I've said before that Computex is ASUS' show -- and what better demonstration than having the recently-elected President of Taiwan "talk" to your newly announced home robot? Crowd noise necessitated several repeated commands to ASUS' Zenbo play some music, but if it was apparently a live demonstration (ASUS' PR affirmed to our Engadget Chinese colleagues that it was), then it's pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the Zenbo's SOS "lifesaving" feature failed in the midst of the trade show chaos. Check out the successful part of the interaction between world leader and... 600 house robot, right after the break.

IBM Watson burst onto the scene in 2011 as a Jeopardy-playing computer and quickly became synonymous with artificial intelligence. Since then, AI has become a lot more commonplace thanks to the rise of digital assistants like Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, but Watson is still chugging away in more ways than you might think, powering everything from cancer treatment software to hotel concierge robots (pictured above). I had a chance to talk to Maya Weinstein, Senior Interaction Design and Creative Director at IBM Watson, about everything from the current crop of AI assistants to how the technology can help save lives. Check out the full interview (with some light edits for clarity) below. Jacob Kleinman: What do you think of the rise of consumer AI products like chatbots or Amazon Echo?

Machine learning is being used in a variety of domains to restrict or prevent undesirable behaviors by hackers, fraudsters and even ordinary users. Algorithms deployed for fraud prevention, network security, anti-money laundering belong to the broad area of adversarial machine learning where instead of ML trying to learn the patterns of benevolent nature, it is confronted with a malicious adversary that is looking for opportunities to exploit loopholes and weaknesses for personal gain. To evade these models an attacker needs to arm themselves with knowledge of the algorithm, feature space and the training data. Attackers have to obtain this information through a limited number of probing opportunities. Designing the feature space for adversarial models is highly dependent on the use case and what limitations you wish to place on the adversary.

Dr. Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and data scientist. He is the founder and CEO of Snips, an artificial-intelligence company specializing in context awareness and privacy. Rand started coding at the age of 10, founded his first startup at 14, and created a Web development agency at 15 before starting his PhD at the age of 21. He has been honored as an Innovator Under 35 by MIT Technology Review. He holds a BSc in computer science and a PhD in bioinformatics from University College London (UCL), as well as two graduate degrees from Singularity University in Silicon Valley and THNK in Amsterdam.

Apple, Amazon, and Google say their virtual helpers--Siri, Alexa, and the less snappily named Google Assistant--can make our lives easier by acting on our commands to book cabs, order pizza, or check the weather. But like all the other free-to-use goodies that tech giants offer up, these new personal assistants must also earn their keep. The companies aren't saying much about exactly how their automated personas can boost their bottom lines, but they have clear potential to open up new lines of revenue. Perhaps most importantly, they could significantly increase the data that companies have on our preferences and everyday lives. "A deeper profile of the customer is possible," says Sridhar Narayanan, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford.

At Computex today, Asus revealed the Zenbo home robot. Kind of like Echo meets Keecker with a bit of Pepper sprinkled in the mix, it's been created to offer busy modern family members a helping hand with everyday tasks like keeping the kids entertained, controlling connected smart devices and providing recipe inspiration for mealtimes. The company also sees it acting as a remote guardian for the elderly. The Zenbo is being pitched as an entertainment center, personal assistant and home automation controller. It's able to move around the home on its own thanks to large wheels on its sides powered by electric drive, or listen out for voice commands from its owner.

I'm interviewing Rob Nail, but I don't know who to make eye contact with, him or his toy robot. The white-and-aquamarine bot blinking at me innocently is named Wesley. He retails for 20,000, is Wall-E cute and is roughly the size of Nail's 19-month-old son. In fact, he's oblivious to all the strange stuff surrounding us: the Oculus Rift viewing station where, moments before, I rode a virtual roller coaster; the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling; and the other robot, which retails for 14,000 and which Nail once used to stream himself to a party. Instead of, you know, actually going.

TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Microsoft Accelerator's Machine Learning Demo Day this Thursday, June 2 from the Showbox SoDo in Seattle. The Microsoft Accelerator is an immersive three- to six-month program aimed at helping entrepreneurs get through the challenges of building a company, finding customers and scaling to global markets. There are seven accelerators located around the world, from Bangalore to Beijing, from Berlin to Tel-Aviv. While most of their programs have a focus on enterprise startups, this demo day in Seattle is for companies specifically leveraging machine learning. Investors and press will hear pitches from nine companies solving problems ranging from natural gas pipelines to on-demand medicine.

FiveThirtyEight founder, political prognosticator, and wunderkind -- is giving Donald Trump just a 25 percent chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in November. He was wrong months ago when he gave Trump just a 5 percent chance to get the nomination. A lot of people followed Silver's prediction. One man did not - and he was right. Conservative radio host John Ziegler penned a remarkably prophetic piece for Mediaite in November rebutting Silver's prediction.

Stephen Hawking has said that he fails to understand the popularity of Donald Trump, the presumptive US Republican presidential candidate. ITV's Good Morning Britain asked the man who has widened the world's understanding of time, space, stars, galaxies and black holes if he could explain the popular appeal of the billionaire tycoon. Hawking, perhaps the world's most famous living scientist and the author of one of the world's best-selling books, replied: "I can't. He's a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator." He also ventured once again into political issues, appealing to British voters to back the remain campaign in the EU referendum on 23 June – not just for economic and security reasons, but for the sake of science as well.