I feel more cheerful already. I'm often to be heard asking the man at Npower or the woman at an airline check-in whether they are robots, given their inability to say'Good morning!' – which, it turns out, does this real robot a disservice.

Japanese car firm Toyota has said it aims to deliver smart cars with artificial intelligence within the next five years. According to Gill Pratt, head of the Toyota Research Institute, the firm is looking to boost car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations using AI. Toyota has said the institute will spend 1 billion ( 682 million) over the next five years, as competition to develop self-driving cars intensifies. Japanese car firm Toyota has said it aims to deliver smart cars with artificial intelligence within the next five years. Head of head of the Toyota Research Institute - the car maker's advanced research division - said the firm is looking to boost car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accidents using AI The Japanese car manufacturer announced last year it would invest 1 billion ( 682 million) over the next five years.

To obtain his PhD in bio-inspired robotics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Dr. Jose Berengueres studied the movement of a gecko in order to build a robot. That was the beginning of his exploration into how the real world and robotics could intersect. Since gaining his PhD in 2007, he's worked on robotic projects worldwide, served as a consultant for multinational companies including Apple, and wrote an Amazon bestseller on design thinking. As the current assistant professor in robotics, UX and design thinking at UAE University, Berengueres is responsible for the robotics and media lab. His team also advises local companies on the application of artificial intelligence (AI).

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

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.