The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), at a press conference here last week, announced preliminary 2018 figures for the industrial sector of the robotics industry. Last year set another record -- but just barely. It was only up 1% over 2017. No information was given about service and field robotics. It's true that 2017 was a banner year, with a 30% year-over-year gain.

Next-generation wheelchairs could incorporate brain-controlled robotic arms and rentable add-on motors in order to help people with disabilities more easily carry out daily tasks or get around a city. Professor Nicolás García-Aracil from the Universidad Miguel Hernández (UMH) in Elche, Spain, has developed an automated wheelchair with an exoskeleton robotic arm to use at home, as part of a project called AIDE. It uses artificial intelligence to extract relevant information from the user, such as their behaviour, intentions and emotional state, and also analyses its environmental surroundings, he says. The system, which is based on an arm exoskeleton attached to a robotised wheelchair, is designed to help people living with various degrees and forms of disabilities carry out daily functions such as eating, drinking, and washing up, on their own and at home. While the user sits in the wheelchair, they wear the robotised arm to help them grasp objects and bring them close -- or as the whole system is connected to the home automation system they can ask the wheelchair to move in a specific direction or go into a particular room.

The headline above an essay in a magazine published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) caught my eye. "Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI", it said. Since plutonium – a by-product of uranium-based nuclear power generation – is one of the most toxic materials known to humankind, this seemed like an alarmist metaphor, so I settled down to read. The article, by a Microsoft researcher, Luke Stark, argues that facial-recognition technology – one of the current obsessions of the tech industry – is potentially so toxic for the health of human society that it should be treated like plutonium and restricted accordingly. You could spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley before you heard sentiments like these about a technology that enables computers to recognise faces in a photograph or from a camera.

There's no denying that Japan, amid a severe labor crunch and a shrinking population, will need to rely more on foreign workers in the coming years, and that's especially true for small and midsize companies. Because of language issues and cultural differences, smaller firms often struggle to integrate foreign workers. But once they overcome those hurdles, many find that the addition of foreign perspectives can lead to new opportunities. Sakae Casting Co., a small aluminum cast manufacturer in Hachioji in western Tokyo, learned this the hard way. But its experience may be an example of what other firms will have to go through in the coming years.

Using easily guessed passwords across multiple accounts is a major gap in the online security habits of British people, a government study has found. The survey by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) found that many internet users did not know the best ways to protect themselves from cybercrime, with 42 per cent expecting to lose money to online fraud. Only 15 per cent of the survey's 2,500 respondents said they knew "a great deal" about how to protect themselves from harmful activity online, while fewer than half of respondents said they do not always use a strong, separate password for their main email account. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Surrounded by advanced achievements in medicine, space exploration, and robotics, people can be forgiven for thinking our time boasts the best technology. So I was startled last year to hear Sarah Stroup, a professor of classics at the University of Washington, Seattle, give a speech called "Robots, Space Exploration, Death Rays, Brain Surgery, and Nanotechnology: STEMM in the Ancient World." Stroup has created a college course integrating classics and science to show how 2,000 year-old Greek and Roman STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine) underlie and illuminate the sciences today. The Greeks made self-acting machinery such as an automaton theater, a first step toward building a real robot, and they imagined a mythological one. Talos, a bronze being made by the god Hephaestus (later the Roman Vulcan) patrolled the island of Crete and threw rocks at threatening ships, anticipating today's development of intelligent battlefield weaponry that chooses its own targets.

Running a small business is extremely challenging and not getting any easier. Research published in October 2017 from the Enterprise Research Centre indicates that just 53.7pc of UK businesses founded in 2013 survived past the three-year mark. Small businesses in the UK, which account for 60pc of private sector employment and 52pc of turnover, according to the Federation of Small Businesses, face a range of challenges in 2019, with economic growth forecast to remain sluggish and continuing uncertainty about how Brexit will play out. In such circumstances, it is vital that small businesses keep their operations as efficient as possible, making the best use of resources and keeping up with the competition. Fortunately, several key innovations in financial technology have revolutionised how businesses operate in the past 15 years, with the benefits felt across the board, from multinationals worth billions of pounds to local businesses with just a handful of employees.

AI-powered loan and credit approval processes have been marred by unforeseen bias. Smart speakers have secretly turned on and recorded thousands of minutes of audio of their owners. Unfortunately, there's no industry-standard, best-practices handbook on AI ethics for companies to follow--at least not yet. Some large companies, including Microsoft and Google, are developing their own internal ethical frameworks. A number of think tanks, research organizations, and advocacy groups, meanwhile, have been developing a wide variety of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI. Below is a brief roundup of some of the more influential models to emerge--from the Asilomar Principles to best-practice recommendations from the AI Now Institute.

Total SA plans to start a digital factory in the coming weeks to tap artificial intelligence in a bid to save hundreds of millions of dollars on exploration and production projects, according to an executive. The use of artificial intelligence to screen geological data will help identify new prospects, and shorten the time to acquire licenses, drill and make discoveries, Arnaud Breuillac, head of E&P, said at a conference organized by IFP Energies Nouvelles in Paris on Friday. It will also help optimize the use of equipment and reduce maintenance costs, he said. The digital factory will employ between 200 and 300 engineers and build on successful North Sea pilot projects, Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said at the same event. It will also be a way to attract "young talent" to the industry.

"Sell the right product to the right customer" is a dream of every marketers and advertisers. As a leading digital marketing company in Asia, MoMAGIC is approaching this ultimate goal by launching two data-driven solutions: TrueReach and TrueInsight, which is capable of understanding and targeting audiences from both macroscopic and microscopic point of view. In this article, we will share the core ideas behind our solutions and some insights we learned when playing with large-scale real data. As the backbone of all MoMAGIC services, TrueInsight integrates large-scale, heterogeneous data sources (e.g., AD-request, web behaviors, etc.) and transforms those high-frequent, noisy dataflows into structured datasets. In order to complete those challenging tasks quickly and accurately, we first carefully designed the data processing pipelines of TrueInsight in a parallel and distributed manner to guarantee its performance scalability, which means TrueInsight can process large-scale data from multiple sources without scarifying its performance.