The year brought AI into the mainstream where numerous businesses warmed up to it, embraced it and reaped handsome results. Digital Marketing, being immensely data driven, has been one of the early adopters of AI and witnessed tremendous impact. Digital Marketing is all about harnessing the power of data to create campaigns that are personalized to fit the desires and interests of the customers. Interacting with the customers at the right time on the right platform with the right message is critical to a campaign's success. The competitive edge for a marketer is based on how quickly one can analyze the incoming data and recalibrate a campaign to outmaneuver the competition.

If 2018 was the year we learnt to hate tech, then 2019 must be the year it hopes to win us back. It might seem that recently the industry has given up on its aspirations to revolutionise knowledge and communications, and instead focused on sowing disinformation and monetising our private lives. It was blamed for election results and mental health crises, finally changing the world on the scale its proponents promise – but not for the better. As the new year begins, companies will be defined by their response to these challenges. It seems unlikely that the largest tech companies will rise or fall any time soon, but we will likely point to this time as the moment things changed.

What would we find, if we could look into the future? Will we be living like the Jetsons.. served by machines? Or will we be trying to battle the machines.. like the Terminator? Today there's a new technology race that pits the US against both China and Russia. It's the race for A.I... artificial intelligence... which many believe will define the century and maybe our survival.

Apple is finally launching HomePod in China, but the timing is tricky as the premium device will have to wrestle with local competitors and a slowing economy. The firm said over the weekend that its smart speaker will be available in Mainland China and Hong Kong starting January 18, adding to a list of countries where it has entered including US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico and Spain. The Amazon Echo competitor, which launched in mid-2017, is already available to Chinese buyers through third-party channels like "daigou", or shopping agents who bring overseas products into China. What separates the new model is that it supports Mandarin, the official language on Mainland China and Cantonese, which is spoken in Hong Kong and China's most populated province Guangdong. Previously, Chinese-speaking users had to converse with HomePod in English until a system update in December that added Siri support for the two Chinese dialects.

Hong Kong has seen multiple data breaches and hacking incidents during the year, prompting worries that cybercrimes are posing a growing threat to businesses and organizations. The Hong Kong Economic Journal recently sat down with information security expert William Tam, Director of Sales Engineering, APAC, at US-based data protection services firm Forcepoint, to discuss the cyber-security threats and how latest technologies like artificial intelligence can help companies protect their data. HKEJ: We understand that Forcepoint recently published the "Forcepoint Cybersecurity Forecast Report for 2019," and in the report, you highlighted the latest market trend in artificial intelligence (AI). Can you elaborate on that? Tam: In the report, we mentioned that companies are now analyzing and looking at AI technology calmly, seeking to utilize the technology.

A Hong-Kong-based firm catering to the finance sector, wanted to revamp its business by implementing an online platform to carry out transactions, and thus remain relevant. A decryption of this requirement revealed that the holistic online platform should enable effortless customer onboarding, data encryption, and implementation of e-KYC, a component that seamlessly authenticates users indulging in online transactions. The firm's pursuit for an ideal solution vendor led to Datatech.ai, a subsidiary of Prizm Group, based in Hong Kong, known for engineering digital products and services powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since its inception, the firm has carved a niche by engineering innovative online and mobile payment solutions that have benefited several enterprises around Hong Kong. "Our aim is to empower clients by delivering enterprise-specific data analytics and AI solutions," mentions William Hung, Business Development Director, Datatech.ai.

Technology has penetrated in every sphere of our lives. We live, love, eat and sleep on #technology now. Each year, we see technology moving deeper and deeper into our existence. Good because it helps us in doing more in less time and efforts. Bad because interweaving of tech in our lives has left us dependent, vulnerable and very anxious.

India's Kumbh Mela festival is billed as the world's biggest gathering of people. Between now and March organisers expect about 120 million pilgrims to bathe at the Sangam - the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers. Hindus believe that doing so will cleanse them of their sins and help them attain "moksha", setting them free from the cycle of birth and death. So how does one prepare for a gathering of humanity so mammoth it can be seen from outer space? The mela (Hindi for fair) is held in the northern city of Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) every 12 years. On Tuesday, when the festival formally begins, officials are preparing for 15 to 20 million visitors.

Despite what you hear about artificial intelligence, machines still can't think like a human, but in the last few years they have become capable of learning. And suddenly, our devices have opened their eyes and ears and cars have taken the wheel. Today, artificial intelligence is not as good as you hope and not as bad as you fear, but humanity is accelerating into a future that few can predict. That's why so many people are desperate to meet Kai-Fu Lee, the oracle of AI. Kai-Fu Lee is in there, somewhere, in a selfie scrum at a Beijing Internet Conference.

In the current field of computer vision, automatically generating texts from given images has been a fully worked technique. Up till now, most works of this area focus on image content describing, namely image-captioning. However, rare researches focus on generating product review texts, which is ubiquitous in the online shopping malls and is crucial for online shopping selection and evaluation. Different from content describing, review texts include more subjective information of customers, which may bring difference to the results. Therefore, we aimed at a new field concerning generating review text from customers based on images together with the ratings of online shopping products, which appear as non-image attributes. We made several adjustments to the existing image-captioning model to fit our task, in which we should also take non-image features into consideration. We also did experiments based on our model and get effective primary results.