SHENZHEN, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Malong Technologies, an artificial intelligence startup and international provider of product recognition technology, was named winner in the "Olympics of Startups" held at the G20 Young Entrepreneurs' Alliance, in Berlin. Malong Technologies' breakthrough ProductAI platform is a high performance'intelligent eye' that enables machines to have human-like visual perception of products, including non-rigid objects such as fashion and fabrics, which have historically been infeasible for computers to recognize accurately without barcodes. Malong Technologies beat startups from every nation at the G20, which represents the 20 major economies of the world. Judged by officials of the European Union and other international organizations, the competition, run by the "Get in the Ring" foundation, led participants through a series of six rounds held over two days, and included'head-to-head' oratory matchups inside a replica boxing ring. The three winning nations include China, represented by Malong Technologies, Canada, and France. As winners, Malong Technologies will benefit from the international visibility which can help open doors to more global customers for its product recognition technology.

Like many other auto companies, Volkswagen has been working on autonomous vehicles, partnering with companies like NVIDIA and Mobvoi along the way. Today, the company announced an extended partnership with Kuka, the Germany-based industrial robot maker. In a statement, the companies said that the cooperation "links up with an existing joint research project looking into collaboration between human and robot." One project the two companies will be working on involves the development of a robot that can connect an electric vehicle to a charging station, so that the rider never has to leave the car. "In future, robots will support humans in many routine tasks. And everyday life in future will be inconceivable without autonomous driving. We will work together on innovative concepts in order to shape this future," said Kuka CEO Till Reuter.

Media players configured for piracy "challenge recent progress" against illegal streaming, a new report says. The popularity of such devices, which have become widely known as "fully loaded Kodi boxes", has surged recently. According to new research from the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), such media players are proving tricky for authorities to deal with. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

I know it's a weird way to start a blog with a negative, but there was a wave of discussion in the last few days that I think serves as a good hook for some topics on which I've been thinking recently. It all started with a post in the Simply Stats blog by Jeff Leek on the caveats of using deep learning in the small sample size regime. In sum, he argues that when the sample size is small (which happens a lot in the bio domain), linear models with few parameters perform better than deep nets even with a modicum of layers and hidden units. He goes on to show that a very simple linear predictor, with top ten most informative features, performs better than a simple deep net when trying to classify zeros and ones in the MNIST dataset using only 80 or so samples. This prompted Andrew beam to write a rebuttal in which a properly trained deep net was able to beat the simple linear model, even with very few training samples.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Dean Kamen's DEKA R&D firm, with support from DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, designed the advanced prosthetic LUKE Arm to give amputees "dexterous arm and hand movement through a simple, intuitive control system." The LUKE Arm, which stands for Life Under Kinetic Evolution but is also a reference to Luke Skywalker's bionic hand, "allows users to control multiple joints simultaneously and provides a variety of grips and grip forces by means of wireless signals generated by sensors worn on the feet or via other easy-to-use controllers."

SYS-CON Events announced today that SourceForge has been named "Media Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SourceForge is the largest, most trusted destination for Open Source Software development, collaboration, discovery and download on the web serving over 32 million viewers, 150 million downloads and over 460,000 active development projects each and every month. With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend 21st Cloud Expo, October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, and June 12-14, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation. Every Global 2000 enterprise in the world is now integrating cloud computing in some form into its IT development and operations. Midsize and small businesses are also migrating to the cloud in increasing numbers.

As I leaned back in my chair, I began to realise that the only way you could provide unlimited, free, specific and scalable advice was if, it was… not human. The promise is that it will reduce costs, save time and even save lives. So I began to think about how AI could help my industry and give millions of business owners their own personal business coach. That plane ride was two years ago and that's why I'm so very pleased to announce we have launched BRiN, the world's first artificially intelligent business advisor.

This whole topic – where (and how) should ML and rule-based verification meet – has been on my mind for a while, but I still don't have good answers. I do think it deserves significant attention from researchers and practitioners. The next three chapters will discuss why I expect ML to keep growing in dynamic verification, why there will always be an unavoidable, irreducible non-ML part, and some ideas about connecting the two. Finally, the last chapter will talk about rules in ML-based systems, explainable AI and all that. If you are not into verification, just go directly there. Please take a quick look at my Dynamic verification in one picture post.

Most fintech companies offer better interfaces for handling money (bank accounts, loans, payments, etc.), but quite a few startups are also offering a solution for a much older need than how to make money. Israel company I Know First, managed by CEO Yaron Golgher, is one of these. The company's main product is an algorithm that provides a forecast for three thousand different investment instruments, including shares, commodities, interest rates, foreign currency, exchange traded funds (ETFs), and global indices. "The algorithm rates all the investment instruments, and singles out investment opportunities in the capital market on a daily basis, according to the pricing anomaly it finds," Golgher says in a "Globes" interview. "Globes": What information do you use?

Machine learning is a growing field, used in everything from the basics of anti-spam functions to the complexities of self-driving cars. As this is a constantly adapting technology, companies seeking to take advantage of the system for functions like analytics may have trouble finding the best place to begin. So what is the first step for a tech department that wants to start using machine learning to improve its data analytics? Even if you rely on outside expertise, it is important to understand what machine learning can and can't do with data. Stanford, Caltech and others offer online classes on Coursera that are very good.