The World Robot Conference 2018 kicked off in Beijing, Wednesday, with over 300 experts and entrepreneurs taking part. The five-day conference features forums, symposiums, exhibitions and contests that have attracted nearly 5,000 competitors from more than ten countries.

The Herald spoke to industry leaders Mahmood Hikmet, R&D Coordinator, Ohmio; Matthew Ensor, Business Director - Advisory, Beca Diane Edwards, General Manager People, Systems and Technology, Ports of Auckland; Ben Reid, Executive Director, AI Forum NZ and Coby Duggan, General Manager, Volvo New Zealand to understand the AI opportunities for New Zealand, and what it could mean for the future of our roads and infrastructure. It's already out there and has been for decades! There is so much artificial intelligence already around you and not just on the roads. Ensor: It is hard to prepare when there is so much uncertainty around what changes artificial intelligence will create. We need to wait before making bets on which emerging technologies will dominate.

If I wanted to show my distaste for the direction the US is going by boycotting American PC hardware, software and services, could it be done? You could certainly eliminate a lot of American products, but you might be giving up features without getting any ethical benefits. For example, more than a billion people already manage without a lot of American technology because they live in China or Russia. While I share your distaste for the Trump regime, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not exactly choirboys. And while Trump is scapegoating immigrants, more than half of America's top technology companies were co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

"Andrew Ingram" is a digital assistant that scans your emails, gives scheduling ideas for the meetings and appointments you discuss with your coworkers, sets up tasks, and sends invites to the relevant parties with very little assistance. It uses the advanced artificial-intelligence capabilities of X.ai, a New York–based startup that specializes in developing AI assistants. The problems it solves can save a lot of time and frustration for people (like me) who have a messy schedule. But according to a Wired story published in May, the intelligence behind Andrew Ingram is not totally artificial. It's backed by a group of 40 Filipinos in a highly secured building on the outskirts of Manila who monitor the AI's behavior and take over whenever the assistant runs into a case it can't handle.

Is Germany losing ground in the increasingly strategic field of Artificial Intelligence? Germany is still Europe's most powerful economy. However, many observers fear that in the on-going digital revolution, it is being left behind by its competitors. The increasingly crucial field of Artificial Intelligence is no exception. When chancellor Angela Merkel showed up at an event organised by the newspaper WirtschaftsWoche in late June in Berlin, the nation's public discourse was dominated by two topics: the unexpected and fully deserved demise of the German football team in the FIFA World Cup, and the looming government crisis initiated by one of Merkel's closest allies on the topic of immigration.

In the quest to become data-driven, companies are increasingly investing in Business Intelligence software to gain a competitive advantage. Yet the insights generated by those tools are mostly fueled by data from within a company's walls, instead of the real-time market signals found externally online – from consumer opinions to corporate filings. This outside data can unlock key indicators about an industry or competitor, but harnessing the volume and variety of global data is a time-intensive task. And although advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to capture and analyze this data to create powerful insights, most commercial AI tools are one-size-fits-all models with limited capabilities. Keeping this in mind, Meltwater is opening up its AI platform, Fairhair.ai,

When engineers or designers want to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed shape of a car, airplane, or other object, they would normally model the flow of air around the object by having a computer solve a complex set of equations--a procedure that usually takes hours, or even an entire day. Nobuyuki Umetani from Autodesk research (now at the University of Tokyo) and Bernd Bickel from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3-D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, where IST Austria researchers are involved in a total of five presentations. Machine learning can make extremely time-consuming methods a lot faster. Before, the computation of the aerodynamic properties of cars usually took a day.

Wall Street is looking towards Silicon Valley for a more automated environment and a tech-driven approach. A July 2016 report by CB Insights showed that 41 startups may be introducing AI to fintech. Of the many big names, Goldman Sachs remained dominant in backing as many as four companies that use AI in financial technology. As many as 658 AI deals were closed and $5021 billion was spent on funding the AI startups in 2016, according to the report. With total AI investment gaining momentum across different industries, an increasing number of companies are branching out to offer a variety of services that range from credit scoring to regulatory compliance and fraud detection.

The San Francisco-based company's second-quarter revenue rose 63% from the prior year to $2.8 billion, while gross bookings, a measure of the overall demand for its ride and delivery services, jumped 41% to about $12 billion, according to a financial statement released by Uber. The company narrowed its loss to $891 million in the second quarter from $1.1 billion a year ago. The loss was, however, wider than the $550 million loss in the first quarter of this year, not including a $3 billion gain from the sales of its southeast Asian and Russian operations. The company is spending more money on new businesses such as food delivery and scooters, according to an Uber spokesman. Mr. Khosrowshahi, who replaced ousted Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick last August, has worked to cut expenses at the ride-hailing company in preparation for an initial public offering. This year, he has sold divisions such as the money-losing U.S. car leasing business to Fair.com and its southeast Asian operations to rival Grab Inc.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days as more companies look to automate repetitive tasks to save money and reallocate staff to more meaningful work. We wanted to explore some of the current use cases for AI based technologies in financial services and where the industry is heading in the coming years. Cut through the hype and you will find financial firms have started to implement AI in a few different areas. Back office operations and data management has been the biggest beneficiary as companies can run algorithms across full data sets and cut out repetitive tasks. A new report by Capgemini states that the financial services industry can add more than $500bn in revenue by implementing automation.