Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to significantly disrupt the global financial services system--creating both new opportunities and increased vulnerabilities--according to a recent August 2018 report, The New Physics of Financial Services: How artificial intelligence is transforming the financial ecosystem, published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with Deloitte. WEF predicts the eventual fall and elimination of mid-sized financial service companies as AI will benefit scale-based players that can compete on cost, and present agile players with new market opportunities in underserved niche segments. According to DBR Research, only 7 percent of banks with assets between $1 billion and $10 billion dollars have deployed an AI solution, a sharp contrast to 48 percent of banks with greater than $50 billion in assets. WEF predicts that early adopters of AI will transform their back-office operations from a cost center to a revenue-generating external service as a cloud-based "software as a service" (SaaS) provider. For example, U.S.-based Blackrock, one of the world's largest asset managers, has developed a hosted proprietary risk-analytics and portfolio management platform called Aladdin that utilizes AI machine learning as a differentiator.

Hundreds of Google employees have signed a protest letter over the company's reported work on a censor-friendly search engine to get back into China, The New York Times said Thursday. The employees are demanding more transparency so they can understand the moral implications of their work, said the Times, which obtained a copy of the letter. It has been signed by 1,400 employees and is circulating on the company's internal communications system, the newspaper said, quoting three people who are familiar with the document. While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

I don't, for the record, make an effort to keep up with the Kardashians. But somehow, they keep up with me. I'm frankly embarrassed that I know who the bit players in the Kardashian epic are, but I do. So when Khloé recently hit back at her sister Kourtney's recent ex Younes Bendjima on Instagram using an Alexa-themed burned, I understood two things intuitively: why she was asking Alexa to play "Heard It All Before" by Sunshine Anderson and that a new form of shade was upon us. The comment in question, captured by the CommentsByCelebs Instagram (truly a gift and a curse for those of us who would care not to care), came after Bendjima denied a Daily Mail report that he had already moved on with a "bikini-clad model" Jordan Ozuna. "Alexa play'heard it all before' by Sunshine Anderson," wrote Khloé, who really has.

Google executives on Thursday addressed the company's plans to reintroduce a search service in China, following an employee backlash over concerns about complying with Beijing's censorship laws, according to reports of an all-hands company meeting. Chief executive Sundar Pichai told staff that Google is in the "early stages" of considering a return to China, Bloomberg reported, but that the company is not close to finalizing a search product. Pichai pledged transparency as the development process advances and cast the potential for business in China as a boost to Google's mission. "I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world, and I don't see any reason why that would be different in China," Pichai said, according to Bloomberg. Google did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

CAIRO – Al-Qaida's chief bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was behind the 2009 Christmas Day plot to down an airliner over Detroit and other foiled aviation-related terror attacks, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Yemeni officials and a tribal leader said Friday. The killing of al-Asiri deals a heavy blow to the group's capabilities in striking western targets and piles pressure on the group that already lost some of its top cadres over the past years in similar drone strikes. A Yemeni security official said that al-Asiri is dead; a tribal leader and an al-Qaida-linked source also said that he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the eastern Yemeni governorate of Marib. The tribal leader said that al-Asiri was struck, along with two or four of his associates, as he stood beside his car. He added that al-Asiri's wife, who hails from the well-known al-Awaleq tribe in the southern governorate of Shabwa, was briefly held months ago by the UAE-backed forces and later released. Al-Qaida itself has remained silent about its top bomb maker.

You might know motion capture as the tech that transformed Andy Serkis into Gollum, but now it can transform everyday people into animated avatars in virtual worlds, and all in real-time. Motion capture--which uses body sensors, ultra-precise cameras, and modeling software to create 3D animations from real-life human movement--is now taking on location-based virtual reality, or LBVR. PCWorld visited a leading motion capture company called Vicon in Oxford, England to learn how mocap has evolved to take on this new frontier in entertainment. If you've watched behind-the-scenes footage of how motion capture (or mocap) works, you've probably seen actors in skintight lycra suits covered with golf ball-sized sensors. Normally, dozens of infrared cameras track these sensors to model an actor's movements.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Researchers at the Human Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts are teaching their PR2 to pick up objects by giving the robot instructions using natural language. Pretty cool project, but do they have to use a...knife?

President Trump's time in office has been punctuated by rising tension with China on a host of economic issues. He's received bipartisan criticism for the impact of tariffs on Chinese goods and the resulting retaliation against American exports. Democrats and Republicans have also unified over concerns about how Chinese state-associated actors are using minority investments in critical technology companies to gain sensitive information -- like IP and know-how -- about startups, many of them VC-backed. Policymakers are worried this technology is being used to propel Chinese advancement in emerging technology like artificial intelligence and robotics. These concerns led to passage of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), which was signed into law by the president on August 13. NVCA has been at the table during FIRRMA's consideration because it stands to have a significant impact on the venture and startup ecosystem.

As it gears up to move into a new home (a Galaxy Home, to be specific), Bixby is far from ready. Samsung's digital assistant has become infamous for its tardiness, and even after showing up late to the AI party, Bixby doesn't have much to show for the extra time. It's not smarter than the rest and doesn't offer any new tricks, even in the recently announced Galaxy Home, other than perhaps better sound quality. As much as I'm excited about Samsung potentially giving Amazon, Google and Apple some competition in the smart speaker space, I'm pretty sure they have nothing to worry about, if my time with Bixby on the Note 9 is any indication. To be clear, Samsung still hasn't launched the Bixby-powered Galaxy Home speaker, and no one seems to have published an in-depth hands-on with it.

Let's get this out of the way: A lot of norms were disrupted in the videogame industry this week. There was news of a writer at a top gaming site allegedly plagiarizing reviews, and also reports that the Chinese gaming market is having troubles. Oh, and Diablo III is making the leap to the Nintendo Switch. Up is down, down is up, and a lot of things are out of whack. So let's expect the unexpected and get right to it.