After working in the home, as an assistant at various stores, and as a waiter, SoftBank's humanoid robot Pepper is adding Buddhist priest to the list of careers the robot can take on. Pepper can chant sutras in a computerized voice while hitting a drum, reports Reuters, as detailed at the creepily-named Life Ending Industry Expo in Tokyo. The company Nissei Eco wrote the software for the Buddhist chants and said because of Japan's shrinking and aging population, Buddhists priests weren't getting as much monetary support from the community and have to work other jobs away from temple to make ends meet. Pepper's abilities were developed so it could hold funerals when there weren't any Buddhist priests readily available. That, and using a robot is much cheaper -- about $350 compared to $2,200 for a human priest, if you don't value genuine human sentiments for the loss of your loved ones.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp will invest more than 50 billion yuan ($7.18 billion) in artificial intelligence and fifth generation internet technologies over the next five years, as competition in the sector grows. Xiaomi Chief Executive Lei Jun made the announcement in a letter posted on the company's social media account on Thursday, but did not provide specific investment details. "We need to turn our continuous advantage we have in AIoT and intelligent life into absolute victory in intelligent full scene, and completely cement our king status in the smart era," Lei said, using the acronym for artificial intelligence of things, a reference to a combination of AI and internet technologies. The announced investment increases Xiaomi's pledge made last year to invest 10 billion yuan over five years in an "All in AIoT" strategy. The Beijing-based company started as an affordable cellphone maker but its internet-enabled products now include smart TVs and rice-cookers.

Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi is planning to pump over ¥50 billion ($7.18 billion) into artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G technologies over the next five years, Reuters reported on Thursday (Jan. The announcement was made by Xiaomi Chief Executive Lei Jun, who posted a letter on the company's social media account. "We need to turn our continuous advantage we have in AIoT [artificial intelligence of things] and intelligent life into absolute victory in intelligent full scene, and completely cement our king status in the smart era," the chief executive said in the letter. He said in the letter that the company is now a "global technology leader" and pointed to 2019 as an important time for Xiaomi's global expansion. "… our overseas revenue now accounts for almost half of our total group revenue."

What does the future hold? For me it is at least full of bacon: packing my scallops and shrimp, sitting next to my eggs, spread over my Waldorf salads. But 2020 is also full of technological progress and the continuation of the innovations that have made the world race faster than you can say "not too crisp, please." Three fields hold the most promise for the tech world in the coming year: internet of things (IoT); artificial intelligence (especially AI & # 39; s most visible face, voice assistants); and 5G connections and devices. Make no mistake: just like a steak that flavors a steak, it is the combination of these trends that really unlocks their power.

Multivariate time series are routinely encountered in real-world applications, and in many cases, these time series are strongly correlated. In this paper, we present a deep learning structural time series model which can (i) handle correlated multivariate time series input, and (ii) forecast the targeted temporal sequence by explicitly learning/extracting the trend, seasonality, and event components. The trend is learned via a 1D and 2D temporal CNN and LSTM hierarchical neural net. The CNN-LSTM architecture can (i) seamlessly leverage the dependency among multiple correlated time series in a natural way, (ii) extract the weighted differencing feature for better trend learning, and (iii) memorize the long-term sequential pattern. The seasonality component is approximated via a non-liner function of a set of Fourier terms, and the event components are learned by a simple linear function of regressor encoding the event dates. We compare our model with several state-of-the-art methods through a comprehensive set of experiments on a variety of time series data sets, such as forecasts of Amazon AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) billings, and the closing prices for corporate stocks in the same category.

Beijing: China's telecommunications giant Huawei on Tuesday thanked the Indian government for permitting it to participate in the upcoming trials for 5G networks, a major boost to the company amidst a US clampdown on it citing national security risks. The 5G is the next generation cellular technology with download speeds stated to be 10 to 100 times faster than current 4G networks. The 5G networking standard is seen as critical because it can support the next generation of mobile devices in addition to new applications like driverless cars and gadgets made out of artificial intelligence (AI). Huawei rivals western equipment makers, such as Ericsson, and is banned in the US. India on Monday indicated its unwillingness to keep any company out of the 5G trials.

Machine learning is what matters as the world continues to turn around in the next century. But many of us are still asking how does machine learning work? Machine learning is a great invention of data analytics that will make computers function naturally as humans and animals do. The algorithms use computational methods in order to learn the information from the data and not dependent on a predetermined equation. As more outputs made available, the algorithms will adapt and increase its performance while the capacity of the machine learning to provide adequate information increases.

AI is increasingly driving important developments in technology and business and is being deployed across industry, from telecommunications to autonomous vehicles. Increasing stores of big data and advances in affordable high computing power are fueling AI's growth. The growth of AI across a range of technical fields raises a number of policy questions with respect to IP. WIPO held a Conversation on IP and AI on September 27, 2019, bringing together Member States and other stakeholders to discuss the impact of Al on IP policy, with a view to collectively formulating the questions that policymakers need to ask. At the conclusion of the meeting, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry announced that WIPO would commence an open process to develop a list of issues concerning the impact of Al on IP policy that might form the basis of future structured discussions.

So far, humans have accepted that artificial intelligence systems can perform many of the rote tasks that humans find tedious and time-consuming. However, the consensus is that AI can't produce art that's engaging and moving. Saudi Arabia aims to give AI a chance to "express" itself artistically at their AI Artathon. The event, which starts in January 2020, offers AI experts and artists the opportunity to produce works of art using AI techniques and methodologies. It's a precursor to the Global AI Summit, which is scheduled to take place in Riyadh on 30th-31st March 2020.

Following consumer adoption and changing attitudes, purpose-built smart assistants like Alexa for Business are paving the way for AI at work. Smart assistants naturally complement intelligent smartphone apps, such as Edison, formerly EasilyDo. Using predictive analytics and deep learning, these smart apps extract meaningful, actionable data in real-time. For example, Edison proactively notifies you when it's time to leave based on traffic patterns and meeting start times. While these apps classify as consumer offerings, it's easy to understand why employees want these tools at work.