FRANKFURT--China's Midea Group made its formal offer to take over Germany's Kuka AG in face of criticism by some of the robot maker's investors and German politicians that management hasn't done enough to find another suitor. Midea, primarily a maker of home appliances, announced its offer of 115 ( 130) a share for the shares it doesn't already yet own in Kuka on Thursday. The price represents a significant premium to the Germany...

Mind is looking for a high-level profile for the development of a software infrastructure for the intelligent management of a smart home environment. The software will have to interface with an existing framework able to provide both generic sensor data (temperature, CO, CO2, energy consumption, etc ...) and high-level information extracted from a vision system. The candidate will be asked to create a reasoning engine that, based on their findings, both deterministic and probabilistic (fuzzy), will implement in real time the best strategy in the management of the home, in comfort optics, safety and energy savings .

Kickstarter's Mine Kafon Drone campaign wants to use drones to wipe out landmines. A Netherlands-based Kicktstarter campaign wants to use drones to get rid of landmines in the next decade. The Mine Kafon Drone is an aerial vehicle that can map landmine-rich environments, do effective sweeping searches with metal detectors, and plant detonators before escaping to a safe distance--all without a single living foot touching the ground. It's a drone that could potentially save thousands of lives, with the body and chassis of something reminiscent of an Imperial Probe Droid. Still, the world would be a better place with a few hundred of these running around.

The announcement isn't too much of a surprise -- autonomous cars have been facing new scrutiny following a fatal Tesla Model S crash last month. China isn't the first nation to react, either: Germany is said to be drafting legislation that would place "black boxes" in self-driving vehicles. China hasn't said when the new regulations would be official, but noted that early drafts have already been written. Hopefully, the new rules will be finalized soon and enable China's auto-makers to resume testing.

Samsonovich made the comments while attending the 2016 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) in New York City, which takes place from July 16-19. The conference was sponsored by MEPhl and attracted more than 200 participants. "We are on the verge of a major breakthrough that was discussed since the fifties of the previous century," Samsonovich said on Tuesday. The breakthrough, according to Samsonovich, is the creation of free thinking machines capable of feeling and understanding human emotions, understanding narratives and thinking in those narratives, as well as being capable to actively learn on their own. "Those are the three key capabilities in my view that will determine the breakthrough," Samsonovich said, adding that progress is expected to be made in "several years."

Ambarish is the founder and CEO of Blippar, an augmented reality and image recognition platform. Leading venture capitalists, scientists and CEOs all have the same prediction for artificial intelligence: machines will take jobs away from both blue- and white-collar workers, "eat the world" and, ultimately, overthrow humanity. These histrionics have driven a widely accepted negative narrative about this technology's potential impact on the future of humanity. Bringing artificial intelligence into the mainstream world should be met with hope and empathy, not fear. The concerns of these experts -- wealthy men with unparalleled access to utilities, healthcare, public safety, education and job opportunities -- are the concerns of privilege.

The problem of machine emotional intelligence is very broad and multifaceted; one of its challenges being the very fact that is hard to define it in an unambiguous way. There is no unique definition of emotion, and there is neither a specific method nor a particular required dataset that is guaranteed to capture it. One of the most popular emotion definitions is the one of the six basic emotions by Paul Ekman [1]. The original six emotions he proposed are: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Another very popular approach is the 2-dimensional emotion map, where each emotional state is projected on the orthogonal axes of valence and arousal [2]. A third dimension can be added to this space with the axis of dominance, see [3] and its related references.

We show how to train a quantum network of pairwise interacting qubits such that its evolution implements a target quantum algorithm into a given network subset. Our strategy is inspired by supervised learning and is designed to help the physical construction of a quantum computer which operates with minimal external classical control.

The development of digital health technology causes many concerns regarding bioethics. Here are 10 examples why people should not be afraid of, but rather embrace the advancements of such technologies. The fear from the unknown is as old as mankind itself, thus the fear from technological development has the same age as advancement itself. When the telephone was introduced to Sweden in the late 1800s, people were afraid that the contents of the lines would spill out in some way if there was a break and many elderly persons refused to touch a telephone for fear of electrical shock. The fear is even scarier when it comes to one's health. Shortly after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen introduced his discovery about the X-Ray, people got scared that it might read their thoughts, and they were afraid that such omnipotent gaze will see through their body and soul. Merchants even offered X-Ray proof underwear.

For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.