In 1990, Kai-Fu Lee packed his bags and left Carnegie Mellon University, where he had been teaching artificial intelligence and speech recognition. He headed west to his first Silicon Valley job, running a new group trying to build speech interface technologies at Apple. Eight years later, Lee was hired by Microsoft with a specific mission: to go to China, start a research group, and develop a technology hub--and talent. Today, China's prowess in artificial intelligence can trace many of its roots back to that research group. In a now infamous move, Lee left Microsoft and--after prevailing against the company when it sued him for violating a noncompete agreement--went to Google in 2005 to lead Google China.

Astronomer (Release: 2018) Alex Pietrow made a splash in 2017 when he published endearingly lo-res photos of the moon and Jupiter shot with a 2-bit Game Boy camera. The Dutch PhD student quadruples his bit count with his latest retro project, an astrophotography video game he developed for the Atari 2600. You can buy the cartridge for $18 and plug it into the late-'70s console, or just play for free online. To earn points, swing the beam of a telescope through the night sky to photograph a moving celestial object. But watch out for those pesky clouds, which can block your target--and vaporize your high score.

Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air. This vision of the future is driving the government's "flying car" project. Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. and more than a dozen other companies and academic experts hope to have a road map for the plan ready by the year's end. "This is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind," said Fumiaki Ebihara, the government official in charge of the project. For now, nobody believes people are going to be zipping around in flying cars any time soon.

Chinese companies are "aggressively investing" in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and show more thirst for talent, a joint study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows, at a time when the race for AI superiority is in the spotlight around the world. The conclusion – based on a survey of over 3,000 participants in 126 countries and 300 executives from China – shines a light on China's ambitions in AI, which is seen as a major driver of the new economy, and the perceived competitive threat the country poses to other big economies. "China's rapid rise in AI has been a wake-up call for nations, industries and corporate executives globally," says the report, which was released on Tuesday and titled Artificial Intelligence in Business Gets Real. "Indeed, many recent national programmes to advance the development of AI refer to China as a competitive threat." Betting big on the core technology behind an array of cutting-edge applications from autonomous driving to facial recognition, China's State Council last July laid out a three-step road map to AI supremacy.

It builds up, like compound interest," Warren Buffett once told an audience. Of course, Buffett was talking about the value of reading, but his thesis about compounding knowledge works not just for human but also for machines. When people talk about artificial intelligence today, what they usually mean is machine learning. Researchers come up with a new model (algorithm), feed it data to help it learn, and then test it in the real world. According to industry pioneer Andrew Ng, the data here is more important than the algorithm itself. That's because vast computational power is mostly a commodity now and a handful of clever engineers can come up with a relatively robust algorithm, however, the ultimate prize in the AI research world is a giant pool of high-quality data.

A few years ago--the company won't say exactly when--some engineers at Apple began to think the iPhone's camera could be made smarter using newly powerful machine learning algorithms known as neural networks. Before long, they were talking with a lean vice president named Tim Millet. Millet leads a team of chip architects, who got to work. When the iPhone X was unveiled last fall, Apple's camera team had added a slick new portrait mode that can digitally adjust the lighting on subjects' faces, and artfully blur the background. It took advantage of a new module added to the iPhone's main chip called the neural engine, customized to run machine learning code.

From self-driving vehicles to smart cities, data is the driver behind AI. According to a McKinsey Global Institute study, nations that promote open data sources and data sharing are the ones most likely to see AI advances. A Brookings Institute report notes that "in this regard, the United States has an advantage over China. Global ratings on data openness show that US ranks eighth overall in the world, compared to 93rd for China". But right now, innovation in the United States is limited without a national strategy that answers questions about protocol and ownership.

NEW DELHI – Japanese companies are looking to tap India's medical market with funding and technological solutions to make health care more accessible in the world's second-most populous country. Japan-based venture capital firms like Spiral Ventures and India Japan Partnership Fund LLP are either funding local health tech startups or exploring new investment opportunities in the health care sector, and electronics giant Panasonic Corp. is offering solutions to improve rural health care. India has a huge health care gap between rich and poor and mismatches between doctors and patients. The situation is made worse by low government spending on health care at 1.3 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest among the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Spiral Ventures has invested in four health tech startups that offer digital solutions for the local market and is scouting for more such startups in which to invest, according to a top company official.

Remote medical consultation services that connect doctors and patients via smartphones and other devices are spreading across Japan, with their popularity boosted by recent deregulation of telemedicine. Under deregulation in April, health insurance can now be used for such consultations, and health care startups are expected to further accelerate the development of remote health care services that use artificial intelligence amid wider accumulation of health data on individuals. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry unveiled its vision for developing and utilizing a health care database to support telemedicine applications for remote diagnosis, remote treatment and telesurgery in its proposal titled "The Japan Vision: Health Care 2035," along with changes in the social environment, including a rapidly aging population and the advancement of medical technology. As an experiment for remote consultations, this reporter tried using the health care mobile app called curon, which is operated by Tokyo-based health care startup Micin Inc. After explaining via smartphone that "I have been taking large amounts of painkillers because I have been bothered by frequent headaches and fevers recently," a doctor., who appeared in a videophone call replied, "You'll lessen the strain on your stomach and kidneys if you change your medication."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is crucial in transforming businesses from followers to leaders. It promises to improve business operations and bring better customer experiences. There's just one catch – it's data hungry. For a majority of businesses in the Asia Pacific, this becomes the largest hurdle in adopting AI. More than half of them are struggling to gather and integrate big data into their operations.