Employing robots and artificial intelligence in Chinese restaurants has turned out to be not such a smart idea after all, with restaurants in Guangzhou either closing down or firing their mechanical staff.

Prepare to hear a lot of news Tuesday on Facebook, as the social networking titan launches its f8 developers conference in San Francisco. Get familiar with the word "chatbot." The social network will likely have plenty to say about it during its f8 keynote address Tuesday. This comes off the heels of Microsoft's experiments with chatbots on Twitter. Facebook is also expected to share more updates on its Messenger platform.

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Artificial Intelligence (Ai) Market By Technology (Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (Nlp), Image Processing, And Speech Recognition), Application & Geography - Global Forecast To 2020" report to their offering. The author forecasts the artificial intelligence market to grow from USD 419.7 Million in 2014 to USD 5.05 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 53.65% from 2015 to 2020. The major factors driving the growth of this market include diversified application areas of AI, improved productivity, and increased level of customer satisfaction. In addition, the rising demand for intelligent systems is expected to propel the growth of the market in the next five years. The scope of this report covers the artificial intelligence market by technology, application, and region.

China will "lead the world" in producing artificially intelligent hardware as the tech industry continues to find breakthroughs in this field, according to a Microsoft executive. Citing examples like Baidu, Harry Shum, executive vice-president of technology and research in Microsoft, said Chinese internet companies are playing an important role in advancing artificial intelligence. "Baidu is building autonomous driving vehicles, and many other Chinese companies are ... doing serious technology development in the artificial intelligence area," said Shum. "If we have the opportunity to democratise artificial intelligence technology through the cloud, we just need a few [Chinese companies] with good ideas and we can [advance] very quickly." He added that he is "bullish" about the artificially intelligent hardware industry in China because cities like Shenzhen are building an ecosystem that supports the technology. "In southern China, you can see these different layers, from manufacturing capabilities, sensors, circuit design, all of that," said Shum. "They used to make low-end phones, but now [can you imagine] what they could do next?"

Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook is widely expected to launch an app store for chatbots at its developer conference this week. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. What can I help you with Jane?

Computer manufacturer Atos has named its first customer for Bull sequana, a supercomputer design it hopes will reach exaflop levels of performance by 2020. Atos is building the computer for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), it said Tuesday. By targeting 2020 for delivery of an exaflop supercomputer, Atos is entering a race in which China and Japan may already have a head-start. An exaflop is a billion billion floating-point operations per second (flops). That's way more than today's fastest machine can manage: China's Tianhe-2 has a maximum performance of 33.9 petaflops (millions of billions of flops), according to the November 2015 edition of the Top500 supercomputer rankings.

Hong Kong's economy is likely to encounter quite serious challenges in the coming two or three years. A study released by the University of Hong Kong predicts the city's economy will grow 1.5 percent this year. I think the real GDP growth rate may be close to zero, or even fall below zero. The situation in the second half may even be worse. Currently, Hong Kong's economy has four pillars: trade and logistics, tourism, finance and professional services.

We've compiled a list of the hottest events and conferences from the world of Data Science and Machine Learning this year that we think you should know about! Image Processing, Computer Vision and Machine Learning based on Optimization and PDE.(Oslo, Norway) 29th August https://ivlopde2016.wordpress.com/

Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook is widely expected to launch an app store for chatbots at its developer conference this week. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. A chatbot is a computer software program that is able to communicate with humans, using artificial intelligence.

The robots are coming -- to help run your life or sell you stuff -- at an online texting service near you. In coming months, users of Facebook's Messenger app, Microsoft's Skype and Canada's Kik can expect to find new automated assistants offering information and services at a variety of businesses. These messaging "chatbots" are basically software that can conduct human-like conversation and do simple jobs once reserved for people. Google and other companies are reportedly working on similar ideas. In Asia, software butlers are already part of the landscape.