The multibillion-dollar business plans being hatched by global automakers and technology companies for self-driving vehicles depend on a sensor that's less than 1 inch wide and costs all of 92 cents. And a company you've probably never heard of, Nippon Ceramic Co., controls about half of that market. Its stock is up more than 40 percent over the past three years and analysts expect profits to nearly double by 2018. In other words, it's good to be Nippon Ceramic right now. The Japanese maker of ultrasonic sensors, which help autonomous vehicles avoid crashes and fit into tight parking spaces, expects demand to double in the next five years and is expanding its production lines to keep up, President Shinichi Taniguchi said in an interview.

The machine also reflects a lot of lessons learned from its predecessor and beyond. For instance, it knows to slow down near corners so that it won't smack into someone. It identifies people asking for help, too, and will approach on its own. Its biggest drawback is simply that it's not as personable as Pepper (you're just looking at a pair of expressionless eyes), and doesn't have a built-in display to show information. It's going to be a while before you see EMIEW3 in service, as Hitachi doesn't expect it to be ready until 2018. However, Hitachi has grand ambitions for its third-generation hardware.

On the 10th day of every month, Junsuke Senoguchi has just one thing on his mind -- the closing level of the Nikkei 225 Stock Average. That's because Mr Senoguchi, an unassuming man in his late forties, has built a machine that's been predicting the direction of Japanese shares, and once a month he gets a progress report on its success. The model makes a simple call -- whether the equity index will be higher or lower after 30 days -- and over almost four years it's been right 68% of the time. "I'm so happy when it works", said Mr Senoguchi, a senior equity strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in Tokyo. "It's because I feel I can predict the future." Algorithms have invaded global share markets, used by everyone from high-frequency traders closing bets in fractions of a second, to specialist asset managers whose strategies are determined by complex quantitative analysis.

David Shing, or simply'Shingy,' is well-known in technology circles. And for good reason, he's AOL's energetic and up-beat'Digital Prophet' – oft jetting around the world to talk about the future of technology. But how long will Shingy's (and other similar roles) survive? Not all that long perhaps, if McCann's hiring of an artificially intelligent creative director in its Japanese office is anything to go by. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

REUTERS/Joshua RobertsAn engineer makes an adjustment to the robot "The Incredible Bionic Man" at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013. It's the latest in a series of figures economists have released projecting the impact that AI systems and machines will have on the human workforce, and this one, from the World Economic Forum, predicts a "Fourth Industrial Revolution," characterized by unprecedented "developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and biotechnology." And while previous industrial revolutions have catapulted the human workforce forward, this one may set us back -- at least in the short term. According to the researchers at the WEF, "current trends could lead to a net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labor market changes over the period 2015–2020." The Forum estimates that a grand total of 7.1 million jobs will be lost as a direct result of many of our proudest innovations, and that two-thirds of these jobs will be "concentrated in the Office and Administrative job family."

Although Google is selling Boston Dynamics to distance itself from "terrifying" humanoid robots, there's still plenty of robot projects underway. SCHAFT, a Tokyo-based robotics company run by Google's parent company Alphabet, presented the bipedal robot at the New Economic Summit in Japan. SCHAFT is best know as the winner of the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge that put it on the map. There aren't too many details on the robot yet, except that it can carry up to 132 pounds and can tackle uneven terrain. But it's nice to be in the snow once in a while too.

Experts are warning that skilled jobs will soon start disappearing because of the rise of artificial intelligence. So far, robots have mainly been replacing manual labor, performing routine and intensive tasks. But smarter machines are putting more skilled professions at risk. Robots are likely to be performing 45% of manufacturing tasks by 2025, versus just 10% today, according to a study by Bank of America. And the rise of artificial intelligence will only accelerate that process as the number of devices connected to the Internet doubles to 50 billion by 2020.

The tech world has been voraciously chattering about "chatbots," and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already declared them the new apps, the next big thing. But what tends to get lost in the discussion is the reason why these chatbots could represent such a power shift in the industry, and how they could fundamentally change the idea of apps, or distinct pieces of software in general. First, though, when we talk about chatbots, what are we actually talking about? The basic idea is "conversation as a platform." "Bots" -- as people have begun to shorten them -- are virtual assistants, software programs that you can talk to in order to get stuff done.

Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the IT services company, said it will give a Rs 24-crore grant over the next three years to Delhi-based Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) to set up a research centre for artificial intelligence (AI). For Infosys, which carries out its Corporate Social Responsibility through the foundation, supporting educational institutions has been a fundamental part of its CSR strategy. The grant comes at a time when Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, who has a doctorate degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford University, has been trying to increasingly build out capabilities around the strategic focal points of automation and artificial intelligence in the company. The proposed Infosys Center for Artificial Intelligence will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of AI and focus on areas such as robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics. The research will draw on real-time data to develop a deeper understanding of AI for social benefits, and the application of AI in education and related areas, said the release.

DeepMind was a relatively unknown artificial intelligence (AI) startup in London up until 2014, when it was bought by Google for around 400 million. Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy.