A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. February is only just gone, and already 2017 is shaping up to be a year full of big ideas and ambitions. The Future of Life Institute, for example, just published the Asilomar AI principles: 23 guidelines to ensure AI developments are beneficial to humanity. They are calling for shared responsibility and caution against an AI arms race.

Facebook is trialling a "dislike" button for the first time, in response to high demand from users. The feature has been rolled out to a small number of people on the Messenger app, who now have the option to respond to individual messages. Facebook wants users to attach emojis to messages in a similar way to the "reactions" feature on the news feed. The social media giant had previously ignored calls for the "dislike" button due to fears the feature might be used as a form of bullying and would be unpopular with big brands. Facebook is however adamant this is more of a "no" button and it is being tested to see if the reaction is helpful for when group conversations need to vote, for instance.

Fujitsu today announced that it has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system," which in terms of operations will be one of the largest-scale supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. The RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project will use the new system, scheduled to go online in April 2017, as a platform to accelerate R&D into AI technology. The system's total theoretical processing performance will reach 4 petaflops(1). The system will be comprised of two server architectures, with 24 of NVIDIA DGX-1 servers and 32 FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 servers, along with a high-reliability, high-performance storage system. Fujitsu is leveraging the extensive know-how that it and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have in high-performance computing development and AI research to build and operate one of Japan's most advanced AI research systems.

IBM has taken its first step towards selling computers that are millions of times faster than the one you're reading this on. The company has set up a new division, IBM Q, that is intended to make quantum computers and sell them commercially. Until now, quantum computers have mostly been a much hyped but long away dream. But IBM believes they are close enough to reality to start work on getting software ready for when they become commercially available. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

In the 1970s, Moffett Federal Airfield, a government-operated military base that served as a test-bed for new technologies, had a high-security underground bunker. To enter, employees would have to walk through concrete hallways, past eerie metal doors and some guards. Inside, it was cold; the AC was always cranking. "It was straight out of 007 -- Dr. Evil kind of stuff," recalls Francis Jeffrey, who worked there at the time as an engineer. This subterranean lab was home to one of the world's first supercomputers, the ILLIAC.

Last week, Fortune magazine released "Here are 50 Companies Leading the AI Revolution," and the prestigious list includes three hot Israeli companies in the artificial intelligence sector: Logz.io, Fortune's infographic includes only six countries and features an equal number of notable AI companies from Israel (population 8.5 million) as China (population 1.38 billion) and the United Kingdom, and more than France and Taiwan. Only the United States has more companies on the graph. Fortune relied on research firm CB Insights' AI 100 list of the most promising artificial intelligence startups globally, based on factors like financing history, investor quality, business category and momentum. The CB Insights list also includes Israeli companies Prospera Technologies (ag-tech at work in Spain, Mexico and New York) and Chorus.ai

In this study we consider learning a reduced dimensionality representation from datasets obtained under multiple views. Such multiple views of datasets can be obtained, for example, when the same underlying process is observed using several different modalities, or measured with different instrumentation. Our goal is to effectively exploit the availability of such multiple views for various purposes, such as non-linear embedding, manifold learning, spectral clustering, anomaly detection and non-linear system identification. Our proposed method exploits the intrinsic relation within each view, as well as the mutual relations between views. We do this by defining a cross-view model, in which an implied Random Walk process between objects is restrained to hop between the different views. Our method is robust to scaling of each dataset, and is insensitive to small structural changes in the data. Within this framework, we define new diffusion distances and analyze the spectra of the implied kernels. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach on both artificial and real data sets.

NEW DELHI: HDFC Bank today announced the launch of an electronic virtual assistant (EVA), an artificial intelligence-driven chatbot, for customer services. Eva is India's first AI-based banking chatbot and can answer millions of customer queries across multiple channels instantly, HDFC Bank said in a statement. Eva can assimilate knowledge from thousands of sources and provide answers in simple language in less than 0.4 seconds, it said. "Within the first few days of its launch, Eva has answered over 1 lakh queries from thousands of customers from 17 countries across the globe," it claimed. With the launch of Eva, it said, bank's customers can get information on its products and services instantaneously and it also becomes smarter as it learns through its customer interactions.

Fortune magazine last week released a list of "50 Companies Leading the AI Revolution," and the prestigious list includes three hot Israeli companies in the artificial intelligence sector: Logz.io, Fortune's infographic includes only six countries and features an equal number of notable AI companies from Israel (population 8.5 million) as China (population 1.38 billion) and the United Kingdom, and more than France and Taiwan. Only the United States has more companies on the graph. Fortune relied on research firm CB Insights' AI 100 list of the most promising artificial intelligence startups globally, based on factors like financing history, investor quality, business category, and momentum. The CB Insights list also includes Israeli companies Prospera Technologies (ag-tech at work in Spain, Mexico, and New York) and Chorus.ai

In the hallowed hallways of Morgan Stanley's office in Canary Wharf, men in crisp tailored suits pass each other, briskly chatting away on their smartphones, while attractive young women in black pencil skirts and long legs scamper through the halls with take-away salads from Chop'd, dressing on the side. Walking these very halls has been the aspiration of many, the full-time MBA candidate who was looking for a career change and "wanted to get into investment banking". Just what is investment banking, you might ask? Well, the money-making part of the operation is called "the front office". Let's just say that if you meet a 9 at All Bar One in Canary Wharf and she asks you if you're in a front office role, just say yes.