One of the surprise products of last week's Computex IT show in Taiwan was the Zenbo robot from Asus. The cute, two-wheeled, home-help robot will read stories to kids, summon help for seniors in an emergency and blast out songs while twirling around the floor to the music. But Asus is better known as a manufacturer of smartphones and laptop PCs. Home-help robots have been tried and failed before, so why did the company decide the time is right? IDG News Service spoke with Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus and the power behind much of the company's product planning and design, to find out more about Zenbo. Shih said he saw the robot as an evolution in computing -- something that followed on from the PC era, mobile computing, and the recent so-called Internet of Things.

I visited my local health-insurance office a few months ago. After entering the building, I was welcomed into a long and dark corridor, full of nervous people carrying bloated folders. The atmosphere was gloomy, and it was obvious that no one wanted to be there. After about 30 minutes I realized why: During that time, the line had barely moved, and it took me the better part of the day to reach a clerk. As a result, I was late for two other errands I had planned.

Thanks to many impressive and rapid advances over the past few years, Artificial Intelligence has come into the spotlight – again. This could just be one of many false starts that this field has seen over the many years of its existence, or yet another Silicon Valley fad designed that startups are using to quickly raise money and gain market share, but there are many good reasons to believe much of the hype. Artificial Intelligence is probably here for good, and much of the technology and business in the upcoming years will be focused on the best ways of leveraging it. Judging by its title, this short ebook seems to provide a good explanation of what Artificial Intelligence is. Sadly, this is not the case.

John Searle, the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, talked at Google about the philosophy of the mind and the potential for consciousness in artificial intelligence. Searle is widely known for his contributions to various fields of philosophy. First, Searle defined some terms he will be using for the rest of his talk and some types of phenomena. He stated that consciousness is an ontologically subjective domain, but that doesn't prevent epistemologically objective accounts of it. He also claimed that computers have no awareness of states of systems.

Google acquired Kifi, an app for collecting links from across the Internet, which teams could then collaborate on. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. The Kifi service and data will not become part of Google. The service will remain fully functional for existing users for a few more weeks, before its shut down. The company is no longer accepting new registrations. The team at Kifi will be joining the Spaces team at Google.

Editor's note: Dallas police actively guided an explosive-laden robot to kill gunman Micah Johnson when negotiations broke down after he opened fire on police and others July 7. This interview on Think -- which was recorded before the ambush took place -- focuses on the questions raised by computers and robots programmed to kill without human supervision. You may have seen it earlier this year when a company called Boston Dynamics posted a video of a humanoid robot that can walk on two legs, even over uneven terrain. Seeing a machine balance on bumpy, snowy ground in a New England forest is mesmerizing. But watching the robot get knocked to the ground by a human tester, then get up all by itself and keep going is somehow profoundly unsettling.

OK, let's drop autonomous vehicles for a second. This post is about creating a machine that writes its own code. More specifically, we are going to train a character level Long Short Term Memory neural network to write code itself by feeding it Python source code. The training will run on a GPU instance on EC2, using Theano and Lasagne. If some of the words here sound obscure to you, I will do my best to explain what is happening. This experiment is greatly inspired by this awesome blog post that I highly recommend reading.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Monday that chatbots will "fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced by everybody." Nadella explained that for now, bots will augment apps, but in time, human language will be taught to all computers and become "the new interface." "So pretty much everyone today who is building applications whether they be mobile apps or desktop apps or websites will build bots as the new interface, where you have a human dialogue interface versus menus of the past," he said. Nadella spoke onstage at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, an annual developer gathering in Toronto. He painted a similarly ambitious picture in April when Microsoft Bot Framework was launched at Build, Microsoft's annual developer conference.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called on Saturday for greater global cooperation against terrorism, state media said, as the Asian giant seeks greater international support for its anti-terror fight. Speaking at an Asia-Europe summit, Li said various security challenges - conventional and unconventional - remain prominent even though those regions had remained generally stable and peaceful. "Acts of terrorism are common challenges faced by every nation. Countries should work more closely to fight terrorism, and build societies that are truly open and tolerant so to root out the soil where it grows," said Li. China has sought Western support for its own "war on terror" since the attacks in Paris last November.

A setup in California is using AI-inspired mapping software for self-driving cars in its repertoire. It recently got a donation of 6.6 million from a few investing companies. One of these was Ford Motors. Ford is busy road-testing its high technology on the thoroughfares of California and Michigan. The technicians of the company are looking closely at the sensors and other odds and ends in the self-driving vehicles.The AI mapping startup is titled Civil Maps and it is now all ready to engage in some valuable research mainly funded by Ford Motors.