Agriculture is the industry that accompanied the evolution of humanity from pre-historic times to modern days and fulfilled faithfully one of its most basic needs: food supply. Today this still remains its core mission, but it's integrated in a more complex than ever mechanism driven by multiple sociological, economic and environmental forces. This $5 trillion industry representing 10 percent of global consumer spending, 40 percent of employment and 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions continues to keep pace with world's evolution, changing tremendously over the past years. Digital and technological advancements are taking over the industry, enhancing food production while adding value to the entire farm-to-fork supply chain and helping it make use of natural resources more efficiently. Data generated by sensors or agricultural drones collected at farms, on the field or during transportation offer a wealth of information about soil, seeds, livestock, crops, costs, farm equipment or the use of water and fertilizer.

In December, footage emerged of the Japanese film director Hayao Miyazaki visiting the Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Tokyo. In the clip, which was broadcast as part of an NHK documentary, the director of Spirited Away is shown a video of a computerised humanoid creature that has taught itself to walk by using its head and buttocks to shimmy along the ground. After the presentation Miyazaki sits in thought, before issuing his verdict. "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever," he says. Miyazaki's delivery has none of the vein-throbbing fury of a Gordon Ramsay – only the life-haunting melancholy of the disappointed father.

The Sino-Israeli Robotics Institute (SIRI) was inaugurated in mid-December when a delegation of nine Israeli companies -- led by Ariel University Prof. Zvi Shiller, chair of the Israeli Robotics Association, and Technion Prof. Moshe Shoham, founder of Mazor Robotics and a world leader in medical robotics -- participated in the second Sino-Israeli Robotics Innovation Conference in Guangzhou, China. Intended as "home base" for Israeli robotics companies entering the Chinese market, SIRI is located at the Guangzhou International Robotics Center (ROBOHUB), a government-supported, 4,800-square-meter robotics incubator and demonstration center including a large exhibition and demo area, innovation lab, training center, and corporate offices. "This is an exciting time for the Israeli robotics industry," Shiller said. "We are committed to establishing a true partnership with SIRI and ROBOHUB, and we look forward to broadening this strategic cooperation, which will serve as a fast track for transforming ideas into products and for moving products into the Chinese market." The conference attracted some 100 robotics companies from Guangdong Province, more than 40 of which held B2B meetings with the Israeli companies.

Not a day goes by when we don't hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol. In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess. So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.

Donald Trump has expressed continued skepticism over whether Russia was responsible for computer hacks of Democratic Party officials. In remarks to reporters upon entering a New Year's Eve celebration at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump warned against being quick to pin the blame on Russia for the hacking of US emails. "I just want them to be sure, because it's a pretty serious charge," he said. "And if you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong." The Washington Post also reported on Friday that Moscow could be behind intrusion into a laptop owned by a Vermont electricity utility.

We consider the problem of learning from noisy data in practical settings where the size of data is too large to store on a single machine. More challenging, the data coming from the wild may contain malicious outliers. To address the scalability and robustness issues, we present an online robust learning (ORL) approach. ORL is simple to implement and has provable robustness guarantee -- in stark contrast to existing online learning approaches that are generally fragile to outliers. We specialize the ORL approach for two concrete cases: online robust principal component analysis and online linear regression. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness advantages of ORL through comprehensive simulations and predicting image tags on a large-scale data set. We also discuss extension of the ORL to distributed learning and provide experimental evaluations.

If you'll remember, nuTonomy is operating a self-driving taxi service in Singapore. The test vehicle is a Renault Zoe -- one of the models it uses for autonomous taxis -- but that's where the similarities end. The Herald says there aren't any plans to offer a similar service in the city just yet. As the publication notes, Massachusetts has become somewhat of a hotbed for autonomous-vehicle research. Currently, Toyota, Audi and local startup Optimus Ride are in various stages of testing their wares.

We'll come right out and say it: 2016 wasn't the greatest year by any standards. In particular, divisive politics and celebrity death seemed to cast a long shadow over the last 12 months. There was the occasional ray of light poking through the clouds though. Especially in technology, which is what brings us all together here at Engadget. Over the last year, we've tried to bring you as many of those uplifting stories (even if they are bittersweet) as possible, to provide a little respite from 2016's emotional hailstorm.

How important is artificial intelligence (AI) to Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU)? Gone is the era of PC, and soon will we say goodbye to the era of mobile internet ... We believe that coming is the era of artificial intelligence. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, has some experience in this area. During his previous tenure at Google parent Alphabet, he led the Google Brain AI project. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he taught AI.

Facebook has hidden a special new year easter egg in its website. The site is letting people celebrate New Year's Eve by watching fairly dismal fireworks light up their news feed. On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, any time anyone writes the words "Happy New Year", they'll turn blue. Whenever anyone clicks on those words, a little firework animation will play. 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.