Chinese telecom giant Huawei is at the centre of an increasingly tense standoff between China and the US. What began as a trade spat and grievances over corporate intellectual property theft has developed into a global standoff involving "hostage diplomacy", death sentences and allegations of Chinese espionage. Huawei's senior executive Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada in December over allegations of sanctions violations, and awaits extradition to the US. Meanwhile, three Canadians remain in police custody in China – with one of them sentenced to death this month. Washington, meanwhile, has said it will file a formal extradition request for Meng by the 30 January deadline.

We have been building models to follow historical trends and make predictions on what will happen based on past data. Now, we have machines that can observe the environment, learn the "unspoken rules" of the environment and adapt its actions to explore & exploit the environment like a human; just don't hold your breath for artificial general intelligence (yet). AI in 2018 is not just about games and we now see real-world applications. In healthcare, deep learning models can perform as well as a human expert in analyzing electron microscopy or in detecting eye diseases. For the environment and climate, AI is helping to build better climate models, mapping millions of solar roofs in the US, detecting hyperspectral signatures of underwater objects to monitor ocean health & many other animal conservation works.

FinTech is a hot topic, not just in India, but globally. Not just the big banks and IT companies, several startups are trying to crack the next big thing which will shape the future of banking, including tech like blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With Datathon, YES Bank, India's fourth largest private sector bank has taken upon itself to figure out how to leverage the new age technologies and turn them into scalable solutions. Launched in September 2018, YES Bank Datathon had 6000 Data scientists, engineers, and developers work to develop 20 data-driven products in an accelerated 100 day period. The top 200 teams (out of 1600) included not only students from top technology institutes like IIT Bombay, Chennai, Kharagpur, but also 150 professionals from organizations like IBM, Walmart Labs, Siemens, Amazon Development Centre, Capillary Technology, TCS, Accenture, Amdocs and Infosys.

While much of the mainstream discussion around AI focuses on the two biggest technology players, the USA and China, other initiatives from around the world are quietly leading the way. In many ways the UK has also positioned itself as a leader in this space through the creation of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the Regulators Pioneer Fund. Canada is taking strong action on responsible AI use in government and will be the first country to implement a directive laying out the rules of applying algorithms in the public sphere. Similarly, while the US still lacks any federal laws on self-driving cars, countries like Austria and Singapore are pursuing comprehensive approaches to modernising the entirety of their transportation systems towards autonomous mobility. Such initiatives include a straightforward regulatory environment, large-scale public-private partnerships and they address a range of issues around autonomous mobility that go beyond technology-readiness levels, from infrastructural requirements to societal acceptance.

It was not long ago thatArtificial Intelligence (AI) was only in the realm of science fiction. Today, it has become a reality and is only growing more prominent in many different industries every day. This includes the internet as AI in search engine technology has been around for a few years. The algorithms used to rank pages have been affected considerably by AI already and that trend will continue into the foreseeable future. How Popular Search Engines Will Evolve in the AI Process Currently, Google's RankBrain, an AI process used help set search engine rankings, is having a major impact which is only expected to expand.

With several leaders raising concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant on Thursday said it is going to transform the life of human beings. "The challenge in India is very different to the Western world. We believe AI is going to transform the life of human beings," Kant said here at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. "How do you provide better data, images to your doctors, how do you track individual students who are not performing well so you can improve learning outcomes. AI needs to be accessed in a very scientific manner for transforming lives of citizens," he said.

Bias in algorithms is more common than you might think. An academic paper in 2012 showed that facial recognition systems from vendor Cognitec performed 5 to 10 percent worse on African Americans than on Caucasians, and researchers in 2011 found that models developed in China, Japan, and South Korea had difficulty distinguishing between Caucasians and East Asians. In another recent study, popular smart speakers made by Google and Amazon were found to be 30 percent less likely to understand non-American accents than those of native-born users. And a 2016 paper concluded that word embeddings in Google News articles tended to exhibit female and male gender stereotypes. The good news is, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) are working toward a solution.

The Dubai Taxi Corporation has launched a new control centre and reviewed its smart transformation plan. In a recent visit to the DTC headquarters, Mattar Al Tayer, Director-General and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), inaugurated the new control centre of Dubai Taxi, which covers all taxi services. The centre also monitors negative practices of offensive drivers, attendance & dispersal of students and bus conductors, tracks bus movement, and controls the fleet. It also manages the operation of 505 limousines, 'Mashaweer' and'In Safe Hands' services as well as the smart towing service. It also enables electronic surveillance of taxi movement, verifies compliance with work controls, and moves stopping and late-coming vehicles.

Editor's note: Noah Wang is co-founder and chief marketing officer of TOP Network, a Silicon Valley-based tech firm developing a business-friendly public blockchain and the world's first blockchain-based cloud communication network. The article reflects the author's views, and not necessarily those of CGTN. Earlier in January, at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bloomberg released the 2019 Bloomberg Innovation Index, which ranks the most innovative countries using criteria including R&D investment, manufacturing capability, and patent activity. China jumped three spots to the 16th compared with a year before, beating the UK for the first time. However, Bloomberg index showed that China lagged far behind its innovative peers such as six-time champion the Republic of Korea as well as the U.S. and Japan, which secured their places among the top 10.

It's going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool. World over, political practices are in decline. I was shocked to see the advertising expenses by political leaders. Just imagine, we work hard, earn money, pay taxes and then, our tax money is used on advertising to tell us that we are doing so great. Come on, we have worked hard and we know that we are doing great.