China, the most populous country in the world, has close to one billion people that speak Mandarin. Spanish is spoken by a less than half that number, primarily in Mexico, Spain and the countries in South America. English follows close behind, with Hindi in India and Arabic in the Middle East making up the top five. Or so you would think. The most common language in the world is actually not human at all.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology will enable simpler user interfaces, which will help banks create a more human-like customer experience. The technology has become efficient in gaining extensive data analytics and customer insights, which will help banks to create a more personalised customer experience, according to Aspect Software. Four in five bankers believe AI will "revolutionise" the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report as customers are looking for a fast, efficient solution to their queries. The new report revealed that AI will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed and also found that, while the number of human interactions in bank branches or over the phone was falling and would continue to do so, the quality and importance of human contact would increase. Stephen Ball, SVP Sales, Europe and Africa at Aspect Software, suggests that as the banking world continues to change with the adoption of new technologies, and a growing number of'challenger banks' and fintech providers emerging to shake up the established order, traditional banks are responding by improving their customers' experience.

In late February, the UN-Secretary General held a press conference, highlighting the risk of starvation in East Africa and the necessity to raise funds to address the emergency situations in Somalia and South Sudan. Drought has been back in these countries and their neighbours since 2016, leading to a huge current food crisis. While governments are trying to handle the situation, how could technology innovations help prevent starvation and improve agriculture management in the future? We met with Laurent Rivière, a French 30 years-old entrepreneur, who shared with us his view on the subject with a combination of engineer pragmatism and changemaker idealism . Founder and CEO at Sunbirds for two years, he explained to us how his "bird of the sun," his solar drone, is addressing the agriculture challenges of the 21st century.

One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

In March, robot programming students took part in the 2016-17 FIRST LEGO LEAGUE competition (FLL) with the theme'ANIMAL ALLIES'. FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a program that supports children and youngsters and introduces them to science and technology in a sporty atmosphere. The theme of this year's FLL competition was to explore the relationship between people and animals. Today, it's time to think about how we can help each other. What might become possible when we work together with our ANIMAL ALLIES?

Amazon's Alexa can summon an Uber and satisfy a four-year-old's demand for fart noises. Siri can control your Internet-connected thermostat. Each serve millions of users each day. But a lucky group of around 10,000 people, mostly in California, know that Facebook's assistant, named M, is the smartest of the bunch. Recommend and reserve a romantic hotel in Morocco that's also suitable for small children?

A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat's level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at the University of Bristol in England, was looking for an objective way to tell whether animals in captivity were suffering. Specifically, he wanted to be able to measure whether, and how much, disruptions in lab rats' routines--being placed in an unfamiliar cage, say, or experiencing a change in the light/dark cycle of the room in which they were housed--were bumming them out. He and his colleagues explicitly drew on an extensive literature in psychology that describes how people with mood disorders such as depression process information and make decisions: They tend to focus on and recall more negative events and to judge ambiguous things in a more negative way. You might say that they tend to see the proverbial glass as half-empty rather than half-full. "We thought that it's easier to measure cognitive things than emotional ones, so we devised a test that would give us some indication of how animals responded under ambiguity," Mendl says.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is abruptly reversing himself on key issues. "After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it's not so easy," the president said after a discussion with Chinese President Xi Jinping that included his hopes that China's pressure could steer North Korea away from its nuclear efforts. "I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power" over North Korea, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "But it's not what you would think." That's just one of several recent comments offering insight into what looks like a moderate makeover for an immoderate president.

Artificially intelligent robots and devices are being taught to be racist, sexist and otherwise prejudiced by learning from humans, according to new research. A massive study of millions of words online looked at how closely different terms were to each other in the text – the same way that automatic translators use "machine learning" to establish what language means. The researchers found male names were more closely associated with career-related terms than female ones, which were more closely associated with words related to the family. This link was stronger than the non-controversial findings that musical instruments and flowers were pleasant and weapons and insects were unpleasant. Female names were also strongly associated with artistic terms, while male names were found to be closer to maths and science ones.