LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global industrial robotics market in the rubber and plastic industry is expected to record a CAGR of over 18% until 2020. This research report titled'Global Industrial Robotics Market in the Rubber and Plastic Industry 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated primarily through the sales and services of various industrial robotics such as cartesian, articulated, and others for different applications in the rubber and plastic industry. "China accounted for about 25% of the overall production of plastics, followed by European countries that accounted for 20%. Key findings of this report show that the demand for plastics is anticipated to grow during the forecast period, and positively impact the market. Significant improvements in gripper technology, such as the development of Versaball by Empire Robotics for handling materials of any shape and size, is also slated to play a critical role in the expansion of robots in the rubber and plastic industry," said Bharath Kanniappan, one of Technavio's lead analysts for robotics research.

A Silicon Valley tech company has done away with the role of HR Director, instead implementing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program which has been developed to handle the role. According to reports, it is showing signs of self-awareness having passed the infamous Turing test, and has been been described by commentators as "the homo sapien to Siri's neanderthal." The software was developed in China and is intended to interact directly with staff, with automated emails programmed to "touch base" and send personalised thank-you notes in a bid to encourage a culture of recognition and to ensure high levels of staff engagement. The program also keeps tally of how many emails certain staff members receive, and sends automated score boards out in a bid to ensure public recognition of staff and encourage friendly competition amongst peers. Bi-weekly, it also conducts a presentation for the entire company, with staff rewards chosen by the AI.

Let's skip to the chase: Self-driving cars are going to be The Next Big Thing (tm). Here's how you can make big money from this revolution, no matter which carmaker or technology platform comes out on top. Since Alphabet started leading this futuristic idea out into the mainstream, the car industry itself has turned in that direction. Name a carmaker, and I bet the company has developed at least the embryo of a self-driving platform. You can already find traces of this upcoming revolution inside current cars, powering automatic parallel-parking systems or highway-speed autopilots.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

In a world of smart machines that can drive cars, beat humans at chess, advise on medical diagnoses and perform a host of other tasks, imagine the next likely step as a smart machine as a people manager. As business investment in smart machines grows, "robobosses" will increasingly make workplace decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by robobosses, according to Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. These smart machine managers will look at data derived from worker performance in new ways because of their ability to dispassionately discover previously undetected relationships and correlations, test their hypotheses, and then elevate them to production status. "Supervisor duties are increasingly shifting toward monitoring worker accomplishments through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation," explained Ms. Karamouzis.

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HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) has launched a new corporate venture arm targeting early stage companies with innovative technologies. HP Tech Ventures will operate across teams in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel, to pursue strategic investments and partnerships in technology areas including: 3D transformation, immersive computing, hyper-mobility, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and smart machines. Led by Andrew Bolwell, HP Tech Ventures will leverage its technology network, its channel and distribution partners, as well as manufacturing and supply chain relationships to help startups scale. The HP Tech Ventures group reports into Shane Wall, HP Chief Technology Officer and head of HP Labs. Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel, May 10, 2016 --HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) today announced the launch of HP Tech Ventures, a new corporate venture arm, targeting early stage companies with cutting edge technologies.

JD.com founder and CEO Richard Liu attends a launching ceremony of the "U.S. Mall" of JD.com in New York, the United States, July 20, 2015. BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese online retailer JD.com has teamed up with robot maker Siasun to automate its logistic network, the company said on Friday. JD said it will work with Siasun to develop logistics robots to increase automation from order to delivery. JD has already invested heavily in making its warehouses and deliveries more efficient. "Logistics in the future will go beyond basic infrastructure," said JD's technology chief Zhang Chen, "Technology ranging from the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data to artificial intelligence are making our service smarter."

Driverless cars, drones and a proposed first commercial spaceport for the UK will feature in the Queen's speech. The Department for Transport has said such cutting-edge technologies are crucial to the country's economy and that its proposals, to be unveiled on Wednesday, will help deliver jobs. Legislation will be introduced to enable driverless cars, already trialled in the UK, to be insured under ordinary policies. The government has said that the spaceport will be constructed by the end of the current parliament. The self-driving car market is currently growing at 16% a year and could be worth up to 900bn worldwide by 2025, while the port is part of the government's plan to raise revenues in the space sector from 12bn to 40bn by 2030, which would mean capturing about 10% of the sector worldwide.

This is my first blog here; my name is Fen. I was with MathWorks for almost 15 years. MathWorks is the creator of MATLAB andI built some of the modules in MATLAB. In the past 5 years, I led a team of consulting engineer to build data analytics solution for customers in APAC. In recent years, commercial banks and asset management companies in China started to build more quantitative models to measure credit risk. With our help, some of them chose to use MATLAB statistics and machine learning modules to build credit risk models; I would like to share a common approach I used on credit risk projects.