CHONGQING, CHINA - MAY 24: A Pand-auto's electric car controlled by Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving system is on display at Chongqing Internet Industrial Park on May 24, 2018 in Chongqing, China. Baidu and its partner Pand-auto car sharing service started a one-month trial operation of autonomous car-sharing service in Chongqing Internet Industrial Park today. Two Silicon Valley executives have a friendly bet on when a commercially available autonomous car will transport them within Las Vegas, with no intervention from a human driver. The more bullish one has placed his bet on May 27, 2024. A driverless future will happen sooner than 2024, and it won't happen first in the US, Europe or Japan.

SenseTime Group has raised $620 million at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion just months after scoring a similar amount from investors led by Alibaba (baba) and Singapore's state investment firm. Fidelity International and Silver Lake Partners were among the investors in the latest financing, bringing the total amount raised by the three-year-old image recognition startup in the past six months to more than $1.2 billion and tripling its valuation in under a year. Tiger Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Hopu Capital also participated. The latest funding will go toward research and talent acquisition, SenseTime said in a statement Thursday. Investors are handing billions of dollars to Chinese artificial intelligence startups, hoping to ride a wave of support from a government intent on becoming the world leader in the technology by 2030.

Dell Technologies has announced the 14th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge four-socket servers and Dell Precision Optimizer 5.0 to further strengthen AI and ML capabilities. It also forged an alliance with Intel in AI and ML for Dell EMC Ready Solutions to enable customers harness the power of data. New AI and ML solutions and partnerships drive smarter, better business outcomes by turning data into intelligent insights in real time. According to the recently released update of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 2018 IT Transformation Maturity Curve Index, commissioned by Dell EMC, transformed companies are 18X more likely to make better and faster data-driven decisions than their competition. Additionally, transformed companies are 22X as likely to be ahead of the competition with new products and services to market.

Last fourth of July, as fireworks burst across the night sky near the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, S.C., convicted kidnapper Jimmy Causey tucked a lifelike dummy into his bed, sneaked out of his prison cell and completed a daring escape. It wasn't until three days later, when Texas Rangers found Causey holed up 1,200 miles away, that authorities offered an explanation for how he had obtained the equipment for the breakout, including a pair of wire cutters used to snip through four fences that encircle the maximum security prison. "We believe a drone was used to fly in the tools that allowed him to escape," Bryan Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told reporters at a news conference. A lengthy investigation confirmed that an accessory role was played by a small, off-the-shelf drone. And with that, law-enforcement and national security officials added "prison breaks" to the potential ill uses lurking in a technology widely available at retailers including Amazon and Walmart.

As if the line between human and machine wasn't already blurry enough, researchers in Tokyo have developed a new method for using living rat muscle tissue in robotics. The "biohybrid" design, described today in the journal Science Robotics, simulates the look and movements of a human finger. Video shows how it bends at the joint, picks up a loop, and places it down. It's a seemingly simple movement but one that researchers say lays the groundwork for more advanced--and even more lifelike--robots. "If we can combine more of these muscles into a single device, we should be able to reproduce the complex muscular interplay that allows hands, arms, and other parts of the body to function," says study author Shoji Takeuchi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo. "Although this is just a preliminary result, our approach might be a great step toward the construction of a more complex biohybrid system."

Xiaomi may have already released the Mi Mix 2S earlier this year, but it's actually kept its true 2018 flagship, the Mi 8, for marking its eight anniversary -- hence the jump from last year's "Mi 6." As announced in Shenzhen today, the new handset starts at 2,699 yuan (about $420) and comes in a familiar-looking dual-sided glass design, with the most notable difference being the new vertical dual camera -- exactly the same module found on the Mix 2S, according to Xiaomi. And yes, there's a notch, which is for accommodating an infrared front camera for facial recognition. There's even a higher-end Mi 8 Explorer Edition which uses a more powerful 3D face scanner instead -- one that's similar to the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X. Not only that, this version also has a fully transparent back to show off its chips and battery. For the sake of this cool look, there's no rear fingerprint reader; instead, this device uses an in-display fingerprint reader, which is backed by pressure activation to save power.

On a video screen projected to a crowd attending the United Nations' summit Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a small drone whizzes past a tech executive. It shoots a projectile into the skull of a test dummy, detonating an explosive that could kill a human. In front of an audience, the executive pitches the drones as "unstoppable" and calls them capable of "an airstrike of surgical precision" that could render nuclear weapons obsolete. The scene quickly cuts to the drones being hijacked by terrorist organizations and going on a killing spree, targeting politicians and social media activists. The film, titled Slaughterbots and produced by the Future of Life Institute, shows how easily autonomous weapons could become weapons of mass destruction.

In early September 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought artificial intelligence from the labs of Silicon Valley, academia, and the basement of the Pentagon to the forefront of international politics. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind," he said. "It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Putin's remarks reflect a belief, growing in sectors and regions across the world, that advances in artificial intelligence will be critical for the future -- in areas as varied as work, society, and military power.

Asian banks are pushing artificial intelligence solutions with good reason. A new report claims that banks could save more than $1 trillion by implementing advanced technology solutions. Banks and financial services companies could wipe as much as 22 percent from their operating expenses by adopting artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. This is the finding of «Machine Intelligence and Augmented Finance», a report compiled by financial research firm Autonomous. With smartphones underpinning the finance industry's tech push, Asia will likely see exponential growth in AI-based solutions.

The need to provide an enhanced customer experience is the primary factor augmenting the growth of the AI in BFSI market. As the competition among the market players is mounting day-by-day, companies have started to focus on providing a better experience to the customers to gain the customer loyalty. This encourages financial institutes to integrate advanced analytics tools and solutions to analyze customer data to fulfil their requirement, understand the customer experience, and to make smarter predictions about their behavior and requirements. Furthermore, companies are also looking forward to connecting with the customers on their choice of channels to provide a more seamless experience. Furthermore, as digitalization is spreading across the globe, customers are becoming more empowered.