Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes. Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes. NEW YORK -- Ding dong, there's a robot at your door and it's got your extra large pizza. This could be a future Saturday night scenario if Domino's Australia gets its way. Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes.

The multibillion-dollar business plans being hatched by global automakers and technology companies for self-driving vehicles depend on a sensor that's less than 1 inch wide and costs all of 92 cents. And a company you've probably never heard of, Nippon Ceramic Co., controls about half of that market. Its stock is up more than 40 percent over the past three years and analysts expect profits to nearly double by 2018. In other words, it's good to be Nippon Ceramic right now. The Japanese maker of ultrasonic sensors, which help autonomous vehicles avoid crashes and fit into tight parking spaces, expects demand to double in the next five years and is expanding its production lines to keep up, President Shinichi Taniguchi said in an interview.

The machine also reflects a lot of lessons learned from its predecessor and beyond. For instance, it knows to slow down near corners so that it won't smack into someone. It identifies people asking for help, too, and will approach on its own. Its biggest drawback is simply that it's not as personable as Pepper (you're just looking at a pair of expressionless eyes), and doesn't have a built-in display to show information. It's going to be a while before you see EMIEW3 in service, as Hitachi doesn't expect it to be ready until 2018. However, Hitachi has grand ambitions for its third-generation hardware.

On the 10th day of every month, Junsuke Senoguchi has just one thing on his mind -- the closing level of the Nikkei 225 Stock Average. That's because Mr Senoguchi, an unassuming man in his late forties, has built a machine that's been predicting the direction of Japanese shares, and once a month he gets a progress report on its success. The model makes a simple call -- whether the equity index will be higher or lower after 30 days -- and over almost four years it's been right 68% of the time. "I'm so happy when it works", said Mr Senoguchi, a senior equity strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in Tokyo. "It's because I feel I can predict the future." Algorithms have invaded global share markets, used by everyone from high-frequency traders closing bets in fractions of a second, to specialist asset managers whose strategies are determined by complex quantitative analysis.

David Shing, or simply'Shingy,' is well-known in technology circles. And for good reason, he's AOL's energetic and up-beat'Digital Prophet' – oft jetting around the world to talk about the future of technology. But how long will Shingy's (and other similar roles) survive? Not all that long perhaps, if McCann's hiring of an artificially intelligent creative director in its Japanese office is anything to go by. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

The epic rocket landing SpaceX pulled off today (April 8) is a big step forward in humanity's march out into the cosmos, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. SpaceX managed to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a robotic "drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean during the successful launch of the company's uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this afternoon. The first-of-its-kind touchdown is an important milestone in SpaceX's quest to develop completely reusable rockets, which Musk has said could revolutionize spaceflight by reducing launch costs by a factor of 100. "I think it's another step toward the stars," Musk said during a post-launch press briefing today. "In order for us to really open up access to space, we've got to achieve full and rapid reusability. And to be able to do that for the primary rocket booster is going to [have] a huge impact on cost."

Undoubtedly the most interesting conversation I had at SXSW was with Dr Ted Berger, who is working on a brain implant to make life better for people who have problems with long-term memory – and the science behind it is fascinating. Berger explained to me how people with conditions like epilepsy and alzheimers can suffer problems with their hippocampus, the part of the brain that turns short-term memories into longterm ones. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Essentially, our initial memories of an event are binary electrical codes that are filtered through the hippocampus to another part of the brain for longterm storage. What Berger, who was at SXSW as part of IEEE's Tech for Humanity series, is building is essentially a battery-powered prosthetic hippocampus.

For example, in Terminator XXVIII: Rise of the Earthlings (2051), a brave young android is tasked with saving the world from an army of killer humans sent from the future to destroy robotkind. Leading the human rebellion is Barry, an 18-stone unemployed bus driver from Caerphilly whose powers include the ability to eat a foot-long meatball marinara from Subway in under nine seconds. In the war zones of the future, robot generals will send human beings on to the battlefield to check for land mines and other unexploded devices. "Previously, this highly dangerous work was carried out by bomb disposal robots," explains Major-General Sir Optimus Prime. "Sending human beings instead will reduce the risk to robot life. We've lost too many good droids this way."

REUTERS/Joshua RobertsAn engineer makes an adjustment to the robot "The Incredible Bionic Man" at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013. It's the latest in a series of figures economists have released projecting the impact that AI systems and machines will have on the human workforce, and this one, from the World Economic Forum, predicts a "Fourth Industrial Revolution," characterized by unprecedented "developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and biotechnology." And while previous industrial revolutions have catapulted the human workforce forward, this one may set us back -- at least in the short term. According to the researchers at the WEF, "current trends could lead to a net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labor market changes over the period 2015–2020." The Forum estimates that a grand total of 7.1 million jobs will be lost as a direct result of many of our proudest innovations, and that two-thirds of these jobs will be "concentrated in the Office and Administrative job family."

SpaceX finally did it--they landed a rocket on a drone ship in the ocean. The achievement will make it easier for the company to refurbish and re-fly used rockets, potentially cutting launch costs dramatically. The success was a long time coming, and the company had to suffer through several fiery failures before they could pull it off. "We're a little bit like the dog that caught the bus," Musk joked during a press conference yesterday. "'What do we do now?'"