You could work for Amazon in your PJs. Amazon has more than 1,200 Amazon staff in the greater Boston area. BOSTON – Amazon isn't just a Seattle company anymore, and a visit to its offices in this university city explains why. Here, in an old Necco wafer candy factory in the formerly industrial neighborhood of Fort Point, Rohit Prasad oversees 1,200 workers developing Alexa, the company's digital assistant. Walls made out of shipping containers, a playful nod to Amazon's main business, and exposed brick echo the urban tech vibe of its Seattle headquarters.

A Californian metropolis will soon become pilot city for fully-automated and driverless driving -- thanks to Bosch and Daimler who are speeding up the SAE Level 4/5 tech in the city. The chosen city will see a fleet of autonomous shuttle service on selected routes in the San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley, which will be operated by Daimler Mobility Services. The pilot project will demonstrate how mobility services, such as car sharing (car2go), ride-hailing (mytaxi) and multi-modal platforms (moovel), can shape the future of mobility. Both have selected Nvidia as the AI platform supplier as part of their control unit network. This network will also be used in the fleet vehicles wherein both companies will put on the Californian roads in Q2/2019.

LONDON – Tokyo has topped a list of the world's most innovative cities, leapfrogging London and New York after embracing the "globe-shaking trends of robotics and 3-D manufacturing." The Japanese capital has risen rapidly since entering the top 10 of the Innovation Cities Index three years ago behind Paris, and was one of three Asian cities to feature this year. "What really surprised us this year was the resurgence of Tokyo, moving up to eclipse rival cities like Boston," said Christopher Hire, director of commercial data provider 2thinknow, which published the annual ranking on Friday. "They showed clear direction by embracing smart technology change to lead innovation and leadership in what we have identified as the twin long-term globe-shaking trends of robotics and 3-D manufacturing." Singapore, Sydney and Seoul also ranked highly in the index, which judges cities on 162 indicators including web censorship, wealth distribution and the potential for green businesses.

China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts. A report by the South China Post on Sunday revealed Beijing's plans to build the automated subs by the early 2020s in response to unmanned weapons being developed in the US. The subs will be able to patrol areas in the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean that are home to disputed military bases. While the expected cost of the submarines has not been disclosed, they're likely to be cheaper than conventional submarines as they do not require life-supporting apparatus for humans. However, without a human crew, they'll also need to be resilient enough to be at sea without onboard repairs possible.

As hot as stories about artificial intelligence (AI), augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been in recent months, we often can't help but think of these technologies as a long way off from mainstream adoption. Movies like Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity Wars only perpetuate this perception by mixing real technologies with fantasy, making the tech we wield in the real world seem primitive in the process. AI, AR/VR, blockchain, and IoT are already playing an important role in our everyday lives, with countless examples hiding in plain sight. In this first article, we're going to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI). In pop culture, AI is often represented as a highly-evolved and self-aware artificial "brain" in a robot capable of overthrowing the human race, as in Ex Machina or The Terminator movies.

Amazon may have pioneered the smart-speaker movement, but Google isn't far behind. A year after Amazon debuted the first Echo, Google followed in its footsteps with the Home. The company copied Amazon yet again with the Home Mini, which is its version of the Echo Dot. Last year, Amazon revealed the Echo Show -- an smart speaker with a display. And, sure enough, earlier this year, Google announced that it, too, was getting into the smart-display category.

As financial institutions race to implement artificial intelligence solutions, there is the potential to miss less robust applications that the consumer expects today, while also slowing the development of more sophisticated AI solutions for the future. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!When The Jetsons premiered in 1962, the notion of a robot maid was considered an imaginative dream about a futuristic life as opposed to something that might actually happen within the viewer's lifetime. That same year, the U.S. was heavily focused on the space race to the moon, still more than six years away from the historic Apollo 11 landing. More than 50 years ago, the world began to dream in terms previously unimaginable. As a result, some of the Jetson generation traded their Saturday morning bowls of sugary cereal for mechanical and software engineering degrees -- and in just 56 years, have created a world their parents might have argued was impossible. While the common U.S. household may not have a Rosie yet, consumer robots and artificial intelligence (AI) have never been more commonplace than they are today.

Although much of the world focused on the the first Earth-Moon conversation at 4:18 p.m. EDT July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle with just 30 seconds of fuel remaining, the entire mission was actually recorded. After painstakingly digitising the original tapes, the audio has now been put online. 'The Eagle has landed': NASA releases Apollo 11 mission audio Melania Trump visits a children's hospital in Nashville Matt Lauer says'I think they see me as an easy mark' Hundreds of audio conversations between the flight controllers and other teams supporting the mission were going on every minute of the mission over an intricate intercom system. 'The untold story of that momentous 8-day, 3-hour, mission by Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins was the round-the-clock support provided by Mission Control and many communications and support locations around the globe,' said NASA. The trio of space explorers lifted off 9:32 a.m.

Researchers hoping to deploy a 600-meter plastic-sweeper to the Pacific Ocean to clean up the notorious floating Great Garbage Patch have revealed the final design for their contraption. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floating tube that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. It harnesses the power of wind and surface waves to autonomously sweep through the area, gathering up plastic waste as it goes. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. In the water, the'pac man' will catch plastic in a skirt, which will be emptired by a boat every few weeks Ocean Cleanup Project was forced to radically redesign the system after tests of their original system found it moved too much due to waves.

I was NASA's chief orbital technician, as the agency was changing its name to NAIA, the National Artificial Intelligence Administration, responsible for de-orbiting the International Space Station. The ISS name itself was a misnomer, coined when the space program was sliding from dream toward delusion. By definition, space stations are orbital facilities where astronauts transfer from Earth-launch vehicles to interplanetary ships intended for, say, the first human expedition to Mars, which indeed never took place. Having accomplished little worthwhile scientific research since its 1998 launch, the ISS was primarily a propaganda tool, pretending the technologically advanced nations of the world had become partners and that humanity had a glorious future in outer space. After decades of indecision, the alternatives now were to find a new purpose for the ISS and boost it to a higher orbit or crash it back to Earth at a safe location in the vast Pacific Ocean.