TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp is targeting developing in the next five years driver assistance systems that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to improve vehicle safety, the head of its advanced research division said. Gill Pratt, CEO of recently set up Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Japanese automaker's research and development company that focuses on AI, said it aims to improve car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations. Toyota has said the institute will spend 1 billion over the next five years, as competition to develop self-driving cars intensifies. "Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I'm very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years," Pratt told reporters late last week in comments embargoed for Monday. The concept of allowing vehicles to think, act and take some control from drivers to perform evasive maneuvers forms a key platform of Toyota's efforts to produce a car which can drive automatically on highways by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Somewhere in the not so distance future, computers could help doctors diagnose diseases much more quickly than they can today. In fact, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have been working on a way to train artificial intelligence (AI) to read and interpret pathology images that doctors use to look for signs of cancer. Andrew Beck from BIDMC explains that the "method is based on deep learning." It is the method commonly used to train AI to recognize images, speech patterns, and objects. During a demonstration at the annual International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging, they were able to show how effective their training was.

I feel more cheerful already. I'm often to be heard asking the man at Npower or the woman at an airline check-in whether they are robots, given their inability to say'Good morning!' – which, it turns out, does this real robot a disservice.

To obtain his PhD in bio-inspired robotics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Dr. Jose Berengueres studied the movement of a gecko in order to build a robot. That was the beginning of his exploration into how the real world and robotics could intersect. Since gaining his PhD in 2007, he's worked on robotic projects worldwide, served as a consultant for multinational companies including Apple, and wrote an Amazon bestseller on design thinking. As the current assistant professor in robotics, UX and design thinking at UAE University, Berengueres is responsible for the robotics and media lab. His team also advises local companies on the application of artificial intelligence (AI).

The researcher hired by Toyota Motor Corp. to spearhead its robotics and artificial intelligence efforts says the automaker's production principles can be applied to build affordable helper robots for rapidly aging societies. Robot makers are struggling with the same scale challenges that the auto industry overcame with the "miracle" that occurred when Henry Ford developed the assembly line, according to Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute. Toyota's vaunted production system later showed how to make cars both more cheaply and reliably, despite mistake-prone humans' role in manufacturing, he said. "My thought is, if the Toyota production system can be applied to cars, maybe it can also be applied to robots, because they're quite similar," Pratt told reporters Friday in Tokyo. He's particularly sanguine about the prospects for devices that would help the elderly age where they live.

Sitting on the Fintech panel at today's ASIFMA capital markets conference in Hong Kong, I had a small epiphany. By "we" I mean anyone involved in Finance or Fintech. If you work in a field with real A.I. applications such as image processing, robotics, industrial automation or such, keep pretending like you know what you're talking about. Why are we even talking about A.I. in the first place? To the lay man, which let's face it most investors are, A.I. sounds magical.

In this Friday, June 17, 2016 photo, Gill Pratt, chief executive of Toyota Research Institute, speaks to reporters at Toyota Motor Corp.'s Tokyo office. The U.S. robotics expert tapped to head Toyota's Silicon Valley research company says the 1 billion investment by the giant Japanese automaker will start showing results within five years.

The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on June 19 that Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology professor Choi Jae-shik recently developed an artificial intelligence system and is going to unveil it at an academic seminar this month. According to the professor, the system is capable of predicting the future prices of houses, future stock prices, foreign exchange rate movements and the like after reading newspaper articles, business reports and so on and then automatically drawing up reports in English. "The system will become capable of drawing up the same reports in Korean at some point in time next year and writing news articles in the near future," the professor remarked. Earlier, an AI system capable of stock price prediction has been developed by the MIT and the University of Cambridge. This system, however, is limited in accuracy because it predicts future prices by analyzing correlations between the prices of stocks owned by someone and the others based on numerical data such as past prices.

ROOBO, a fast-growing hardware and AI startup headquartered in Beijing, today unveiled a prototype of its newest product, a "pet robot" called Domgy. For the unfamiliar, ROOBO is the company behind Pudding, a voice-controlled, educational robot for kids. Pudding is used to teach kids vocabulary, geography, jokes and more. The company also makes the Idealens virtual reality headset, Skyseries drone and Runbone earbuds. Since its founding in 2014, ROOBO has grown to 300 employees, with 7 worldwide offices, including one in Seattle.

"It's happening," TechCrunch announced on their website Sunday. "The TechCrunch team landed in Tel Aviv and we're in the starting blocks for the TechCrunch Meetup Pitch-Off in Tel Aviv on Wednesday June 22. And it's going to be an awesome event." Panels and meetings include discussions with an Israeli venture capitalist firm, a medical nanofiber technology company, a firm that deals with artificial intelligence, and another that is focused on the technology that gave the world self-driving cars, in addition to a host of others. Additionally, attendees will participate in an intimate fireside chat with Israel's ninth President, Shimon Peres.