There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing facts while understanding is the application of knowledge to the mastery of systems. You can know a lot while understanding very little. Just as an example, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence system that defeated the TV Jeopardy champs a few years ago knew all there was to know about Jeopardy questions but didn't really understand anything. Ask Watson to apply to removing your appendix its knowledge of hundreds of medical questions and you'd be disappointed and probably dead.

The first wave of robots taking over human jobs is upon us. Apple Inc. AAPL, 1.76% supplier Foxconn Technology Co. 2354, -0.41% has replaced 60,000 human workers with robots in a single factory, according to a report in the South China Morning Post, initially published over the weekend. This is part of a massive reduction in headcount across the entire Kunshan region in China's Jiangsu province, in which many Taiwanese manufacturers base their Chinese operations. Roughly 600 companies are reportedly looking to reduce headcount with robots, as part of an effort to accelerate growth and reduce costs, according to the Chinese newspaper, which cited data from the Kunshan government. Last year, 35 Taiwanese companies, including Foxconn, spent a total of 4 billion yuan ( 610 million) on artificial intelligence as part of this initiative, according to the report.

In the 1990s, fashion's relationship with robots was the stuff of fantasy. On the runway of Alexander McQueen's imaginative Spring/Summer 1999 show, two robotic arms spray-painted a white dress worn by Shalom Harlow. Today, the industry's relationship with automation is much more practical. In the distribution centres of e-commerce giants like the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group and Amazon (which, in 2012, paid 775 million to acquire Kiva Systems, a manufacturer of robotic fulfilment systems used by Gap, Gilt Groupe and Saks 5th Avenue) software-controlled robots routinely navigate giant warehouses, picking and transporting inventory faster and more accurately than humans, enabling services like same-day delivery. "Automated storage and retrieval systems provide high storage density as well as inventory accuracy and management, yet require a smaller footprint," explains Steve Crease, director of operations at Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, which uses ASRS to deliver its "key service level" of same-day delivery.

A Foxconn factory's workforce today shrunk from 110,000 employees down to 50,000, according to a report from the South China Morning Post. Because robots can do the same job. Foxconn is Apple's primary manufacturing partner, and there is a fear that other factories in the Chinese city of Kunshan will do the same thing, something that could have a disastrous impact on the population of the area, which is largely made up of migrant workers. In fact, according to the report as many as 600 companies in the area have plans to rely more on automation. Related: A fire broke out at Foxconn's main iPhone plant, but there's no cause for concern Foxconn has been working toward replacing workers with robots for a while now, obviously in an attempt to save money and increase profits.

HYDERABAD: After being ranked among the best universities in the country, the University of Hyderabad (UoH) here on Wednesday was placed among the most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India by a UK-based journal. According to the study published in Science & Technology Libraries Journal, United Kingdom, UoH has been ranked 7th among 160 organisations, as most-productive organisation involved in artificial intelligence research in India. The top 20 most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India published 53 or more papers each and contributed 2,219 papers. The average citation per paper achieved by the total papers of these 20 organisations was 4.68, and eight organisations achieved a higher average citation per paper ratio than the group average. The institutions listed include Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (10.21);

Toyota and Volkswagen are the latest in a string of auto industry giants to partner with ride-hailing companies, as the future of "mobility services" steers toward less ownership and more self-driving cars. Toyota and Uber announced a partnership Tuesday in which Toyota, valued at 177 billion, will invest an undisclosed amount to collaborate with Uber to develop autonomous cars. Volkswagon has invested 300 million in Gett, a taxi-hailing service that operates in 60 cities in Israel, Russia, the United States, and Britain, allowing the Israeli startup to expand in Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tuesday's announcements are the latest in a series of major investments by the automakers to compete with Apple (whose 500 billion value is as much as seven major automakers combined) and Google, as the everyday commute appears poised to undergo a massive transformation. The focus on autonomous cars comes as Tesla, another tech startup, is attempting revolutionize the electric car and battery technology.

A former McDonald's chief executive has warned that raising the minimum wage will spur unemployment as companies will instead employ robots that work for less. "I guarantee you if a 15 minimum wage goes across the country you're going to see a job loss like you can't believe," said Edward Rensi in an appearance on Fox Business Network Tuesday. "It's cheaper to buy a 35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making 15 an hour bagging French fries." The minimum wage has been a hot topic this spring, with some states and employers deciding to up their minimum wage to 15 an hour in the coming years. California will raise its minimum wage to 15 an hour by 2022.

China's labor-intensive industries have been rapidly shifting toward jobs-killing automation in recent years, with a world-leading 16 percent rise in industrial-robot sales last year alone. Now, a new official estimate has put a spotlight on some of the effects of these investments in China's electronics-manufacturing center. Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., more commonly known as Foxconn, has shed 60,000 workers at one factory alone, according to a recent report in the South China Morning Post. Foxconn is most famously known as Apple's largest contract manufacturer, which has faced criticism over the treatment of its workers and for a string of worker suicides. "The Foxconn factory has reduced its employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000, thanks to the introduction of robots," Xu Yulian, spokesman for Kunshan city, told the Post.

We learn the structure of a Markov Network between two groups of random variables from joint observations. Since modelling and learning the full MN structure may be hard, learning the links between two groups directly may be a preferable option. We introduce a novel concept called the \emph{partitioned ratio} whose factorization directly associates with the Markovian properties of random variables across two groups. A simple one-shot convex optimization procedure is proposed for learning the \emph{sparse} factorizations of the partitioned ratio and it is theoretically guaranteed to recover the correct inter-group structure under mild conditions. The performance of the proposed method is experimentally compared with the state of the art MN structure learning methods using ROC curves. Real applications on analyzing bipartisanship in US congress and pairwise DNA/time-series alignments are also reported.

Any-angle pathfinding is a fundamental problem in robotics and computer games. The goal is to find a shortest path between a pair of points on a grid map such that the path is not artificially constrained to the points of the grid. Prior research has focused on approximate online solutions. A number of exact methods exist but they all require super-linear space and pre-processing time. In this study, we describe Anya: a new and optimal any-angle pathfinding algorithm. Where other works find approximate any-angle paths by searching over individual points from the grid, Anya finds optimal paths by searching over sets of states represented as intervals. Each interval is identified on-the-fly. From each interval Anya selects a single representative point that it uses to compute an admissible cost estimate for the entire set. Anya always returns an optimal path if one exists. Moreover it does so without any offline pre-processing or the introduction of additional memory overheads. In a range of empirical comparisons we show that Anya is competitive with several recent (sub-optimal) online and pre-processing based techniques and is up to an order of magnitude faster than the most common benchmark algorithm, a grid-based implementation of A*.