Sony Corp. on Wednesday showed off the latest tricks of its signature robotic dog, Aibo, including a new security capability of patrolling inside a house. Teaming up with security company Secom Co. Ltd., the Japanese electronics giant will roll out the new roaming security feature for free in a system software update scheduled for mid-February. Specifically, up to 10 names and faces can be registered on the My Aibo app, and the user's Aibo can then be programmed to walk around predetermined areas in a home or other structure at designated times to check whether any of the registered individuals are present. The user will subsequently receive a report from the Aibo. The patrolling task is the first feature that showcases the Aibo's ability to remember and recognize spaces, said Izumi Kawanishi, Sony's senior vice president in charge of the artificial intelligence robotics business.

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The year brought AI to the mainstream where numerous businesses warmed up to it, adopted it and reaped fine results. Digital Marketing, being immensely data-driven, has been among the early adopters of both AI and witnessed enormous effects. Digital Marketing is all about harnessing the power of data to produce campaigns that are customized to match the needs and interests of the consumers. Interacting with the customers at the perfect time on the perfect platform with the ideal message is essential to a campaign's success. The competitive edge for a marketer is dependent on how quickly one can assess the incoming data and recalibrate a campaign to outmaneuver the competition.

Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, the three Chinese tech giants loosely equivalent to Google, Amazon, and Facebook, are not just developing and deploying AI themselves. Their deep pockets have also funded a broad range of AI companies, focused on everything from smart cities to finance to education. Here is also an English translation of the article it originated in, courtesy of Jeffrey Ding, who writes the ChinAI newsletter.) It revealed that BAT invests in 53% of the nation's 190 major AI companies. This may not surprise those of you who closely follow China's AI ecosystem. Looked at one way, the landscape shows how intensely these companies are striving to outdo one another.

Would you ever consider purchasing diamond jewelry online? Lots of people have -- according to Research and Markets, the jewelry ecommerce market accounts for roughly 5 percent of the $257 billion overall jewelry industry, a share that's expected to triple by 2020. It's growing especially quickly in Asia, where the compound annual growth rate from 2011 to 2014 exceeded 60 percent. But if you're reluctant to dive in, you're not the only one -- there's a lot of uncertainty in the online diamond-buying market. High-resolution photos alone don't always tell the full story, particularly if they're lit unnaturally.

Have you seen this person? The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) is building artificial intelligence that can answer such a question. Despite privacy concerns over CCTV, the task of finding specific individuals in captured footage, or pinpointing people caught on camera in different places, is a tough one. There's no telling how differently someone may appear, or behave, from one camera to another.

Candidates from fields like big data analysis, machine learning and data science will be in demand in 2019, a report by Michael Page, a Singapore-based global professional recruitment consultancy, said. The candidates will get a 20% to 25% increase in their compensation package while switching jobs within their respective industries this year, the recruitment consultancy has predicted. "There will be a major movement among senior professionals who can contribute to the growth of India's industries. There are also accountable and skilled candidates for employment opportunities within mid- and large-manufacturing industries especially in chemicals, building materials and domestic consumer companies," Nicolas Dumoulin, Managing Director, Michael Page India said. "The entrance of newly-evolved funds within the private equity sector has led to the hiring of senior professionals. The rise in India's e-commerce and financial technology business has increased the hiring opportunities for senior-level talent from banking spaces," he said.

An Alaska company that makes a parachute system for drones came to Rome to conduct federal validation tests for its product. Indemnis sent a team to the New York Unmanned Aerial Systems Test Site at Griffiss International Airport in Rome in December to demonstrate its Nexus parachute system, according to a news release issued Wednesday by DJI, the Shenzhen, China-based maker of a line of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, and NUAIR. DJI has lines of drones for use in photography, film making, law enforcement, construction, agriculture and consumers. The companies began working together two years ago to develop a system that can deploy instantly if a drone gets into trouble. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibits most drone operations over people, but operators can get a waiver if they show they have safety measures.

What does a nuclear power plant disaster have to do with machine learning? The safety plan for Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was designed using the historical data for past 400 years. The structural engineers designed the plant to withstand an earthquake of 8.6 intensity on Richter scale and a tsunami as high as 5.7 meters. These threshold numbers were decided using predictive modeling. So, they had the data for earthquakes(intensity and annual frequency) in last 400 years and they were looking for a model that can help predict the earthquakes in future.

According to Gartner Inc. AI is going to be one of the biggest the trends. It will be the number one driver of business change with reports suggesting the market size to reach $20 billion by 2022. While with over 400 people killed in road accidents every day and over 1.3 million people killed in India over the past one decade. There is a dire need to improve road safety in India. Artificial Intelligence can prominently play a role in bridging the gap by improving efficiency in driving patterns.