Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. on Tuesday unveiled a robot that can operate in the presence of flammable gases, such as after a gas leak following a disaster. A joint project with Chiba Institute of Technology, the Sakura No. 2 is the country's first mobile inspection unit that can operate in the presence of high concentrations of explosive gases such as methane and hydrogen. There is an increasing need for an inspection robot that is not a fire hazard as Japan steers toward becoming a hydrogen-based society, said Ken Onishi, a senior engineer in charge of the project for Mitsubishi Heavy. "There was a debate over whether to develop robots that can operate near hydrogen gas, as doing so requires an extremely high level of technology," Onishi said. "As we may encounter accidents such as collisions involving hydrogen cars or a truck loaded with hydrogen tanks rolling over inside a road tunnel, we decided to develop a robot that can deal with such situations."

We made a tool that you can use. Reinforcement learning is much discussed these days with successes like AlphaGo. Wouldn't it be great if Reinforcement Learning algorithms could easily be used to solve all reinforcement learning problems? But there is a well-known problem: It's very easy to create natural RL problems for which all standard RL algorithms (epsilon-greedy Q-learning, SARSA, etc…) fail catastrophically. That's a serious limitation which both inspires research and which I suspect many people need to learn the hard way.

Today eBay announced it will acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. SalesPredict is eBay's latest acquisition that will support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. It follows eBay's recent acquisition of Expertmaker, in order to further bolster our structured data efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, a number of SalesPredict's employees will join eBay's structured data organization, working from eBay's Israeli Development Center in Netanya.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robo-advising are hot sectors in the Fintech space. Kavout is a company that wants to provide powerful AI tools for all investors and, for the time being, these tools are free. Alex Lu, CEO and co-founder of Kavout, explains that hedge funds and investment banks are rapidly hiring AI and machine learning developers – pointing to the fact that Goldman Sachs has more software engineers than Facebook. "None of this is a coincidence," says Lu. "The big players know that there is much more to be gained in the markets by investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our aim is to make those technologies available to all investors."

With consumers now shopping and managing their services online, retailers are racing to find ways to improve their customer service and shopping experiences while transforming how they communicate with their customers. Also, as of mid-April, Facebook opened Messenger platform to chatbot services. Rogers Communications is also wading into the bot game by using Facebook Messenger for customers to chat with service representatives to change account information, add a phone line or deal with other service information, and are on the cusp of implementing a bot. In many ways it makes sense for retailers to incorporate bots in areas they can be controlled, like automating everyday customer service tasks (imagine never sitting on hold again).

INFLUENCER: "Conversational artificial intelligence is alive and well," says Paul Slattery, Technical Director at AKQA Berlin One of the most natural things for humans to do – engage in a simple conversation – has been one of the hardest things for machines to master. Yet a new era has started where we might chat with machines more often than we do with each other – as conversation becomes the most effective interface for getting things done. Conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) is alive and well in applications like Telegram, which passed 100 million active monthly users earlier this year. Facebook has re-launched Messenger as a platform with built in AI; x.ai has spent the last two years teaching'Amy', its calendar AI, how to handle meeting schedules via email; and a 19-year-old has created DoNotPay, a free chatbot AI lawyer that has appealed 3 million in parking tickets. Let's have a look at how these intelligent systems work, the advantages they present to us and where we might be heading.

DETROIT/SAN FRANCISCO, July 12 (Reuters) - Concerns raised by the first reported fatality in a semi-automated car were expected to speed adoption of more sensitive technology to help vehicles see and drive themselves safely, increasing demand on the emerging autonomous vehicle technology industry, investors and analysts said. Goldman Sachs forecasts the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles will grow from about 3 billion last year to 96 billion in 2025 and 290 billion in 2035. More than half of that revenue in 20 years, Goldman estimates, will come from radar, cameras and lidar, a sensor that uses laser - all tools considered essential to building vehicles that can pilot themselves. The May 7 death of Ohio technology company owner Joshua Brown in a Tesla Motors Inc Model S while the car's semi-automated Autopilot system was engaged highlighted the limitations of current automated driving systems. Tesla's Autopilot system uses cameras and radar, but not lidar.

Manuel Ebert is the founder of summer.ai, His firm helps companies leverage their data and integrate machine learning into their business logic. As a former neuroscientist, he has always been equally interested in natural and artificial intelligence. Global Big Data Conference's vendor agnostic Global Data Science Conference is held on March 7th, March 8th & March 9th, 2016 on all industry verticals. The Conference allows practitioners to discuss data science through effective use of various data management techniques.

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But the job recruitment process can be taxing for both applicants and companies, which spend long hours flipping through troves of résumés to determine the best candidates. In an attempt to streamline hiring, FirstJob, a millennial-focused HR company, has launched a recruiting assistant named Mya that they say can automate up to 75 percent of the recruitment process. The system uses machine learning and natural language processing to perform an initial screen, answer applicants' questions, give feedback, and provide suggestions on how an applicant should proceed. Meanwhile, the system gives businesses much-needed breathing room when attempting to qualify large groups of potential candidates. Related: Look out, Google Assistant!