This week saw a lot of machines taking over for humans in both the pharmacy and warehousing industries and augmented reality finally go mainstream in retail. China continues to commit to innovating faster than any other country and This Week In China Tech is our way to keep you on top of the most important stories coming from the mainland. Here are this week's headlines. JD.com, one of China's largest e-commerce companies, announced the new Augmented Reality (AR) Innovation Alliance (article in Chinese) and brought three new AR products to market. The alliance brings together hundreds of corporations, including Intel, Wal-Mart, Vipshop, Lenovo, and Carslan.

Artificial intelligence (AI) doesn't just have technological applications. Simulation of human intelligence processes has demonstrated that it can help farmers, artisans and fisherman to substantially eliminate the gap between the price they get for their produce and the market price, said Amitabh Kant, speaking at the AI Startup Conclave organised by leadingindia.ai "AI can help double their income with the same efforts and tools they are using today," said Kant, who was addressing scholars from prestigious institutions and other startup invitees. Leadingindia.ai, is an initiative being supported by NVIDIA, Amazon, edX, Newton-Bhabha Fund, Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, Brunel University and University College, London. Special teams from the government of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat attended the event.

Ehang, the Chinese drone manufacturer, broke its own Guinness World Record by piloting 1374 drones simultaneously above the city of Xi'an. In December 1180 drones were observed over Guangzhou and 1000 drones were flown in the same city in February last year. The drone was flown 853 feet above the city wall and presented an aerial display with 3937-foot length and 328-foot depth in the sky. The citizens and viewers recorded the amazing show on their phones and were left awe-inspiring. Impressing the thousands of citizens, Ehang have knocked off Intel's 1218 drone light show.

At some point in the future, while riding along in a car, a kid may ask their parent about a distant time in the past when people used steering wheels and pedals to control an automobile. Of course, the full realization of the "auto" part of the word -- in the form of fully autonomous automobiles -- is a long way off, but there are nonetheless companies trying to build that future today. However, changing the face of transportation is a costly business, one that typically requires corporate backing or a lot of venture funding to realize such an ambitious goal. A recent funding round, some $128 million raised in a Series A round by Shenzhen-based Roadstar.ai, In short, not as many as you'd think.

Identifying multiple use cases of artificial intelligence (AI), NITI Aayog chief Amitabh Kant said that beyond technological developments and applications, it can help farmers, artisans, and fishermen to substantially eliminate the gap between the market price and the price they actually get for their produce. During the AI startup conclave organised by the leadingindia.ai The initiative, supported by NVIDIA, Amazon, edX, Newton-Bhabha Fund, the Royal Academy of Engineering UK, Brunel University, and University College, London, saw founders of over 30 AI startups interacting with the academia, government, industry, and investors. The aim is to collaborate with leadingindia.ai Further, citing a PwC report, Kant said that AI would drive global GDP gains of $15.7 Tn by 2030, which is even more revolutionary than the advent of the Internet.

Samsung's SVP, head of global research Larry Heck, who joined the company from Google last November, says the new centers represent an acknowledgement that we're still in the early stages of AI, and there are some grand scientific challenges to be solved so that more people actually start using AI every day: "These challenges are going to need the top AI talent in the world to solve them, so what we recognized is that we need to go to where the talent is," says Heck. "Toronto is a world-leading center for research, specifically in deep learning and computer vision, and similarly are Moscow and Cambridge. These are the first three, but we'll be expanding and opening more." The three new centers join Samsung's existing AI-research labs in Seoul and Mountain View, CA. While it does represent a significant boost in the company's AI investment, don't expect the results to land in your new phone next year. Heck says the work at these centers will be tackling advanced research problems, far out in front to provide a path forward for Bixby and their other AI efforts.

It has been a year since the SoftBank Vision Fund was launched, and a pattern has emerged. Masayoshi Son has been using his nearly $100 billion armamentarium to invest in technology companies that gather user data. According to the SoftBank Group's most recent results, the fund, which marked its first anniversary on Sunday, had invested $29.7 billion by the end of March. This means about one-third of the fund's cash has been invested. The fund contributed 302.9 billion yen ($2.72 billion) to SoftBank Group operating profit for the year through March. The huge fund began with a mountain of money that was roughly equal to the total invested amounts of all the world's other venture capital funds.

NAB has found "hundreds" of use cases across the bank for machine learning and analytics technology and is in the process of standing them up. Speaking at the AWS summit in Singapore last month, executive general manager of the bank's program management office, Kyle McNamara, provided extra detail on initiatives also spoken about at the AWS Sydney summit. In Sydney, NAB revealed it is standing up an AWS-backed elastic data lake called discovery cloud, which will act as the foundation for its machine learning and analytics push. In Singapore, however, NAB revealed the initial scope of its analytics efforts. "At NAB there are literally hundreds of use cases in marketing, risk, operations and compliance that can and are starting to leverage analytics and machine learning," McNamara said.

I visited Beijing last week and learned a great deal from Microsoft's AI //innovate event in China - our 2nd largest developer base for Cognitive Services on Azure. The most heart-felt demo was Harry Shum could communicate with an almost deaf student of Nanjing University of Technology. Using two mobile phones with Microsoft Translator, the deaf student not only had no problem to communicate with Harry but also removed his language barriers between Chinese and English! I started speech recognition research as a graduate student in Beijing's Tsinghua University more than 35 years ago. My graduate student dream was to help people communicate better without language barriers.

Artificial intelligence software capable of interpreting images, matching faces and analysing patterns of communication is being piloted by UK police forces to speed up examination of mobile phones seized in crime investigations. Cellebrite, the Israeli-founded and now Japanese-owned company behind some of the software, claims a wider rollout would solve problems over failures to disclose crucial digital evidence that have led to the collapse of a series of rape trials and other prosecutions in the past year. However, the move by police has prompted concerns over privacy and the potential for software to introduce bias into processing of criminal evidence. As police and lawyers struggle to cope with the exponential rise in data volumes generated by phones and laptops in even routine crime cases, the hunt is on for a technological solution to handle increasingly unmanageable workloads. Some forces are understood to have backlogs of up to six months for examining downloaded mobile phone contents.