The debate over how robots could affect employment has been going on for more than a century. Those who rage against the machine say robots will steal our jobs, make us their slaves, and then kill us. Others believe robots are the key to ultimate freedom from work that humans find dull or dangerous. Some robots could climb stairs, others could pick up and place objects, while others could drive you around the sidewalk without you exerting any effort. The majority of executives at the conference explained how robots are here to rescue us from manual labor and will help to make our companies leaner, more profitable, more consistent, and more competitive.

When trying to communicate with future customers, it's important to strike the right tone. When it isn't right, as in the case of Microsoft's Tay, things can spin out of control quickly. That's why more companies are trying to understand how to integrate emotional intelligence into the machines that interact with people. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places--and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That's how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games.

Singapore: Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a US-based information technology (IT) firm with most of its employees working out of India, expects its business growth in the Asia-Pacific region to outpace the company average this year, maintaining the trend seen in recent years, Jayajyoti Sengupta, president and Asia-Pacific head, said in an interview. Automation, which includes robots, machine learning and artificial intelligence, will be among the new frontiers for Cognizant, as rote and repetitive processes become "digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent", he said. Cognizant has said it expects its revenue growth to slow to between 10% and 14.3% for the calendar year 2016. How do you see the situation in the Asia-Pacific? It would be pertinent to note that Cognizant's growth of 21% in calendar 2015 included revenues from the acquisition of TriZetto.

The Drone Racing League flew in to the capital this week as machines soared around Wembley Stadium at speeds of 75mph (120km/h). Drones buzzed around the iconic venue and further proved why the sport of drone racing is gaining popularity. The racing was live streamed to spectators for the first time over EE's 4G network at the stadium, with 4G cameras attached to the drones giving people a drone's-eye-view. The event was attended by 16-year-old Luke Bannister, from Somerset, who recently won 174,000 ( 250,000) in the Drone Grand Prix in Dubai. First Person View (FPV) drone racing involves live video being streamed to the pilot's headset to enable split-second manoeuvres. This perspective is usually only available to the team controlling the drone, however for the first time spectators in the stadium and online were also able to'ride' around the stadium.

A Russian photographer has proved how easy it is to track down people on social media using facial recognition software. Yegor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on St Petersburg's metro and used a facial recognition app which trawls through profiles on VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, to track down their online profiles. Named "Your Face is Big Data", the series of photographs shows how powerful facial recognition software has become, to the point that a complete stranger can find you at the click of a button. Tsvetkov told the Guardian the project aimed to show technology can affect privacy, particularly if you don't activate the relevant settings on your social media profiles. "Nobody noticed that I photographed them, but I used a simple camera and I didn't try to hide it," he said.

The cutest robo-smartphone ever made is hitting shelves in Japan next month - but is it cute enough to drop almost 1,300? RoBoHoN (which translates roughly as "heart moving phone") is an adorable tiny robot, which doubles up as a smartphone. Or is it a smartphone that doubles up as a robot? Either way, the happy little bot is a surprisingly powerful piece of technology in its own right. Created by Japanese electronics firm Sharp, RoBoHoN is a 20cm tall robot phone. It'll read out phone messages, announce phone calls and even shout at you when it's time to wake up.

The idea that humans are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence whose abilities far outstrip our own is ridiculous, said Chris Bishop, Microsoft's director of research at Cambridge, highlighting the many limitations of AI systems today. "This is a good moment for a little reality check," he told a public discussion hosted by The Royal Society in London this week. While recent breakthroughs in machine learning have allowed computers to become as adept as the average person at recognising faces and objects and to make huge strides in areas such as voice recognition, Bishop cautioned against assuming that machines are outstripping human performance across the board. "Yes, deep learning has achieved human-level performance in object recognition but what does that mean? It means the machine makes about the same number of errors as the human. "The reason the machine is as good as the human at this is because it can distinguish between 157 varieties of mushroom, whereas it makes all kinds of stupid mistakes that humans wouldn't make." Even some of the most celebrated examples of machine intelligence, such as a Google DeepMind system beating a world champion in the notoriously complex game of Go, need to be understood in context of the time and effort that went into building the system, he said. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing. "[Take] the Go example, where the machine has just about crept ahead of the best human.

For the consumer & retail and banking industries, standard features can be configured into customer interaction templates for use in attending to customers or for marketing activities. In addition, Pepper can store information from interacting with customers on the cloud for future analysis, and the data can then be visualized, providing an integrated streamflow through to customer support. Pepper also has sensors to detect anyone approaching it, which enables interaction with that individual. Following the interaction, the new customer information can be reviewed through Interactive Analytics. "We need to know more about Pepper. In ten years, Pepper will be used in ways we never imagined. Accenture is working together with Softbank Robotics to take it to another level, thinking about how it can help solve our client's challenges and how it can be used to provide better customer services."

Saqib Shaikh is a software developer from London, England who is currently working for Microsoft on the firm's Bing search engine. Shaikh lost his sight when he was seven years old. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has strived to be a leader in the artificial intelligence arena, developing advanced AI theories and applications that permit machines to learn, evolve and make independent decisions. Microsoft's AI research team is building … Microsoft certainly hasn't been scared off doing further experiments with artificial intelligence after the whole racist bot debacle. The tech firm is back with an AI powered API that can identify (or at least try) what's in a picture.