Asus has had a few big hits that the rest of the industry followed, like the Eee PC in 2008, which sparked the craze for netbooks. Other products have fared less well, like the PadFone, a hybrid device that includes a smartphone that docks into a tablet. But year after year, in a hardware industry that shies away from risk, Asus usually has a surprise or two up its sleeve. Last week it was a home help robot called Zenbo, whose cute antics and affordable price-tag stole the show at Computex. We sat down with Asus Chairman Jonney Shih in Taipei last week and asked him how he approaches product design, and also got his take on AI.

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

Cylance, an Irvine, California-based cybersecurity startup that taps machine-learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to thwart malware, has raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors. The company was founded in 2012 by Stuart McClure, who sold an Internet security firm to McAfee for 86 million eight years ago and came on board as McAfee's chief technology officer (CTO). Prior to this round, Cylance had already raised about 77 million, including a 42 million round last July and 20 million the previous year. McClure has an interesting background -- his venture into the security realm was influenced by a deadly plane crash he was involved in back in 1989, one which resulted in the death of nine passengers. The event was apparently caused by a flaw in the Boeing 747's locking mechanism -- a known fault that the company ignored.

"Warcraft" just snatched China's all-time midnight presales record from "Furious 7," and it's set to soar to the top of the country's box office as it opens this weekend on more screens than any other film has before. But the video game epic probably won't surpass the car-racing action flick. An estimated one-half of the globe's players of "World of Warcraft" -- the Activision Blizzard video game series on which the movie is based -- live in China, so their enthusiasm was key to setting that presales record. And through late Wednesday, "Warcraft" is off to a sizzling 46 million start in China. Although presales are generally a good proxy for how well a film will do there, the record 391 million haul pulled in by "Furious 7," the highest-grossing Hollywood movie ever in China, should be safe.

This year is Microsoft's chance to show what the Xbox One is truly capable of. We've already seen the excellent Quantum Break from developer Remedy Entertainment this year, and, indeed, the company has a new focus on original, exclusive games. Cases in point: the cel-shaded pirate simulator Sea of Thieves, the robotic mystery of ReCore and a long-awaited return to Halo's strategy roots with Halo Wars 2. There's also the chance we could hear more about Inside, from Limbo developer Playdead, and maybe, just maybe, Crackdown 3 and the newly leaked and zombie-focused Dead Rising 4 and State of Decay 2. That's to say nothing of Below from Capybara Games or Tacoma from Fullbright -- both of which have been running under the radar in terms of media access. There are also rumors that Microsoft will have new hardware to show off, including a microconsole that accesses games and apps like Netflix from your Xbox One. Given the work that Microsoft has put into Xbox-to-PC streaming, this doesn't seem farfetched.

Marking a heightening of interest in autonomous vehicle technology, China's largest search engine Baidu announced plans to mass-produce self-driving cars within five years Forbes reported in an article that Baidu's senior vice president Wang Jing announced that his firm is planning…

Norwalk, Conn.--June 8, 2016-- TMC announced today the conference program for the Smart Machine Conference, held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV from July 11 – 14, 2016. The Smart Machines conference is dedicated to exploring the business advantages of technologies like AI, Autonomous Robots, Chat bots, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Cloud, Big Data, Virtual Reality Assistants and so much more. The conference program includes keynotes, case studies, networking opportunities and a robust exhibit floor. "The smart machine revolution is here and disrupting society as a whole whether it's fraud detection powered by machine learning, customer service chat bots or a champion chess playing computer," said TMC's CEO, Rich Tehrani, the conference's Executive Producer. "At the Smart Machine Conference attendees will learn the competitive advantages of these technologies and what the industry's future holds."

Since the second half of the 1990s, productivity growth has accelerated in the US due to the Information Technology (IT) Revolution. However, the productivity effects of traditional types of IT were exhausted by mid-2000 (e.g. Today, the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics?referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution?on the future economy and society is attracting attention, and many speculative arguments have arisen regarding the possible effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In particular, the substitution of human labour by AI and robots is being hotly discussed. The Japanese government has begun efforts to develop and diffuse AI and robotics technologies.

Cylance, an Irvine, California-based cybersecurity startup that taps machine-learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to thwart malware, has raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors. The company was founded in 2012 by Stuart McClure, who sold an Internet security firm to McAfee for 86 million eight years ago and came on board as McAfee's chief technology officer (CTO). Prior to this round, Cylance had already raised about 77 million, including a 42 million round last July and 20 million the previous year. McClure has an interesting background -- his venture into the security realm was influenced by a deadly plane crash he was involved in back in 1989, one which resulted in the death of nine passengers. The event was apparently caused by a flaw in the Boeing 747's locking mechanism -- a known fault that the company ignored.

The newest weapon in the fight against wildlife poaching and illegal logging doesn't rely solely on boots or bullets, but on a computer software application driven by artificial intelligence. Called Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, or PAWS, the app uses algorithms – similar to the mathematical models used to power computer games – to devise strategies for defeating those who seek to destroy nature. Thousands of animals are illegally slaughtered each year for their ivory, skin and bones for use in traditional medicines and feeding black market demand, while others meet their death at the hands of illicit trophy hunters, in what the World Wildlife Fund refers to as "a global poaching crisis." Last year alone, around 30,000 elephants and a record 1,338 rhinos were killed in Africa, while tens of thousands of other animals were poached and trafficked, "feeding an illegal wildlife trade that is increasingly being driven by international organized crime," the international conservation group said in a recent statement. Developed in 2013 and still in the test phase, the PAWS software analyzes data on terrain, topography, routes most frequently used by animals and paths traveled by poachers, said Milind Tambe, a computer scientist and professor of industrial systems engineering at USC who developed the technology with his doctoral students, including Fei Fang and Thanh Nguyen.