South Korean tech Major LG Electronics has announced that Google Assistant is coming to its 2018 line-up of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled ThinQ TVs in seven new countries. The company's ThinQ TVs came with integrated Google's digital assistant when they were introduced in the US and added support for Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa's commands soon after. "Google Assistant will be available in Canada, Australia and the UK, with support coming to South Korea, Spain, France and Germany by the end of the year," The Verge reported late on Friday. "The built-in ThinQ AI, which runs on LG's own'WebOS' can be used for TV-specific commands, such as'search for the soundtrack of this movie', while Google Assistant and Alexa can be used as a smart home hub," it said. The company was also planning on bringing Amazon Alexa support to Australia and Canada in the future.

Fortnite may be a free video game, but it's already earned $1 billion this year, as well as a cult following. A crowd gathers to buy copies of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" during a launch event for the highly anticipated video game at a GameStop Corp. store November 7, 2011 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. The worldwide video game market could grow from $137.9 billion this year to $180.1 billion by 2021, according to Newzoo. The research firm also expects the top five video game markets to generate nearly $98 billion in revenue this year. China famously banned video game consoles for 15 years (2000 to 2015) due to fears about their impact on children's development, but that merely turned PCs – and later, mobile devices – into its main gaming platforms. China is now home to Tencent (NASDAQOTH: TCEHY), the largest video game publisher in the world.

The report, based on more than 200 interviews with industry players as well as a host of workshops, concludes that AI is "fundamentally changing the physics of financial services". This is largely because big FS firms are taking a page from the AI book of big tech firms. Rather than a proprietary mindset, they are developing applications and making them available as a service through the cloud. For example, in China, Ping An's One Connect sells AI-powered services ranging from credit adjudication to instantaneous insurance claims settlement to hundreds of small and mid-sized Chinese banks and is expected to fetch up to $3 billion at public sale. Meanwhile, in the US, BlackRock's Aladdin, which provides risk analytics and portfolio management tools that leverage machine learning to asset managers and insurers, is expected to provide 30% of the firm's revenues by 2022. Jesse McWaters, AI in Financial Services project lead at the WEF, says AI "is turning what were historically cost centres into new source of profitability, and creating a virtuous cycle of self-learning that accelerates their lead."

TAMPA, FLORIDA – Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter. The spacecraft is designed to circle Bennu, and reach out with a robotic arm to "high-five" its surface, then return the sample it collects to Earth in 2023. The first images of Bennu were taken on Aug. 17 at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million km) from the $800 million spacecraft. "This is the closest we have even been to Bennu," said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are collaborating on a new approach to help students learn Mandarin. The strategy pairs an AI-powered assistant with an immersive classroom environment that has not been used previously for language instruction. The classroom, called the Cognitive Immersive Room (CIR), makes students feel as though they are in restaurant in China, a garden, or a Tai Chi class, where they can practice speaking Mandarin with an AI chat agent. The CIR was developed by the Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab (CISL), a research collaboration between IBM Research and RPI. CISL researchers demonstrate an AI-assisted Mandarin Chinese language learning aid.

Many people worry that the development of self-driving technology will put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work. What often gets missed is that self-driving technology companies are going to create plenty of jobs, too. Most obviously, high-end jobs will spring up for engineers designing the necessary hardware and software. But there are also going to be jobs for workers further down the income spectrum, doing things like taking customer calls, cleaning and repairing cars, and updating the high-definition maps that cars use to move around. The Google spinoff plans to launch a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area before the end of the year.

Prudential Corporation Asia and UK-based Babylon Health (Babylon) have partnered for AI-backed digital health services in Asia. The partnership will see Babylon's AI expertise made available to existing and new customers of Prudential across Asia. Prudential has more than five million medical insurance customers in Asia and premium income exceeded £800 million in 2017. Based in the UK, Babylon offers AI-powered health services, including personal health assessment and treatment information. The Prudential-Babylon proposition will offer customers in up to 12 markets in Asia 24/7 access to a comprehensive set of digital health tools, complementing Prudential's existing suite of insurance products.

Korean Air's fleet of 139 passenger planes carries millions of passengers across the globe every year. Ensuring each plane is safe and well-maintained is a priority. When Korean Air addressed line maintenance issues with its fleet, its team of 2,000-plus maintenance employees has historically had to pore over troves of maintenance records to find crucial data on everything from how to fix an important plane part to a plane's maintenance history. "Maintenance issues represent a substantial cost to an airline--to the tune of 28 percent of the total operating cost," said Rob Ranieri, Vice President and Partner, Global Industry Offering Leader, Travel and Transportation at IBM. To remedy this tedious and costly practice, Korean Air recently enlisted IBM Watson Explorer to compile and analyze data from various sources, including technician notes, material cost data and in-flight incident history.

Sony on Thursday announced that its Aibo robotic dogs infused with artificial intelligence will be unleashed on the US market by the year-end holiday season, with a price tag of $2,899. The sixth-generation mechanical pup combines robotics with image sensors and artificial intelligence, enabling it to learn behaviours and recognise faces, according to the Japanese consumer electronics giant. Aibo robot personalities develop based on interactions with people, giving each a unique character depending on its human companions, Sony said. "This is truly a one-of-a-kind product designed to connect with its owners on an emotional level," Sony Electronics North America president Mike Fasulo said. Similar to real-life dogs, Aibo can learn tricks and will seek out owners, reacting to words of praise or scratches on the head, according to Sony.

We propose a simple modification to existing neural machine translation (NMT) models that enables using a single universal model to translate between multiple languages while allowing for language specific parameterization, and that can also be used for domain adaptation. Our approach requires no changes to the model architecture of a standard NMT system, but instead introduces a new component, the contextual parameter generator (CPG), that generates the parameters of the system (e.g., weights in a neural network). This parameter generator accepts source and target language embeddings as input, and generates the parameters for the encoder and the decoder, respectively. The rest of the model remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. We show how this simple modification enables the system to use monolingual data for training and also perform zero-shot translation. We further show it is able to surpass state-of-the-art performance for both the IWSLT-15 and IWSLT-17 datasets and that the learned language embeddings are able to uncover interesting relationships between languages.