With President Trump's visit to Beijing this week, there's been a lot of nervous talk about China's growing wealth and trade. The country will soon overtake the US to become the world's largest economy, and its government is aggressively pushing innovation in everything from solar power to artificial intelligence to electric cars. But one of China's most important industries is also one of its oldest: rice. It's unclear how much rice the POTUS enjoyed during his visit, but some seems likely--not only given his reported love of the stuff, but also its role in Chinese culture. People began cultivating the grain in China nearly 10,000 years ago. Today, rice is its biggest crop, with farmers growing roughly 200 million tons--more than any other country, and nearly a third of the world's supply--every year.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union's sweeping new data privacy law, is triggering a lot of sleepless nights for CIOs grappling with how to effectively comply with the new regulations and help their organizations avoid potentially hefty penalties. The GDPR, which goes into effect May 25, 2018, requires all companies that collect data on citizens in EU countries to provide a "reasonable" level of protection for personal data. The ramifications for non-compliance are significant, with fines of up to 4% of a firm's global revenues. Companies that do business in Europe have been scrambling to put new processes and platforms in place to improve data security and facilitate GDPR compliance at a time when data volumes are exploding across legacy IT and multi-cloud environments. A logical starting point for GDPR compliance, therefore, is a full understanding of where data is stored and how it is used.

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. Takahiro Nozaki and colleagues of the Faculty of Science and Technology and Haptics Research Center at Keio University developed a haptic-based avatar-robot with a General Purpose Arm (GPA) that transmits sound, vision, movement, and importantly, highly sensitive sense of touch (force tactile transmission), to a remotely located user in real time. "This'real-haptics' is an integral part of the Internet of Actions (IoA) technology, having applications in manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, and nursing care," says Nozaki.

The Imaging, Signals, and Machine Learning (ISML) group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate with expertise in computer vision/image processing and data analytics. The ISML group conducts applied computer vision research and development addressing important issues of industrial and economic competitiveness, biomedical measurement science, and national security. The group consists of staff members with backgrounds in electrical engineering, computer science, and optical engineering, and frequently collaborates with partners in industry, academia, and other government organizations. To view the job description and apply, please visit bit.ly/ISML-Postdoc. ORNL is an equal opportunity employer.

John Markoff covered technology for The New York Times for 28 years. He is currently a Berggruen Institute fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "You don't get it," he said. "In China, they'll be lucky if the robots come just in time." For the previous decade, I had been reporting on the rapid expansion of new AI technologies into the workplace and how they were about to displace not only blue-collar manufacturing jobs but, for the first time, white-collar knowledge workers like lawyers and doctors. But that night, Kahneman alerted me to a largely unexamined aspect of the AI-fueled automation debate.

Researchers at Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence (AI) program after it created its own language, Digital Journal reports. The system developed code words to make communication more efficient and researchers took it offline when they realized it was no longer using English. The incident, after it was revealed in early July, puts in perspective Tesla CEO Elon Musk's warnings about AI. "AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive," Musk said at a meeting of U.S. National Governors Association in July. "Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it'll be too late." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called Musk's warnings "pretty irresponsible," prompting Musk to respond that Zuckerberg's understanding of AI and its implications is "limited."

Marco Polo, Columbus, and Afonso de Albuquerque were more than explorers. They didn't merely seek silk and spices, but looked to develop new markets, pioneer the best routes to reach them, and gather vast volumes of information on winds and tides, languages, people and local customs to aid the merchants who followed in their wake. They were, in their own way, the data scientists of their time. Data has always been a fundamental component of international trade and transportation, but never has so much information been available as today. Remote sensing, telematics, connected devices and vehicles all generate huge volumes of valuable data – the only challenge for organisations in the logistics and supply chain industry is how to harness this information and turn it into insight. Having the right data enables organisations to maximise efficiency across their supply chain, boosting profits, speeding delivery, and reducing costs for themselves and their customers.

The importance of the code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park cannot be underestimated. They produced vital intelligence that played a huge part in swinging the war in the Allies' favour. As Winston Churchill said at the time, the Bletchley staff were'the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled'. When scouring the land for the government's secret Code and Cypher School, which obtained signals intelligence by breaking high-level encrypted enemy communications, the Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned Intelligence from Bletchley played a vital part in the defeat of the U-boats in the six-year Battle of the Atlantic, British naval triumphs in the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 and the Battle of North Cape off the coast of Norway in 1943. By 1944 British and American commanders knew the location of 58 out of 60 German divisions across the Western Front.

The company says they're deploying cars without backup drivers. The company says they're deploying cars without backup drivers. A new study is bolstering the case for putting more autonomous vehicles on the road sooner rather than later -- at the same time that self-driving cars are hitting a milestone in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area. A research report released this week argues that deploying driverless cars commercially as soon as they become at least a little safer than human drivers, could end up saving hundreds of thousands of lives -- as compared to waiting for the technology to be close to perfect. Meanwhile, on the roads in Arizona, the first public tests of self-driving cars without backup drivers have begun.

OCE drives the commercialization of cutting-edge research across key market sectors to build the economy of tomorrow and secure Ontario's global competitiveness. In doing this, OCE fosters the training and development of the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs and is a key partner with Ontario's industry, universities, colleges, research hospitals, investors and governments. A champion of leading-edge technologies, best practices and research, OCE invests in sectors such as advanced health, digital media and information communications, advanced manufacturing and materials, and cleantech including energy, environment and water. OCE is a key partner in delivering Ontario's Innovation Agenda as a member of the province's Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs (ONE). Funded by the Government of Ontario, the ONE is made up of regional and sector-focused organizations and helps Ontario-based entrepreneurs rapidly grow their company and create jobs.