As the CEO of one of the top global AI-powered biotechnology companies, I regularly get to see some of the world's most innovative techno parks and biotechnology hubs that are popping up all over the world. Over the past couple of years, I traveled to several such centers in the US, Canada, China, Singapore, and the Middle East. We even established one of our R&D centers at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. All of these centers have their advantages and disadvantages that often go in line with the government policies and I will try to cover some of these centers in my future posts and make a comparison. So far, some of the most impressive biotechnology hubs are in China and in Singapore.

Non verbal behaviours such as gestures, facial expressions, body posture, and para-linguistic cues have been shown to complement or clarify verbal messages. Hence to improve telepresence, in form of an avatar, it is important to model these behaviours, especially in dyadic interactions. Creating such personalized avatars not only requires to model intrapersonal dynamics between a avatar's speech and their body pose, but it also needs to model interpersonal dynamics with the interlocutor present in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a neural architecture named Dyadic Residual-Attention Model (DRAM), which integrates intrapersonal (monadic) and interpersonal (dyadic) dynamics using selective attention to generate sequences of body pose conditioned on audio and body pose of the interlocutor and audio of the human operating the avatar. We evaluate our proposed model on dyadic conversational data consisting of pose and audio of both participants, confirming the importance of adaptive attention between monadic and dyadic dynamics when predicting avatar pose. We also conduct a user study to analyze judgments of human observers. Our results confirm that the generated body pose is more natural, models intrapersonal dynamics and interpersonal dynamics better than non-adaptive monadic/dyadic models.

Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the online sharing of medical information, with videos representing a large fraction of such online sources. Previous studies have however shown that more than half of the health-related videos on platforms such as YouTube contain misleading information and biases. Hence, it is crucial to build computational tools that can help evaluate the quality of these videos so that users can obtain accurate information to help inform their decisions. In this study, we focus on the automatic detection of misinformation in YouTube videos. We select prostate cancer videos as our entry point to tackle this problem. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce a new dataset consisting of 250 videos related to prostate cancer manually annotated for misinformation. Second, we explore the use of linguistic, acoustic, and user engagement features for the development of classification models to identify misinformation. Using a series of ablation experiments, we show that we can build automatic models with accuracies of up to 74%, corresponding to a 76.5% precision and 73.2% recall for misinformative instances.

Amazon's Prime Day is July 16. Chinese tech IPOs are the talk of the town this week following Xiaomi's listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In spite of its less-than-ideal debut, analysts expect a flood of Chinese tech firms--including Jack Ma-backed Ant Financial and online food delivery service Meituan-Dianping--to go public this year. A month ago, another Chinese tech company with grand ambitions had already made the jump: Ecovacs Robotics, whose line of robot vacuum cleaners dominate its native Chinese market and on Amazon.com. Headquarted in Suzhou, Ecovacs raised 803 million yuan ($121 million) when it listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on May 28, making its founder, Qian Dongqi, a billionaire.

The three-day expo opened here on Thursday, attracting more than 200 exhibitors from ten countries and regions, with some 1,000 AI products on show. Visitors watch a concept unmanned vehicle at the Global AI Product Application Expo 2018, in Suzhou of east China's Jiangsu Province, May 10, 2018. The three-day expo opened here on Thursday, attracting more than 200 exhibitors from ten countries and regions, with some 1,000 AI products on show. The three-day expo opened here on Thursday, attracting more than 200 exhibitors from ten countries and regions, with some 1,000 AI products on show. The three-day expo opened here on Thursday, attracting more than 200 exhibitors from ten countries and regions, with some 1,000 AI products on show.

This article is part of a series that explores how artificial intelligence could change life in China. Lü moved to Shanghai in 2014 from his hometown in central China's Henan province, one of the country's poorer provinces, to work at an app development company. A year later, his wife joined him, leaving their son back in Henan with his grandparents. Living some 800 kilometers away is not an ideal situation, says Lü, but it's a necessary compromise to give the whole family a better life. Because he's only able to visit his son around six times a year, Lü spends generously on whatever he thinks will help the boy's intellectual development -- from cheap toys and storybooks to a 1,200-yuan ($180) robot playmate named Ledi, who's powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

SINGAPORE - Start-ups working on artificial intelligence (AI) will now have a centre in Suzhou to help them venture into the Chinese market. Besides offering one-stop services for the start-ups, the centre aims to incubate 15 innovative companies in its first five years and promote National University of Singapore (NUS) technologies. The NUS Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Commercialisation Centre is a $20 million collaboration between NUS and Suzhou Industrial Park Administrative Committee. It will start operating from January 2018, focusing on advancing "AI research, innovation, application and commercialisation across various areas, including healthcare, financial technology and smart city", NUS said in a statement. "It will provide technology incubation support and solutions to start-ups and small businesses, helping them solve problems with AI as well as accelerate the adoption of AI to promote and form an AI ecosystem and industrial chain in the Suzhou area." The centre will also provide NUS students with opportunities for internship stints as well as lectures and symposiums to connect professionals in the artificial intelligence field.