HONG KONG (Reuters Breakingviews) - Forget autonomous driving: The latest digital buzzword is medtech. Investors at last week's annual RISE technology conference in Hong Kong talked up a coming healthcare artificial-intelligence revolution, and the hype is as palpable in Silicon Valley. Chinese firms are well positioned to take the lead. U.S. venture capital funds poured over $12 billion into local biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical-device upstarts in the first half of this year, according to data from Pitchbook, on track to surpass last year's record of $17 billion. Investments in the country's life sciences sector doubled to $12 billion last year, according to ChinaBio Consulting, and accelerated to more than $5 billion in the first quarter of 2018, led by prolific backers like Qiming Ventures and Sequoia Capital China.

HONG KONG, July 18 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Forget autonomous driving: The latest digital buzzword is medtech. Investors at last week's annual RISE technology conference in Hong Kong talked up a coming healthcare artificial-intelligence revolution, and the hype is as palpable in Silicon Valley. Chinese firms are well positioned to take the lead. Biometric and genome data - everything from blood pressure readings to tissue samples and DNA - are transforming the industry, from the way pharmaceutical firms discover drugs to how doctors diagnose patients. The hunt is on for better, and cheaper, treatments.

Earlier this week we learned that worldwide smart speaker sales are expected to increase sixfold within the next couple of years. This mirrors multiple studies that say the majority of U.S. households will have a smart speaker by 2022, powered by current leading intelligent assistants Google Assistant and Alexa. At the same time, tech giants making intelligent assistants seem to want to have it both ways, selling products to both consumers and governments. For example, Microsoft, maker of Cortana, may be supplying facial recognition software to ICE, the government agency tasked with capturing and detaining immigrants who are in the United States illegally. As Amazon rolls out deep learning camera Lens and fashion assistant Echo Look, the company has drawn pleas from employees, the ACLU, and a number of other organizations to stop sharing its facial recognition software with law enforcement agencies.

Arriving at Creator, a new restaurant located on the ground floor of an office building on downtown San Francisco's Folsom Street, feels like walking into a catalog. Sleek, wooden communal tables with high white stools line one end of the room, with a bookshelf full of hand-picked culinary books against the wall and modern light fixtures overhead. It's what you would have imagined a restaurant eventually looking like if you watched a lot of The Jetsons. Those machines, with large transparent glass casings and ingredients in cylindrical tubes, are Creator's burger-making robots. Each 14-foot device contains around 350 sensors and 20 microcomputers to produce the best, freshest, locally sourced cheeseburger that $6 can get you in America's most expensive city.

Executives from the Taiwanese contract electronics company Foxconn made high-profile visits to the United States during the last few weeks. They announced a new company in Silicon Valley that will focus on artificial intelligence (AI). And Foxconn's founder joined President Donald Trump for a ground-breaking ceremony at a new factory in Wisconsin. Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world's largest contract maker of electronics. It operates factories across China and is most well-known for making phones and other devices for Apple.

What is the relationship between machine learning and optimization? On the other hand, what happens when machine learning is used to solve optimization problems? Consider this: a UPS driver with 25 packages has 15 trillion possible routes to choose from. And if each driver drives just one more mile each day than necessary, the company would be losing $30 million a year. While UPS would have all the data for their trucks and routes, there is no way they can run 15 trillion computations per each driver with 25 packages.

When analyzing empirical data, we often find that global linear models overestimate the number of parameters required. In such cases, we may ask whether the data lies on or near a manifold or a set of manifolds (a so-called multi-manifold) of lower dimension than the ambient space. This question can be phrased as a (multi-) manifold hypothesis. The identification of such intrinsic multiscale features is a cornerstone of data analysis and representation and has given rise to a large body of work on manifold learning. In this work, we review key results on multi-scale data analysis and intrinsic dimension followed by the introduction of a heuristic, multiscale framework for testing the multi-manifold hypothesis. Our method implements a hypothesis test on a set of spline-interpolated manifolds constructed from variance-based intrinsic dimensions. The workflow is suitable for empirical data analysis as we demonstrate on two use cases.

Many if not most large enterprises run hybrid computing environments and are looking for management software flexible enough to run in and manage assets across private and public clouds. Against this backdrop, BMC has rebuilt its venerable IT service-management product suite to run on a range of cloud platforms while incorporating machine learning to enhance predictive-analysis capabilities. The BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that runs on Amazon Web Services as well as BMC's own cloud. It will be available for Azure in the fourth quarter and for Google Public Cloud at the end of the year or beginning of next year, BMC said. The software is designed to manage applications, IT services and the infrastructure underneath those services.

The nonprofit MathandCoding, a San Francisco Bay Area-based organization that teaches coding to kids, June 11 announced it has expanded its offering to include machine learning and engineering workshops to its lessons. The organization as a whole has grown since being founded by three high school students to hold lessons at more than 25 libraries and community centers throughout the area. The success has led to co-founder Anika Cheerla saying the organization has ventured into physics, engineering and machine learning. MathandCoding started machine learning and AI for Girls initiative about a year ago to encourage middle and high school girls to learn machine learning and artificial intelligence, which Cheerla said are the future technologies sweeping all facets of life. "It was received with a lot of enthusiasm," the Indian American said in an email to India-West of the workshop, where students learn to use open databases to create models and do predications.

Kroger and Nuro executives said delivering groceries without drivers--while still years away--would make such services cheaper and easier to introduce in less densely populated parts of the country. Nearly a third of 4,504 adults surveyed by Forrester Analytics earlier this year said they didn't do more grocery shopping online because of costs including delivery charges. "We are not trying to be a dollar cheaper than regular delivery. We are trying to be an order of magnitude cheaper," said Dave Ferguson, who helped lead Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL 0.21% self-driving vehicle arm before co-founding Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuro in 2016. The Nuro partnership is the third deal Kroger has made in the past two months that aims to aid in how it sells to customers as competitors Amazon.com