They're starting to dominate entire sectors of AI and robotics. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth "See you in Vegas?" As a China tech writer based in the US, I have one week a year when my entire beat seems to come to me--no 20-hour flights required. CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world's biggest tech show, where companies launch new gadgets and announce new developments, and it happens every January.

They came for the 27th Tokyo Game Show, which was back in full ostentatious form this year after a pandemic hiatus and a timorous return in 2022. Most came hoping for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet-unreleased video games on display within the show's 11 hangars. Others hoped to broker deals to have their video game published, or to publish someone else's. To step through the front doors was to enter a scene of roaring overstimulation. A babble of tens of thousands of voices clashed with a competing timpani of video game trailers.

After two years without a full-fledged, in-person CES, automotive suppliers and vehicle technology providers – and their customers – are eager for CES 2023, which is just a few months away. Even before a trend of diminishing support for some of the major auto shows around the globe, longtime auto journalist and analyst John McElroy called CES the world's best auto show. And it appears the 2023 version, slated for Jan. 3-8, 2023, in Las Vegas, may maintain that status. Gary Shapiro, president and CEO at Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which hosts the event, recently said that excitement is building, as CTA is expecting attendance to surpass 100,000 people. Of even greater interest to automotive and mobility supplier PR professionals, the automotive technology section of the show's floor is sold out, and in the first week of media registration, more than 1,000 journalists have already signed up.

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference, or WAIC, will open in Shanghai tomorrow. The World Artificial Intelligence Conference, or WAIC, China's top AI event, will open on Thursday, with leading business executives participating and new tech innovations and products making debut. As the first batch of restarted exhibitions and conferences in Shanghai following the lift of the city's COVID-19 lockdown in June, the three-day WAIC 2022 will see strict pandemic prevention measures in place. As a result, many events will be held online with metaverse innovations. Scientists and business executives, including Huawei's rotating chairman Ken Hu and Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon, will attend the opening session tomorrow morning.

The team at Retrocausal built a computer vision platform that allows any manufacturer to rapidly set up an activity recognition pipeline to assist with manual assemblies. Using any standard camera pointed at an assembly station, the system can learn the assembly procedure and give real-time feedback. At Deci, they are tackling the problem of taking a Machine Learning model optimized for a single hardware platform and adapting it to work on a different hardware platform. When developing an ML model running on the edge, a time-consuming development cycle is made to optimize the model to run at peak capacity. However, over time hardware platforms get updated and companies need to make the decision of whether or not to update their hardware and dedicate engineering resources to manually tweak a multitude of settings.

We spoke to the exhibitors to get real-life demos of their products. Tangram Vision is a hardware-agnostic sensor fusion platform. Their co-founder, Adam Rodnitzky, walks us through their sensor fusion platform. Matt Bilsky, Founder and CEO of FLX Solutions gives us a live demo of their robot, the FLX BOT. Matt Bilsky applied his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering to create a novel, highly compact robot that is designed to reach and inspect parts of a building that a human cannot reach.

Every year, ICRA gathers an astonishing number of robot makers. With a quick look at the exhibitors, one can already perceive the immense creativity and inventiveness that creators put in their robots. To my eyes, creating a robot is an art: how does a robot should look like? What would it be good for? Should we go for legs or wheels?

The IEEE International Conference on Automation and Robotics, ICRA, is the itinerant flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, RAS. In its 39th edition, ICRA is being held in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, in Philadelphia, PA, USA, between May 23 and 27, 2022. ICRA started just after the birth of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (formerly IEEE Robotics and Automation Council) in 1983. The first edition was held in Atlanta, GA, USA, in 1984. During its first years, the conference showed the growing interest of researchers and industry leaders in the emergent field of robotics.

Las Vegas (AFP) - A lifelike, child-size doll writhed and cried before slightly shocked onlookers snapping smartphone pictures Wednesday at the CES tech show -- where the line between cool and slightly disturbing robots can be thin. "Oh!The eyes are very scary," said Marcelo Humerez, an exhibitor from Peru who happened upon the Pedia-Roid, which is designed for medical training, as its eyes went white. But just a few stands away, a humanoid named Ameca got a decidedly different reception, as it chatted with a curious crowd that marveled at its ability to make a range of stunningly person-like gestures. "Whoa, robot!I didn't expect that when I turned the corner," said Ricky Rivera, an exhibitor with Canada-based tech company Geotab."But it looks amazing and it tracked me right away." Both reactions were, in some ways, exactly what the makers had been aiming for.

CES 2022 will put the spotlight on electric vehicles, digital health, the metaverse and other hot technologies when the trade show officially opens on Wednesday. But the resurgent Covid-19 pandemic threatens to overshadow the innovations on display. CES 2022 officially runs Jan. 5-7, but preshow media events begin on Monday. The upcoming show will be a hybrid event with an in-person conference in Las Vegas along with an online component for those who can't attend the physical show. On Friday, organizers shortened the physical show by one day.