This is 2016 version of the Eurovision prediction. I have explained systematics in quite detailed fashion in the last year post which you can find here. Very shortly, I measured how many tweets have been sent about each song from each country. From this, I estimated amount of votes that each country would give to another. For example, if Germans tweets the most about Polish song, I assume that Germany will give Poland 12 points.

The world going crazy over smartphone and other high-tech devices does not mean that spirituality has no more place in the hearts and lives of people. To disprove that, a Buddhist temple outside Beijing developed Xian'er, a monk robot that could recite mantras and explain the basics of Buddhism. The two-foot-high robot, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has a shaved head and wears a saffron robe like traditional Buddhist monks, reported The Guardian. A touchscreen on the chest of the robot monk, found at the 500-year-old Longquan Temple, provides answers to 20 simple questions about the Buddhist faith and daily life at the temple. Among the questions is "What is the meaning of life?" Xian'er replied, "My master says the meaning of life is to help more people finally leave behind bitterness and gain happiness," quoted CNET.

Do we need an Asimov's Law for chatbots? And how do they compare with a talking parrot? What can dairy farmers learn from outfitting cows with pedometers? How can algorithms better explain to humans not just what they're predicting, but why? Some of the biggest names from the Seattle area's growing machine learning and artificial intelligence community tackled these questions and more Wednesday at a Madrona Venture Group summit. The sprawling array of challenges and opportunities in this fast-growing, fascinating, and sometimes frightening field defy easy summary.

Japan's three leading automakers expect a stronger yen will cost them around 14 billion in lost operating profit this year alone -- just as they need to invest more in everything from cleaner fuel to driverless cars. After three years of supernormal profits on the back of a weaker currency, Toyota Motor, Nissan Motor and Honda Motor now face a reality check after the yen has turned around. While the recent years' currency boon filled automakers' coffers -- Toyota alone has around 10 billion in cash -- a squeeze on margins will put them under pressure to focus their investments, analysts say. "How to respond to yen rises while securing profits and continuing future investments -- this balance is important," Toyota Executive Vice President Takahiko Ijichi said this past week. The dollar climbed roughly 60 percent against the yen between late 2011 and mid-2015, a huge windfall for Japan's carmakers, but so far this year it is down roughly 9 percent against the yen.

Apple new 1 billion investment in the Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing is as much about currying favor with regulators as directly expanding its own business, analysts said. Apple might need the help; it faces slowing iPhone sales and tougher restrictions on its services in the country. The investment -- one of Apple's largest to date -- could serve other purposes as well. It helps the company put some of its giant overseas cash hoard to work without incurring taxes by bringing it back to the U.S. It might also inform Apple's own interest in the automotive business; several reports suggest it has begun work on its own self-driving car. "It kills two or three birds with one stone," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

There are three main ingredients to creating artificial intelligence: hardware (compute and memory), software (or algorithms), and data. We've heard a lot of late about deep learning algorithms that are achieving superhuman level performance in various tasks, but what if we changed the hardware? Firstly, we can optimise CPU's which are based on the von Neumann architectures that we have been using since the invention of the computer in the 1940's. These include memory improvements, more processors on a chip (a GPU of the type found in a cell phone, might have almost 200 cores), FPGA's and ASIC's. Such is the case with research being done at MIT and Stanford.

Didi Chuxing, the largest ride-hailing service in China, just received a huge boost from Apple. The iPhone maker recently invested a whopping 1 billion into the Chinese company. "Didi exemplifies the innovation taking place in the iOS developer community in China," said Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple. "We are extremely impressed by the business they've built and their excellent leadership team, and we look forward to supporting them as they grow." The investment by Apple in Didi Chuxing is an interesting and unusual move.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your dance-challenged Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. SNUMAX is a "multi-functional soft robot" developed by Seoul National University's Biorobotics Laboratory, which won the RoboSoft Grand Challenge this year. "Boomf is the noise a marshmallow makes when it falls through your letterbox and lands on your doormat."

Despite heightened tensions between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the FBI-Apple standoff, the Department of Defense is increasingly looking to Silicon Valley to help it develop artificial intelligence capabilities. Just this week, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made yet another trip to the Silicon Valley, the fourth such trip since he took the DoD helm last year. During this trip, Carter visited the Pentagon new Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, facility, reported the New York Times. During a speech there, Carter again discussed his Third Offset strategy, which looks to high-tech weapons to give the U.S. military an edge of China and Russia in the future. The first and second offset, in case you are wondering, refer to previous eras in which DoD used technology to compensate for a smaller military – the 1950s use of nuclear weapons to deter superior Warsaw Pact forces and the 1970s and 1980s when the Pentagon looked to improved conventional weapons technology, such as cruise missiles, to compensate for a smaller force posture.

It's a little known but often dangerous problem: each year, 3,500 people in the U.S. -- mostly young children -- swallow button batteries. Normally, these batteries pass through the body without incident. But if they come into prolonged contact with esophagus or stomach tissue, the results can be harmful: the batteries can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, which burns through body tissue. A postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shuhei Miyashita brought up this hazard to Daniela Rus, the professor who leads the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A simple experiment proved how hazardous the little batteries can be.