Affectiva, a startup developing "emotion recognition technology" that can read people's moods from their facial expressions captured in digital videos, raised 14 million in a Series D round of funding led by Fenox Venture Capital. According to cofounder Rana el Kaliouby, the Waltham, Mass.-based company, wants its technology to become the de facto means of adding emotional intelligence and empathy to any interactive product, and the best way for organizations to attain unvarnished insights about customers, patients or constituents. She explained that Affectiva uses computer vision and deep learning technology to analyze facial expressions or non-verbal cues in visual content online, but not the content or conversations in a video. The company's technology ingests digital images--including video in chat applications, livestreamed or recorded videos, or even GIFs--through typically the simplest web cams. Its system first categorizes then maps the facial expressions to a number of emotional states, like happy, sad, nervous, interested or surprised.

The Afghan Taliban named an Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour's deputies to succeed him on Wednesday, after confirming Mansour's death in a U.S. drone strike at the weekend. Within an hour of the announcement, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a shuttle bus carrying court employees west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing as many as 11 people and wounding several others, including children. New Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada was named in a United Nations report last year as former chief of the sharia-based justice system under the Taliban's five-year rule over Afghanistan, which ended with their ouster in 2001. Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a feared network blamed for many deadly bomb attacks in Kabul in recent years, and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, will serve as deputies. The announcement, following a meeting of the Taliban's main shura, or leadership council, ended days of confusion during which the Taliban declined to confirm the death of Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday.

KABUL, Afghanistan – The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that their leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and that they have appointed a successor -- a scholar known for extremist views who is unlikely to back a peace process with Kabul. The announcement came as a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying court employees in the Afghan capital, killing at least 11 people, an official said. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement sent to the media, the Taliban said their new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of Mansour's two deputies. The insurgent group said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which is believed to have taken place in Pakistan, but offered no other details.

Adidas (IW 1000/247), the German maker of sportswear and equipment, announced on May 24 that it will start marketing its first series of sportshoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017. More than 20 years after Adidas ceased production activities in Germany and moved them to Asia instead, chief executive Herbert Hainer, unveiled to the press the group's new prototype "Speedfactory" in Ansbach in southern Germany. The new state-of-the-art 4,600-square-meter plant is still being built, but Adidas showed off a foretaste of it to the press, promising to automate shoe production, currently done mostly by hand in Asia, and enable the shoes to be made more quickly and closer to its sales outlets. The factory will deliver a first test series of around 500 pairs of shoes to be sold from the third quarter of 2016. How Many Times Has Your Company Started (and Stopped) Implementing Lean?

It's been a busy few weeks for us here at Sentient. We were lucky enough to spend our afternoon chatting about the future of AI in retail at ShopTalk, then spent our evening talking about the AI with some of the brightest minds in the industry at WIRED. We'll have videos of both for everyone in the coming weeks, but wanted to share our co-founder Babak Hodjat's appearance at Collision earlier this month to give you a taste of the way we see AI at Sentient: At any rate, we've been racking up the frequent flier miles lately. And the next month and change is no different. Here are some of our upcoming speaking gigs.

I really found interesting this bit from a recent Andreessen Horowitz a16z podcast that looked at Google I/O, Google's annual developer conference. Kyle: So Steven, yesterday Google announced quite a few different products and services, several cynical commenters on twitter came out with the idea that, "You know, hey, we've seen a lot of these things before, oh a computer you control with your voice in the home, a bot that you interact with to, you know, interact with different services. We've seen this before why is google showing all of this off now? None of this feels new." But you pushed back against that.

The recent announcement of Chatbot API from Facebook sets another milestone in one of the hottest trends in mobile as a growing number of leading social messaging platforms introduced bot development capabilities. In a nutshell, Messaging Bots allow people to connect and interact with businesses through chat. The bots assist the user to complete different actions, such as checking your bank account balance, purchasing items, and book a table at a restaurant. The idea of automatic chat is not new. Various types of websites offer the help of a virtual conversational agent.

KABUL – The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and said they had appointed a successor. In a statement sent to media, the insurgent group said its new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of two of Mansour's deputies. It said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which was believed to have been held in Pakistan. Mansour was killed in Pakistan on Saturday when his vehicle was struck by a U.S. drone, an attack that is believed to be the first time a Taliban leader was killed in such a way inside Pakistani territory. Pakistani authorities are believed to have given shelter and support to some Taliban leaders over the Afghan border.

Sony Corp. shares rose as investors ignored a weak profit forecast, looking instead to the company's long-term prospects in entertainment and sensors needed for driverless cars and other emerging products. In New York, shares rose even after the company issued an annual profit outlook that fell short of analysts' estimates due to costs for repairs after the Kyushu earthquakes. The impact of the quakes and a slowdown in demand for image sensors that power cameras in smartphones -- including Apple Inc.'s iPhone -- are testing Sony's ability to generate more of its earnings from PlayStation gaming consoles, streaming services for its 65 million online users as well as movies and music. Still, profit at Sony's games and network services business will rise 52 percent to 135 billion ( 1.2 billion) on anticipated sales of PS4 consoles this year. "All the bad news is probably out for the time being, and we expect the focus to shift to the pace of recovery" in image sensor operations, Takeo Miyamoto, a Tokyo-based analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, wrote in a report on Tuesday after the earnings.

Two Maine brothers will be contributing to a human-piloted robot that's competing in a one-on-one battle with another robot from Japan. Twins Geoffrey and Michael Howe tell The Portland Press Herald their Waterboro company, Howe & Howe Technologies, will add to an enhanced version of a prototype called the Mk. The prototype was built by a California startup called MegaBots Inc. The company announced in the summer of 2015 that it had challenged a Japanese robotics firm to a battle and that it had accepted the challenge. Howe & Howe is responsible for building a track base, which resembles a small tank.