Japan's oldest "love doll" manufacturer wants to strip the sex toys of their seedy image and encourage people to see them as works of art instead. "Even now there is still a stigma," said Junpei Oguchi, a representative for Tokyo-based sex doll maker Orient Industry, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a three-week exhibition showing the evolution of its dolls that drew over 10,000 visitors. "But at our exhibition there were lots of men and women visitors -- more women than men, in fact," he said. "There were young and old, men and women, a really wide range of people. I think people came because they had heard the reputation of how beautiful our dolls are. We want to get rid of the stigma."

But the authors warned that the march of sex robots raised serious moral and ethical questions which needed to be addressed. They warned that users could become socially isolated or even addicted to the machines which could never replace real human contact. "It's very sad because it's going to be a one way relationship," said Prof Sharkey. You are loving an artefact that can't love you back, and the best they can do is fake it." The report also warned of a'darker' side to the industry in which companies were programming'shy' or'reluctant' personalities into their dolls so that users could feel they were forcing the robots to have sex.

Talos was a giant bronze warrior created to guard the island of Crete from pirates and invaders. He circled the island three times daily, and his menacing appearance encouraged would-be pirates to seek treasure elsewhere. A scarecrow, made only to project the image of a warrior. The faithful however, believed that the craftsmen had imbued creations such as Talos with very real minds, capable of emotion, thought and wisdom. This was of course, false. Talos was simply the latest manifestation of a dream that has consumed the minds of intellectuals for almost all of human history: the desire to create life-like, intelligent beings such as ourselves.

Can a self-driving vehicle be moral, act like humans do, or act like humans expect humans to? Contrary to previous thinking, a ground-breaking new study has found for the first time that human morality can be modelled meaning that machine based moral decisions are, in principle, possible. The research, Virtual Reality experiments investigating human behavior and moral assessments, from The Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück, and published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, used immersive virtual reality to allow the authors to study human behavior in simulated road traffic scenarios. The participants were asked to drive a car in a typical suburban neighborhood on a foggy day when they experienced unexpected unavoidable dilemma situations with inanimate objects, animals, and humans and had to decide which was to be spared. The results were conceptualized by statistical models leading to rules, with an associated degree of explanatory power to explain the observed behavior. The research showed that moral decisions in the con?ned scope of unavoidable traffic collisions can be explained well, and modeled, by a single value-of-life for every human, animal, or inanimate object.

Did you know that AI can predict your personality traits better than your spouse of partner, your friend, even your family? That's one of the key insights I learned last week when I attended Pega's Pegaworld at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV. More than 4,000 Business and IT leaders came together to understand the role of technology and AI in the future of sales, marketing, customer service. This event included some really smart people, if a bit more technical than the audience I typically see at Marketing conferences. How to use data and personalization to drive customer experience and ROI.

All evolution comes with challenges and the dark world of cybercrime continues to thrive and is this year's second most reported economic crime. The recent NHS computer hack using Wanna Decryptor ransomware shut down IT systems with 75,000 attacks in 99 countries. The unprecedented ransomware breach froze computers across the health service with hackers threatening to delete files unless a ransom was paid. The passwords were scrambled with the MD5 algorithm, which nowadays is easy to crack. According to Zdnet.com, the unidentified hacker explained his motives for the attack: "I heard the database was getting traded around so I decided to dump it myself – like I always do". He said it was "mainly just for the challenge and training my pentest skills." He exploited a union-based SQL injection vulnerability in the site's software, a flaw he said was "easy to find."

Trade unions have vowed to oppose any move by employers to use technological advances in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence as tools to exploit workers. Unions also pledged to fight any Government plan to restrict the right to strike in some essential services, as proposed recently by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. The biennial conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in Belfast also passed a motion calling for the Government to introduce legislation to give union officials the right to enter workplaces to represent, organise and recruit workers. In an address to the conference, Ictu general secretary Patricia King also urged the Government to scrap the existing reduced VAT rate for the hotel and food services sector, which she described as "completely untenable". She said three-quarters of all workers in the accommodation and food services sector earned less than €400 per week.

For the AI competition, BBVA had more than a hundred entries from 26 different countries. Themes ranged from providing more personalised products and services, better risk management, offering customers greater insights into their transaction, personalised money management systems and real-time AI chatbots. Commenting on the winner, BBVA's Head of Open Talent Marisol Menéndez said: "The judges agreed unanimously on our winner, although it was a hard decision as all ten of our finalists have build exceptional products. "AI really has the potential to be a game-changer for the financial service sector, offering both customers, clients and business huge opportunities to deliver better, faster, more individual, more accurate and more insightful products and services – and that why at BBVA we wanted to run a competition based on this specific issue. "Change was selected because their solutions is really at the heart of what we are trying to do with technology as a bank – to use it to reduce people's stress and support them with their financial decisions making. "Being able to hold the final here at Money 2020 has been fantastic – not only has it given our finalists the chance to meet and share their ideas with potential customers and partners, but we've also help all of them get some valuable exposure for their business.

In Constraint Programming (CP) a portfolio solver combines a variety of different constraint solvers for solving a given problem. This fairly recent approach enables to significantly boost the performance of single solvers, especially when multicore architectures are exploited. In this work we give a brief overview of the portfolio solver sunny-cp, and we discuss its performance in the MiniZinc Challenge---the annual international competition for CP solvers---where it won two gold medals in 2015 and 2016. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

Machine learning algorithms are often showcased in customer churn study. Applications in fields such as telecommunication or product marketing (gaming, insurance etc..)(see [1],[2] for a recent review) are multiple. The implementation of these methods in Customer Relationship Management is becoming the new norm, as improving customer retention yields superior business results. We argue that this type of techniques can easily be applied to employee turnover. Note that the employee turnover can actually be subdivided in 3 buckets: involuntary turnover (induced by the company), voluntary turnover (employee resignation) and retirements. Retirement and an involuntary turnover are out of the scope of this paper.