If a recent interaction between a human journalist and his Chinese robot counterpart is anything to go by, it'll be a while before a journalist job will be lost to (a robot in) China. On Monday (April 24), Jia Jia, a Chinese-manufactured robot under development for about three years (link in Chinese), had a conversation with AI expert Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of technology magazine Wired. State-run Xinhua news agency broadcast the chat live, billing Jia Jia as a special reporter. Jia Jia looks like a young woman in her early twenties, blinks and smiles in a fairly human way, moves her lips when she speaks, and has micro-expressions. But she had a hard time responding naturally to many of the questions posed by Kelly, sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to answer.

If a recent interaction between a human journalist and his Chinese robot counterpart is anything to go by, it'll be a while before a journalist job will be lost to (a robot in) China. On Monday (April 24), Jia Jia, a Chinese-manufactured robot under development for about three years (link in Chinese), had a conversation with AI expert Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of technology magazine Wired. State-run Xinhua news agency broadcast the chat live, billing Jia Jia as a special reporter. Jia Jia looks like a young woman in her early twenties, blinks and smiles in a fairly human way, moves her lips when she speaks, and has micro-expressions. But she had a hard time responding naturally to many of the questions posed by Kelly, sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to answer.

A chat with AI instructor Chris Mohritz Christopher Mohritz is a lifelong entrepreneur and technologist with a number of successful businesses under his belt; bringing a unique blend of technology know-how coupled with creative thinking and business acumen to each of his projects. Since 2009, Chris has been building and leveraging artificial intelligence systems to cognify a wide range of business functions -- marketing, sales, customer support and decision automation to name a few. And over the past five years, he has been building and operating a business accelerator for web/mobile startups, helping other entrepreneurs launch exceptional "AI-first" businesses. Chris draws heavily from a deep background in technology -- from operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. Navy to designing datacenters at Lockheed Martin. Complemented by a broad range of business experience -- from technical sales for the Fortune 500 to project management in the public sector.

Welcome to the Schindler Conference Call on key figures for the First Quarter 2017. I'm here together with Erich Ammann, our CFO we will go into all financial details later during the call. As an introduction to the remark it is fair to say that we continued our successful plan of the last year as we kept our direction towards top-line growth and also higher profitability. Let's have a closer look on our highlights of the first quarter 2017 on slide two. We made further operational and strategic progress. First, we were able to confirm our growth path. Orders received increased by 5.9% in local currencies and also operating revenue rose by 3.8% in local currencies. Operating revenue was therefore within our guidance of 3% to 5% growth in 2017. Our investments into our geographic diversification mainly into our strategic markets were paying off. Second, we also continued to improve our profitability. The EBIT margin increased to 11.5% and even 11.7% before restructuring costs. Net profit stayed flat at CHF179 million due to some temporary booking losses on the ALSO exchangeable bond. Third, we made further progress in our strategic initiatives. We are on track with our globally harmonized modular product platforms, but it is still a long way to go to finalize this, and we were also able to successfully launch our new Internet of Elevator and Escalator Solutions, Schindler Ahead. Yesterday, we launched officially our new Schindler Ahead initiative and I would like to stay a little bit with that topic. As you can see on slide number 3, we will create significant customer benefits in the future. We increased the uptime of our equipment with predictive maintenance, we offer comprehensive insights about all type of information of the equipment for a better building, maintenance and management, and we generate convenience with superior customer service by interactive and personalized passenger experience. On slide four, you find the solution concept of our enhanced service offerings. There are four elements to be mentioned. First the Cube, The Cube enables machine intelligence, all relevant machine data are collected, filtered and transmitted to the cloud platform. The Cube is an intelligent device, not only a transmitter or a gateway, as we can run apps and stream multimedia content and handle emergency calls. The second topic is the cloud platform. The cloud platform creates real time insights.

Almost everyone who went to college had to go to the process of applying for a job. When you graduate, you will obviously look for a job. Part of this process is to perform an interview with the recruiter of the company to convince him that you are the right person for the job. This interview can be stressful for some people and easy-going for others. Sometime, recruiters can be biased by personal opinions they may have about you or they might try to trick you.

When a robot almost looks human--almost, but not quite--it often comes across as jarringly fake instead of familiar. Robots that are clearly artificial, like WALL-E or R2-D2, don't have this problem. But androids like this one that imperfectly mimic human mannerisms and facial expressions are weird enough to be haunting. This phenomenon is known as the uncanny valley. It's a major obstacle for designers who try to make their robots look like people--and it may be just as much of a hurdle for developers who are creating bots that talk like people, but that don't have a body at all.

Over 1.5 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year in America alone. Indeed, research currently relies on data from just 3% of patients. MIT's Regina Barzilay is hoping to rectify that. Via the MIT Stata Center, she leads a Machine Learning-based project that aims to derive insight from patient data. She's working with a consortium of partners, including Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to bring data science to clinical research.

Tesla founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices. Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesions, and so on, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But Why. "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy," Musk said in the interview published on Thursday. The interview was part of a nearly 40,000-word article that explains in detail the science of the human brain and how Neuralink will aim to connect to it. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Musk said in a tech conference last year. "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said in the latest interview.

DB: from a technical standpoint, how did AI help build the interface? KH: the main visualization -- the map of over 750 fonts in one two-dimensional plane -- would not have been possible without AI. DB: what did you find most challenging about working on the project? KH: when it comes to technology-driven explorations such as this one, one of the core challenges is to balance letting the technology speak for itself with creative license to make design decisions that may obscure the technology, but lead to a better experience. DB: what surprising things did you learn about machine learning algorithms in the process?

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the company's newest products in Hawthorne, Calif. Elon Musk, already the CEO of two companies, appears ready to embark on his next project: a neural interface melding the human brain with computer technology. In an interview with the website Wait But Why, the head of Tesla and SpaceX says his latest endeavor -- Neuralink -- is four years away from introducing its first product to market. The initial version of the Neuralink device would focus on people with severe brain injuries. "The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody's fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element," said Musk. "It could help with people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics by providing a neural shunt from the motor cortex down to where the muscles are activated."