Cisco Systems said in August that sales in Asia were flat in the latest quarter and fell 2% for the fiscal year. A pair of tech companies are on the move following quarterly results, while Fitbit could make a move into mobile payments. Shares of the networking giant are up more than 5% in early trading after beating Wall Street estimates for the third quarter. Cisco reported earnings of 57 cents a share off revenue of 12 billion. Analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence projected earnings of 55 cents.

Google Home makes one heck of a first impression: An adorable little Bluetooth speaker, with a hyper-advanced personal assistant that promises to do things Amazon's Echo can't even dream of. You can even choose the color. On paper, Home seems superior to Echo in so many ways that it doesn't feel like a fair fight. That also may well be true in practice! But the race between Home and Echo may turn out to be a little more complicated than specs.

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. Japan-based SoftBank Robotics announced Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual developer's conference, that it is opening a new Pepper-focused outpost in San Francisco and unveiling an Android SDK, or software development kit, in the hopes of enticing programmers to write code for the robot. "Pepper is ultimately an unfinished product, and we just wanted to incentivize developers to expand the ways in which people can engage with a humanoid robot," says Steve Carlin, vice president of SoftBank Robotics Americas, which has an existing office in Boston. Asked if SoftBank will roll out at SDK for iOS developers, Carlin says he wouldn't rule anything out but "for the moment Android is the pervasive language."

The predictive powers of computers will work nicely in cases where reality does not change dramatically. However, it will fail in any case where there are dramatic, unpredictable, changes in the future. The authoritative science journal Nature announced recently that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines?

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The main objective of this thesis proposal is the exploration of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques for the processing of Big Data in medicine in order to identify novel relevant information for improved understanding of pathophysiological processes. To this aim, the notions of hierarchy and abstraction of deep architectures (i.e., deep learning) will be investigated. The developed techniques will be mainly applied to the research fields in our group which are the neurosciences (study of neurodegeneration and neural development in infants) and cardiology (cardiac function analysis). The project will involve the collaboration with clinical partners. The project will be conducted at the Department of Information & Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain, within the Simbiosys group (https://portal.upf.edu/web/simbiosys).

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan's Sony Corp said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a U.S. startup. The electronics maker has invested an undisclosed sum in California-based Cogitai. The year-old firm, founded by three researchers, focuses on technology that allows machines to learn continually and autonomously from interaction in the real world. The move comes a time when major technology companies such as Facebook Inc, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google are spending aggressively on AI ventures. "From an objective perspective, we are lagging behind," Chief Executive Hiroaki Kitano at Sony Computer Science Laboratories said in an interview. "But there are still unexplored areas – some in cyberspace but vastly more in the physical world," Kitano said.

In case you needed more proof that all our jobs will one day be occupied by robots, a Hong Kong V.C. firm has just named an artificial intelligence tool to its board of directors. The company's also insisting the tool will be treated as an "equal" to the other board members. A press release from Aging Analytics UK, a company that conducts research on biotechnology and regenerative medicine, made two announcements this morning: first, that they've launched an new A.I. tool called VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences); and second, that they've licensed VITAL to Hong Kong V.C. firm Deep Knowledge Ventures, where the tool will become an "equal member of its Board of Directors." Yes, that means it'll have exactly the same power as a living, breathing, presumably college-educated human being. VITAL uses machine learning to predict which life science companies will make for successful investments, the press release explains.

SoftBank Robotics Corp. said Thursday it has expanded opportunities for app developers to use Google's Android platform for its humanoid robot Pepper. It hopes to encourage more programmers to develop apps for the device. An Android-ready Pepper model will go on sale in July, though only for developers, and on Thursday an Android development toolkit was made available for download, Fumihide Tomizawa, SoftBank Robotics chief, told a news conference at the firm's headquarters in Tokyo. Previously, there was a development platform specially designed for Pepper, but it was not based on Android. Tomizawa said the number of developers could increase 100-fold, as there are only several thousand Pepper app designers but hundreds of thousands of Android coders.

CloudMinds, a cloud robotics start-up founded by the former head of the research division of China Mobile, has raised US 30 million seed financing from SB China Capital (SBCVC), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., Walden International and Kaixuan Capital. Cloud robotics is an emerging field of robotics rooted in cloud computing and cloud storage centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services. Huang Xiaoqing left the Research Institution of China Mobile last March to launch CloudMinds, according to an article published by Caixin Media. "A robot with similar capabilities of a real human requires a computer system that may be one million times bigger in size than that of a human brain, which means the brain of a robot must be on the cloud," Huang told the Chinese media organization. CloudMinds is targeting to reveal a full-service housekeeping robot in 2025 to service individual families.