Munich: Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics. The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations".

Faraday Future plans to begin testing prototype self-driving electric vehicles on California roads later this year after winning approval from the state, an industry source said on Tuesday.

Waterloo, Ontario, is a boom town. An hour west of Toronto, the city rumbles with construction work. Even the Older Mennonites of St. Jacobs, one town over, are digging up their main street, forcing their horse-and-buggies to detour. The region's growth stems largely from the University of Waterloo, whose intensive internship programs have made it a magnet for tech recruiting. In the '90s the city birthed Research in Motion and its Blackberry platform, which briefly dominated the mobile industry. Today, Waterloo is also a bot town.

Based on the agreement, both parties will work together on new technology innovation, enhanced user experience and developing a new e-commerce platform for enterprise-level products. Together, the companies are dedicated to driving the next generation of e-commerce artificial intelligence solutions, and conducting associated research and development for high-speed interconnect products. A key technology that JD.com has developed is JD Camera, an application for image recognition and similar image search in mobile terminals. JD Camera facilitates ease-of-shopping for users by allowing customers to quickly and easily search for their favorites products with just a photo rather than detailed language descriptions. "In the future, with the help of the Joint Lab, Camera will be enhanced from general photo-based searches to more advanced imaged-based searches that will allow users to view, select and purchase from suggested recommendations with an advanced image match algorithm for such items as clothing, make-up, furniture, etc.," said Weng Zhi, vice president of technology, JD.com.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a trending field of research, showing great promise in many challenging problems such as playing Atari, solving Go and controlling robots. While DRL agents perform well in practice we are still missing the tools to analayze their performance and visualize the temporal abstractions that they learn. In this paper, we present a novel method that automatically discovers an internal Semi Markov Decision Process (SMDP) model in the Deep Q Network's (DQN) learned representation. We suggest a novel visualization method that represents the SMDP model by a directed graph and visualize it above a t-SNE map. We show how can we interpret the agent's policy and give evidence for the hierarchical state aggregation that DQNs are learning automatically. Our algorithm is fully automatic, does not require any domain specific knowledge and is evaluated by a novel likelihood based evaluation criteria.

Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as'electronic persons' and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution. Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as'electronic persons' and their owners liable to paying social security under a draft EU proposal. The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider'that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations'.

A few hundred miles south of Tesla Motors headquarters resides another electric car maker that has been given the green-light to unleash its prototypes on California roads. Faraday Future won approval today from The Golden State to begin testing its self-driving vehicles later this year on public routes. The Los Angeles-based startup plans to start building and selling electric vehicles next year in the United States, but has not disclosed details of regarding its newly awarded self-driving program. Faraday Future won approval today from The Golden State to begin testing its self-driving electric vehicles later this year on public routes. Faraday is one of several Chinese-funded startups hoping to challenge Tesla in premium electric vehicles.

An African adage that says "if you don't know where you are coming from, you will not know where you are going to" got me studying the history of technology, so I can interpret the technology crystal ball. The advancements in technology is very rapid and it is important to peek into the future, because it belongs to those that shape it today. Throughout my quest to understand how technologies we use today have metamorphosed into what they are, the prophecies about'Singularity' keeps resounding in my head because of its imminence in our society. Singularity literally means the quality or condition of being singular. However, the term can be defined from different perspectives; mathematicians define it as a point at which a function takes an infinite value, while physicists describe it as a time when matter is intensely dense.

Instead of talking to customer service representatives who adhere to scripts in a robotic manner, soon we might be talking and chatting with customer service employees that are actual robots. While industry experts say that technology isn't quite there yet, the companies that run outsourced call centers, including offshore ones are already worried about having their jobs outsourced altogether to machines. Sure, robots assemble our cars and move Amazon fulfillment center shelves around . Some robots have even taken jobs in hotels. Yet it's jobs that require thinking and speaking that robots will go after next.

This week, the Federal Aviation Administration announced new rules regarding drone operation. Here are 5 things you need to know. A man flies a small drone presented by Japan's toy company Nikko Kyosho EGG at the International Tokyo Toy Show on June 9, 2016. WASHINGTON – New drone rules from the Federal Aviation Administration limit most small commercial drone operations to daylight hours and require operators to get certified every two years. The rules, made public Tuesday, mark the FAA's first attempt at a comprehensive plan to ensure the popular remote-controlled aircraft can safely share the skies with commercial craft.