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.

Pepper, the humanoid robot programmed to "understand" human emotions, is to take a new job - as a receptionist in two Belgian hospitals. It will be the robot's first foray into healthcare after previous deployments in shopping centres, banks and train stations. Some experts have questioned the usefulness of social robots such as Pepper. Softbank, the company behind Pepper, and partner French robotics firm Aldebaran have seen huge success with the creation, with each batch of 1,000 selling out fast in Japan. The hospital-based robots will be significantly more expensive than the 1,850 basic model with a 34,000 ( 24,000) price tag.

Where does true power reside? Is it waving at you from a stage-lit, Presidentially-sealed podium? Or tucked away inside a billionaire's wallet? Can you smell it in a mahogany-clad clubroom at Yale in the smoke of a Bonesman's cigar, or catch a glimpse of its dark feathers perching on the advisory council of a transnational bank? One thing we know for sure: the nature and location of power is changing, and the agents of that change are the Californian technology companies that have the taken the 21st century by the throat.

Olli, a 3D printed, self-driving minibus, to hit the road in US A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it's ready to roll right now. The vehicle -- a 3D-printed minibus called "Olli" capable of carrying 12 people -- was unveiled by Arizona-based startup Local Motors outside the US capital city Washington. Napster's improbable journey This week the Rhapsody music service announced that it will retire the Rhapsody name and re-brand its service (and the company) under the Napster brand. The Napster name has endured a long journey in the 17 years since Shawn Fanning first created the service in early 1999. I thought it might be helpful to put together a short history tracing that path.

There's been a lot of handwringing about the algorithms driving what we see related to political news. First, a month ago, there was concern that Facebook's news feed results were biased against conservative news, and this week, there's concern that Google favors Hillary Clinton in its autocomplete suggestions in its search engine. The video shows that Google seems to have suppressed the appearance of "Hillary Clinton indictment" in favor of "Hillary Clinton India," even though data shows people search for information on Clinton's indictment more than information on Clinton and India. It points out that the executive chairman of Google's parent company, Eric Schmidt, is a big Clinton supporter and that Google has many ties to her as well.) Search engines and algorithms decide what's relevant on these sites in very complicated ways, and the public generally doesn't know when it gets tweaked. Generally speaking, people want artificial intelligence.

Large-scale brain-like machines with human-like abilities to solve problems could become a reality, now that researchers have invented microscopic gadgets that mimic the connections between neurons in the human brain better than any previous devices. The new research could lead to better robots, self-driving cars, data mining, medical diagnosis, stock-trading analysis and "other smart human-interactive systems and machines in the future," said Tae-Woo Lee, a materials scientistat the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea and senior author of the study. The human brain's enormous computing power stems from its connections. Previous research suggested that the brain has approximately 100 billion neurons and roughly 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) connections wiring these cells together. At each of these connections, or synapses, a neuron typically fires about 10 times per second.

Lam Wing Kee, 61, a Hong Kong bookseller who was imprisoned in China has told the BBC he considered taking his own life while in custody. Mr Lam was one of five booksellers targeted by officials for selling material critical of the Chinese leadership. Speaking to the BBC's Juliana Liu, he said: "You can stand up against tyranny."