after another has been removed from what remains of the Italian navy, and the base is wound down, the centre is preparing for a new kind of marine warfare amid the wreckage of the old. In a line of workshops along the quay, technicians tinker at the innards of the next generation of naval weapons. They may look like large bright yellow torpedoes, but they are in fact underwater drones, capable of being remote controlled on the surface and taking autonomous actions in the deep.

People in India can now open an account with a bank that's only accessible via mobile devices. Called Digibank, it's staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat. The machine-learning-based technology is a product of Kasisto, a New York startup that spun out of the company that created Apple's Siri assistant. Kasisto trained its KAI artificial-intelligence platform with millions of questions asked by customers during their banking experiences. "A lot of the bots that are out there are what we would consider'dumb bots.' It's very easy to break them, and it's very easy to ask an out-of-context question, and they just don't know how to handle it," says Dror Oren, Kasisto vice president of product.

US-based conglomerate GE has signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence. The Centre is being designed to develop applications that will help companies save costs. The first of these will be the Digital Twin of an aluminium smelter. According to senior company officials, GE would invest around Rs 3 crore in the first six months and could commit around Rs 30 crore over five years depending upon the outcome. Aluminium smelters are refineries for extracting the metal from aluminium oxide, separating it from oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like battery buttons. The days of waiting for a swallowed item to pass through the body may soon be gone, thanks to a tiny pill-size origami robot. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like button batteries. Each year 3,500 button cell batteries are swallowed, according to the National Capital Poison Center. While they typically pass through the body without incident, if they come into prolonged contact with the stomach or esophagus they can cause internal burning, according to an MIT statement.