Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – China's President Xi Jinping has arrived in Malaysia as part of a Southeast Asian tour which is seen as delivering a personal message that Beijing is a more reliable trading partner than the United States amid a bruising trade war with Washington. Xi arrived in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday evening in what is his first visit to Malaysia since 2013. He flew in from Vietnam where he had signed dozens of trade cooperation agreements in Hanoi on everything from artificial intelligence to rail development. On touching down, Xi said that deepening "high-level strategic cooperation" was good for the common interests of both China and Malaysia, and good for peace, stability and prosperity in the region and the world", according to the official Malaysian news agency Bernama. Xi's three-country tour and his "message" that Beijing is Southeast Asia's better friend than the truculent administration of US President Donald Trump comes as many countries in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc are unhappy with their treatment after the US imposed huge tariffs on countries around the world. "This is a very significant visit.

Microsoft will invest 2.2bn in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in Malaysia to support the country's digital transformation, the tech giant has said, following similar announcements in Indonesia and Thailand. The announcement by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday includes plans to establish an AI Centre of Excellence and provide education and training to 200,000 people in the Southeast Asian country. "We are committed to supporting Malaysia's AI transformation and ensure it benefits all Malaysians," Nadella said as he visited Kuala Lumpur on the final stop of a three-nation tour of Southeast Asia. "Our investments in digital infrastructure and skilling will help Malaysian businesses, communities, and developers apply the latest technology to drive inclusive economic growth and innovation across the country." Zafrul Abdul Aziz, Malaysia's minister of investment, trade and industry, said the investment reflected a "deep partnership built on trust".

--Federated learning (FL) enables edge devices to collaboratively train machine learning models, with model communication replacing direct data uploading. While over-the-air model aggregation improves communication efficiency, up-loading models to an edge server over wireless networks can pose privacy risks. Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used quantitative technique to measure statistical data privacy in FL. Previous research has focused on over-the-air FL with a single-antenna server, leveraging communication noise to enhance user-level DP . This approach achieves the so-called "free DP" by controlling transmit power rather than introducing additional DP-preserving mechanisms at devices, such as adding artificial noise. In this paper, we study differentially private over-the-air FL over a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channel. We show that FL model communication with a multiple-antenna server amplifies privacy leakage when the multiple-antenna server employs separate receive combining for model aggregation and information inference. Consequently, relying solely on communication noise, as done in the multiple-input single-output system, cannot meet high privacy requirements, and a device-side privacy-preserving mechanism is necessary for optimal DP design. We analyze the learning convergence and privacy loss of the studied FL system and propose a transceiver design algorithm based on alternating optimization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a better privacy-learning trade-off compared to prior work. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) applications that leverage massive data generated at the edge of wireless networks has attracted widespread interest [2], [3]. Federate learning (FL) is a popular paradigm for exploiting edge devices' data and computation power for distributed machine learning. FL coordinates the distributive training of an AI model on edge devices by periodically sharing model information with an edge server [4]. This work was supported in part by the General Research Fund (project number 14201920, 14202421, 14214122, 14202723), Area of Excellence Scheme grant (project number AoE/E-601/22-R), and NSFC/RGC Collaborative Research Scheme (project number CRS_HKUST603/22), all from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. The work of J. Y an was supported in part by the Guangzhou Municiple Science and Technology Project 2023A03J0011. Part of this work was presented at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, December 2023 [1]. He is now with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell Tech, Cornell University, NY 10044, USA.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Taipei, Taiwan – A United States government agency grounded its drone fleet over concerns China could use the unmanned aircraft for spying despite internal warnings that a ban would in fact increase security risks, documents obtained by Al Jazeera reveal. The US Department of Interior (DOI) also disregarded warnings the ban could hamper efforts to fight wildfires, months before officials reported the restrictions were making fire-fighting more difficult and dangerous, the documents show. The DOI, which manages public lands and resources in the US, ordered the temporary grounding of drones made in China or containing Chinese parts in October 2019 amid deep suspicion of Chinese technology within the administration of former US President Donald Trump. Then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt formalised the ban in January 2020 with an open-ended order grounding the DOI's entire 810-strong fleet of unmanned aircraft systems (UAVs) – whose uses include responding to natural disasters, geological surveys and wildlife population monitoring – until "cybersecurity, technology and domestic production concerns are adequately addressed". The order, which followed years of warnings that drones made by firms such as Shenzhen-based DJI could be secretly sending data to Beijing, included exceptions for emergency uses, such as fighting wildfires and search-and-rescue missions.

