On June 25 IBM ISTC Startup Challenge competition DemoDay will be held which was launched in April this year and lasted 10-weeks. SeedStar competition will be held in the same place (American University of Armenia, Manoogian Hall), which is implemented jointly with Microsoft Innovation Center and Enterprise Incubator Foundation. More than 40 applications were received for IBM ISTC Startup Challenge and only 10 passed to the competition stage, 6 of which reached the final round. Various workshops were conducted for the teams during these 10 weeks, ranging from concept design and development, through access to the market. The teams used the services provided by the IBM Watson artificial intelligence in their work, which allows them to make "smart" solutions without much effort.

Getting anywhere in a city like Beijing means slogging through colossal traffic jams and chaotic, bewildering intersections. Crashes kill 500 people daily, and everyone views the rules of the road as advisory at best. "Many drivers and pedestrians think that traffic signals are just for reference," says Jing Wang. But Wang is entirely serious when he says Beijing and Shanghai are a perfect laboratory for self-driving cars. He leads the autonomous vehicles program at Baidu (China's version of Google), and he's confident China will be the first country to embrace autonomy.

It has housed soldiers, scientists, and even ravers, but Fort Alexander near St Petersburg now lies abandoned. Magnificent drone footage shows the fortress, named after a Russian Emperor, in its current forsaken state. The structure was built between 1838 and 1845 on an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland. Dramatic drone footage shows the derelict Russian'Plague Fort' near St Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland During the Crimean war the fort guarded the Imperial Russian Navy base in Kronstadt against British and French fleets. But it was never involved in hostilities and lost its military value soon after construction.

Already busy dealing with customers in phone stores, train stations, and departments stores, Pepper the robot has now been put to work in two hospitals in Belgium. The android, which can understand and respond to a range of human emotions, started assisting visitors at two health facilities in Ostend and Liege on Monday. Pepper launched to great fanfare in Japan exactly a year ago, with the first batch of 1,000 units snapped up in just 60 seconds. The creation of Japanese telecom giant SoftBank and French robotics company Aldebaran SAS, the robot is being marketed as an assistant for businesses and also as a companion for families and those living alone. Standing 120-cm tall, Pepper can converse in a number of languages and also communicate via its torso-based tablet.

Akihiro Kishimoto is a research staff member at IBM Research – Ireland working on a range of projects in artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed computing and search. His interest in these technical fields grew from his passion for board games. And while a student at the University of Tokyo, he and three of his fellow classmates designed ISshogi, a program to play the incredibly complex (and ancient) Japanese board game, Shogi. ISshogi won the World Computer Shogi Championships four times from 1997-2005. While studying AI at the University of Alberta, Akihiro was a member of the GAMES group (Game-playing, Analytical methods, Minimax search and Empirical Studies) in the Department of Computing Science, and worked with Jonathan Schaeffer and others to solve Checkers.

DVDs were first launched in Japan, Travelocity opened up as the first online booking agent, eBay, Ask Jeeves also opened their online doors and the Spice Girls had their first UK number-one. You get the point (well except the Spice Girls bit) – it was an inflection point with technology, and 20 years later we are that same point again with AI, sometimes referred to as cognitive technologies. At the time I was fortunate to work for a very innovative company who had developed the first generation of SaaS solution for managing supply chains. So as you can imagine I spent a lot of my time sat in meetings trying to convince executives the internet was going to change the world and they needed to innovate. What we forget (which seems silly now) is many of these execs either dismissed the technology, or worse, had convinced themselves they get it and have a solid plan.

Japan's electronics makers are beefing up efforts to recruit hard-to-find artificial intelligence experts -- a critical resource as connected technologies and services loom large on the industry's path forward. Growth in the number of college graduates with AI expertise -- typically math whizzes or engineers with additional knowledge of programming languages and data analysis -- has failed to keep pace with rising demand for such talent. The global supply is only in the tens of thousands, pitting companies expanding AI research operations against each other in the search for top recruits. Sony will next spring begin bulking up its ranks of such new graduates with a specialized recruiting framework for research and development in AI and machine learning. No limit will be set on the number of staff that can be hired, unlike under the company's normal recruiting system.

Innovation is among the key factors driving a country's economic and social growth. But what are the factors that make a country innovative? How do they differ across different parts of the world and different stages of development? In this work done in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF), we analyze the scores obtained through executive opinion surveys that constitute the WEF's Global Competitiveness Index in conjunction with other country-level metrics and indicators to identify actionable levers of innovation. The findings can help country leaders and organizations shape the policies to drive developmental activities and increase the capacity of innovation.

Meet the future face of healthcare assistance - a friendly faced robot named Pepper. Its diction is still a little odd, and his movements sometimes a bit hesitant, but the robot is all geared up to help patients at two Belgian hospitals. The humanoid assistant, who has a screen on his chest and a round head, is the first robot in the world to be used to greet people in a medical setting, its software creators said. Two of Belgium's hospitals have installed Pepper robots in their receptions for trials. The robots will help patients in Ostend and Liege.

Yet, very little, if any, of that information is translated on mobile. More than two thirds of people will research a product through a search engine before buying, and 25 percent of search engine results turn up social media posts and personal blogs. Customers who need to tweet in multiple languages to reach new markets often find that their English tweets stay in English and are not forwarded to the correct geographies. Now a new translation service technology turns around quality human translations in minutes for short digital text-like Tweets in the languages of your choice. Social media user generated content can be simultaneously translated into different languages on demand in real time.