When I first spotted Shift Technology with their focus on fraud detection for insurance, I assumed I would find a venture in Israel (which is known for smarts in finding the bad guys in cyberspace, as we outlined when we went to Israel on our Fintech global tour). So I was surprised to find that Shift Technology is a Paris based venture. There is a lot more tech innovation in France than the image of economic sclerosis would lead you to assume. The next thing that jumps out at you is that they recently closed a 10m Series A round in a tough market from a top tier VC (Accel Partners). So they must be doing something right.

Teenagers may lose their virginity to sex robots in the future, a leading expert predicted yesterday. Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, warned that android sex dolls may have damaging consequences for society. He said that just as the rise of internet porn took the Government by surprise, a similarly seismic robot revolution is on the way – with far-reaching consequences. Professor Sharkey, speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, explained that he was'fairly liberal about sex'. But he explained: 'It's not a problem having sex with a machine.

We're getting A.I. to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things these days, whether its on the small-scale of text prediction or captioning photos, to driving cars for us and beating people at board games. But what if we turned a neural network into a science fiction writer? The answer is that you'd get a complete mess in return. That is the premise behind Sunspring, a film starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp and written by... well, an LSTM recurrent neural network. Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed the network a bevy of sci-fi scripts, from Ghostbusters 2 to Star Wars, and then gave it a selection of prompts to include in the screenplay it churned out.

La Poste has bought the Grenoble-based technology company ProbaYes, as part of its drive to step up its digital activity with Artificial Intellligence (AI). In a statement issued last week, La Poste said that the acquisition was an opportunity to "expand and include an Artificial Intelligence research centre to meet the needs created by internal transformation and optimisation but also the needs to personalise and develop new services for customers". ProbaYes will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of MediaPost Holding. The company statement added: "La Poste is continuing to ramp up its transformation through a range of digital services centered around its role as a universal operator for exchanges and notably in the field of the Internet of Things, and aims to use its trusted position to bring people together and make daily life simpler for individuals, professionals and businesses."

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been talking about the commercial use of drones for quite some time now. However, in a recent interview, CEO Jeff Bezos assured artificial intelligence (AI) is the next big thing. Nonetheless, Chinese firm Ehang might disagree with this idea; in fact, the company is betting on drone taxis as the next attention-grabbing innovation in a move that could remind readers of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s autonomous car initiative or Zee.Aero's flying car. Back in January, Ehang, a cameras and drones maker, presented its electric passenger drone, the Ehang 184. Now, the Chinese corporation has partnered with the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) and the Governor's Office of Economic Development (Goed) to test the vehicle and, ultimately, get regulatory approval.

Tracking customers in real-time, zero-click ordering and delivering pizzas via artificially intelligent robots are just some of the latest innovations underway at Domino's. The pizza retailer today launched the first in a proposed series of tech innovation events, under the brand'Abacus', showcasing the way digital and technology is being harnessed by the business. Ten innovations were detailed, some of which will be available from next week, while others will be rolled out over the coming 12-24 months.All stemmed from the theme'time is the enemy of food' and showed the power of harnessing data analytics not only for operational process improvements, but also for tailoring customer experiences and interaction. The first of these is On-Time Cooking, an extension of the GPS Driver Tracker capabilities Domino's has been providing for the last 10 years aimed at shortening the time between cooking a pizza and when customers pick up their order. Domino's A/NZ managing director, Don Meij, said that until now, stores haven't known exactly when a customer will arrive, running the risk of pizzas sitting on the rack for 10 or 20 minutes longer than they should.

Since hosting the first Intelligent Assistants Awards in the fall of 2014, the market for smart self-service solutions has rapidly expanded. Today's customers don't just accept interacting with virtual intelligent assistants (IAs); many prefer taking their questions to IAs rather than calling or chatting with a human agent. Companies reap the dual benefits of providing customers with popular self-service options while optimizing their overall customer support infrastructure and expense management. IA Awards Puts Focus on Intelligent Assistance Landscape Opus Research will host the third IA awards at the upcoming Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences (IASquared) in San Francisco on September 12-13, 2016. Awards Focus on Real-World IA Implementations and Proven Business Value From their inception, the IAAs focused on real-world implementations that fit into what Opus Research has defined as the "Virtual Agents and Customer Assistants" category of the Intelligent Assistants Landscape.

Larry Page, the billionaire co-founder of Google, is secretly backing a pair of startups that are working on flying cars, according to a report. Since 2010, Page has poured more than 100 million into Zee.Aero, a company that lately has been testing two flying-car prototypes at an airport hangar in Hollister, Calif., Bloomberg said Thursday, citing sources. Since last year, Page also has been funding another flying-car startup called Kitty Hawk -- and has cast it as a rival to Zee.Aero as he stages a top-secret race to develop a new class of vehicles that can soar above traffic jams and sidestep the hassles of the airport, Bloomberg said. "Page has drawn a line separating his two flying-car teams," the report said. "It's common for the Zee.Aero engineers to speculate over lunch about what their Kitty Hawk counterparts are up to."

So, what happens when you create artificial intelligence that can write a science fiction screenplay? Short film writer-director Oscar Sharp and producers Andrew Kortschak, Andrew Swett, and Allison Friedman, along with actor Thomas Middledtich (Silicon Valley), have crafted a bizarre, illogical, yet strangely fascinating experimental short. Sharp and his "technologist collaborator" Ross Goodwin built "Jetson," a little machine that can craft screenplays. Using text prediction software used on smartphones as a basis, hundreds of sci-fi TV and film screenplays, as well as some basic seeds from a sci-fi filmmaking competition, were fed into Jetson and the machine was given the green light. What materialised is Sunspring, a nonsensical short, but one that is nevertheless compelling, driving the mind to come up with possible meanings and conclusions.

Wix.com, the Nasdaq-listed, Tel Aviv-based do-it-yourself website development company, will start selling a new platform that will use artificial intelligence to ensure the website completely meets the requirements of the builder. Based on data gathered from the experiences of more than 86 million users, Wix has created a set of algorithms that are meant to churn out the best website for the users' needs, after first learning about the users through a few simple questions, the company said in a statement. "Wix ADI is the world's first technology platform that combines website design and content creation with artificial intelligence to enable complete websites to be created in a matter of minutes," said Avishai Abrahami, co-founder and CEO of Wix.com, in the statement. Artificial intelligence refers to the use of technology by a computer to do or copy cognitive functions like learning or problem solving, typically performed by a human brain. By asking users what they need, Wix's new website platform can tailor the website, making sure the layout, text and images it proposes will best suit the site's needs based on its knowledge of the user's business and location.