I saw a news article recently about how high frequency trading firms are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their trading performance and profit. Two large companies were mentioned with each having a slightly different approach. This May, Nomura Securities are releasing a new stock trading system, built around analysing and assessing vast price and trading data resources. The system aims to simulate the insights of experienced (human) traders and make predictions based on historical market conditions and the correlation to current asset prices. Nothing particularly new about that, but the difference is they will be using AI tools to enable the system to enhance its price prediction ability as it gains more experience.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.

For two straight quarters, deal activity in artificial intelligence has hit record highs. Dennis Mortensen is one of the biggest winners in all the craze. His startup x.ai is the creator of Amy Ingram, an AI-driven personal assistant that can schedule meetings for you. After testing Amy in beta for two years, Mortensen announced last week 23 million in Series B funding to bring Amy to market. Dennis Mortensen: AI used to be for academia only and decades-long research.

Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?

Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, Quoc Le had no electricity till he was nine. A little over 20 years later he has helped design artificial intelligence used by millions everyday. The 32-year-old helps lead the Google Brain team, a specialised unit that attempts to give computers the kind of profound neural networks that human beings possess, or at least helps them simulate it. It is Google's attempt to build an artificial brain. It may not be humanoid-like machine that can think for itself that many will have in mind, but "intelligence" has already been integrated into Google products, the kinds of technology that Mr Le could only imagine as a child.

These strange-looking, two-legged robots might be the predecessor of a machine that someday helps with chores around the home. The bipedal bot, which has yet to be named, was developed by Schaft, a Japanese robotics company that is part of X, the research lab owned by Alphabet (previously Google). It was revealed at an event in Japan hosted by Andy Rubin, who started Google's robotics project before leaving the company at the end of 2014 to create his own hardware incubator. A video shot by someone at the event shows the robot carrying a heavy-looking gym weight, slipping on a tube without falling over, and cleaning a set of stairs with a vacuum cleaner brush attachment on its feet. It can also be seen walking through a forest and along a rocky beach.

An artist's rendering of Japan's new National Stadium, which will become the main venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. THE Olympic Games have long been used to showcase some of the world's newest technologies. From electronic stopwatches in Stockholm in 1912, to live television broadcasts in Berlin in 1936, to instant video replay at Salt Lake City in 2002 -- host cities have looked to stay at the cutting edge. But in four years, those innovations are going to look as ancient as the Games themselves as the most tech-savvy of nations -- Japan -- prepares to dazzle visitors and audiences across the globe with the most futuristic Olympics of them all. "The Olympic Games is a sports festival, but also it's a chance to show the innovation of scientific technologies," Tokyo's organising committee CEO Toshiro Muto said. "We have the potential to make this Olympic Games wonderful (and one) that the people of the world are going to admire."

Planning with hybrid domains modelled in PDDL+ has been gaining research interest in the Automated Planning community in recent years. Hybrid domain models capture a more accurate representation of real world problems that involve continuous processes than is possible using discrete systems. However, solving problems represented as PDDL+ domains is very challenging due to the construction of complex system dynamics, including non-linear processes and events. In this paper we introduce DiNo, a new planner capable of tackling complex problems with non-linear system dynamics governing the continuous evolution of states. DiNo is based on the discretise-and-validate approach and uses the novel Staged Relaxed Planning Graph+ (SRPG+) heuristic, which is introduced in this paper. Although several planners have been developed to work with subsets of PDDL+ features, or restricted forms of processes, DiNo is currently the only heuristic planner capable of handling non-linear system dynamics combined with the full PDDL+ feature set.

As the rapid development of e-commerce, reputation model has been proposed to help customers make effective purchase decisions. However, most of reputation models focus only on the overall ratings of products without considering reviews which provided by customers. We believe that textual reviews provided by buyers can express their real opinions more honestly. As so, in this paper, based on word2vector model, we propose a Textual Reputation Model (TRM) to obtain useful information from reviews, and evaluate the trustworthiness of objective product. Experimental results on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing reputation information from reviews.

This paper offers a perspective on Symbiotic Cognitive Systems that draws on Distributed Cognition. It argues that representations are the medium of cognition, and that the external representations that are one of the foci of Distributed Cognition are critical to supporting symbiosis. The paper analyzes an instance of a symbiotic cognitive system in which hundreds of human participants – with the support of a digital system – collectively optimize a program. It discusses the roles external representations play in symbiosis, and suggest that the design of external representations that are accessible and legible to both human and digital agents is a critical part of symbiotic cognitive systems.