Technology is central to the country's sustainability agenda. Malaysia's commercial hub, Kuala Lumpur, has rolled out a smart city plan, which includes accelerating digital transformation by focusing on education and promoting cloud technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), among other areas. The Malaysian government has also emphasized technology investment in its Budget 2022, with up to MYR 100 million (US$ 23.7 million) in grants for areas such as smart automation and at least MYR 30 billion (US$ 7 billion) for government-linked companies investing in renewable energy, supply-chain modernization, and 5G infrastructure. In recent years, Kuala Lumpur has also seen an increasing number of "greening" opportunities. For instance, the city governance has employed a smart "City Brain", which uses Alibaba Cloud's computing systems to optimize services like traffic control and even calculate the best routes for emergency services.

KUALA LUMPUR (June 8): Half of current finance artificial intelligence (AI) deployments will be either delayed or cancelled by 2024, while the use of business process outsourcing (BPO) for AI will rise from 6% to 40% within two years. In a statement on Tuesday (June 7), technology and consulting firm Gartner Inc said chief financial officers (CFOs) face major barriers to scaling up the use of AI in-house and will increasingly turn to BPO solutions to meet their digital transformation objectives. Gartner said its experts provided CFOs with a breakdown view into some of the key predictions around the growing use of AI-driven technologies via the finance and accounting outsourcing market here on Tuesday during the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference. Gartner finance practice senior director analyst Sanjay Champaneri said while finance departments have made reasonable progress in laying the groundwork for AI, the challenges come when attempting to scale up solutions that can manage the complexities of function-wide use. "The upfront costs of building scalable infrastructure in house, and the overreliance on stretched citizen developers, will lead many CFOs to rethink their current strategies," he said.

Working as an aerospace engineer in Malaysia, Chee How Lim dreamed of building a startup that could really take off. Today his company, Tapway, is riding a wave of computer vision and AI adoption in Southeast Asia. A call for help in 2019 with video analytics led to the Kuala Lumpur-based company's biggest project to date. Malaysia's largest operator of toll highways, PLUS, wanted to reduce congestion for its more than 1.5 million daily travelers. A national plan called for enabling car, taxi, bus and truck traffic to flow freely across multiple lanes -- but that posed several big challenges.

Charles is currently editorial director for Asia at Economist Impact. He covers a territory spanning from Australia to India. His team works with many Western multinationals from the Fortune 500 but increasingly with Asian multinationals, governments, SMEs and high-growth technology firms as well. A native Australian, Charles is currently based in Singapore and has most recently managed the regions technology research practice. He is a frequent speaker at technology events, recently giving keynote presentations at events in Singapore, Australia, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

KUALA LUMPUR: Highways operator Prolintas has achieved another milestone by developing and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as part of their highway management. The highway concessionaire has been using the Smart Surveillance System (S3) and Prolintas Integrated Maintenance Escalations (Prime) which are based on smart technology system. This system upgrade has put Prolintas as the first in the country to utilise such advanced technology system in highway management operations. Prolintas group chief executive officer Datuk Mohammad Azlan Abdullah said the system upgrade was aimed to improve the level of highway efficiency. "By using S3, we will be able to do highway surface monitoring, faulty assets detection, road accidents, foreign object, stagnant water areas and animal presence. "Apart from that, it will also be able to do live video streaming (of the highway), real-time integrated notification and reporting.

KUALA LUMPUR – Disney has cut a lesbian kiss from the latest "Star Wars" movie, Singapore's media regulator said on Tuesday, so that more children can watch it. The two minor female characters embrace but do not kiss in the version of "The Rise of Skywalker" shown in Singapore, local media said, as the ninth film in the celebrated science-fiction series rakes in millions from loyal fans. "The applicant has omitted a brief scene which under the Film Classification Guidelines would require a higher rating," a spokeswoman from Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority said. Disney, which owns the "Star Wars" production company Lucasfilm, did not respond to a request for comment on its decision to cut the scene from the last installment of the second highest-grossing movie franchise of all time. It concludes a story that began in 1977, when filmmaker George Lucas introduced a young hero named Luke Skywalker and delighted audiences with a galaxy of robots, furry warriors known as Wookiees and a host of other eclectic characters.