George Devol who came from the USA designed the first programmable robot in 1969. It meant that the robot age had started from then on. However, in about 989 BC, during western Zhou Dynasty, a Chinese man whose name was Yan Shi made a wood robot. It looked like a real man and it was able to do many actions. It was good at dancing and it has a heart, a stomach and other things in its body. It also had teeth and hair. It could express its feelings by using its eyes. Its eyes could move and could show love to women, but it couldn't laugh. It was probably the earliest robot in the world.

Not all robots always look like humans. They have various shapes. They are clever and they can do all kinds of jobs, especially difficult and dangerous jobs. They are widely used in factories, banks, hospitals and other places. In the future, robots will make fewer mistakes, even can correct themselves and they will be smarter. It's possible that we will have a robot in our own home. They will do more things for us. We will have more free time to have a rest, to relax ourselves with the help of robots. I believe that we can have a better life.

It's reported that a Chinese company has created a new facial recognition system that can identify (识别) people even if they are wearing masks. Developers began working on the new system in January 2020 when the novel coronavirus appeared in China. The fast spread of the virus has led most people to wear masks in public to protect themselves and people around.

China is regarded as a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). According to engineers at the Beijing-based Hanwang Technology Ltd, this system is the first to be created to identify people wearing face masks. A team of 20 engineers completed it in about a month, adding a collection of about 6 million unmasked faces and a smaller collection of masked faces," the company said.

Hanwang is now selling two main kinds of products using the new technology. One performs single channel recognition (单通道识别), which will be used at the entrances to buildings. The other product is a multi-channel (多通道识别) recognition system that uses groups of cameras. It's said that the multi-channel system can identify a person in a crowd of up to 30 people within a second.

When people wear a mask, the recognition rate   can reach about 95 percent," said Huang Lei, Hanwang's vice president. The system's success rate for people without wearing a mask is about 99. 5 percent."

Nowadays the new system is trying to identify people with both sunglasses and a mask. In such cases, all of the key facial information is lost, making recognition hard," Huang said.