In NVIDIA's Q1 2019 quarter, the company once again exceeded expectations, reporting a 66% growth in total revenue, including 71% growth in its red-hot datacenter business (reaching $701M for the quarter). For NVIDIA, the "Datacenter" segment includes High-Performance Computing (HPC), datacenter-hosted graphics, and AI acceleration. While that is certainly an impressive growth rate, it is smaller than the 2-3x year-over-year growth the company has enjoyed over the last few years. This raises a few interesting questions we will examine here. Is this slow-down in growth a sea change or just the law of large numbers catching up with the business?

Customers at this automated JD.com store in Tianjin can pay via QR code on mobile phones and through facial recognition technology, both without sales assistance. First there was pilot-free aircraft in China, better known as drones. This year the country began setting up a tract of the South China Sea to test captain-less ships. And now there are stores without staff. This phenomenon, while not unique to China, has taken off quickly there this year with lots of growing room left.

South Korea's LG Electronics on Monday introduced its latest robot vacuum cleaner that is "smarter and stronger" than predecessors, with an improved artificial intelligence platform with 3-D sensors. The newly launched LG Cordzero R9 ThinQ features LG's AI platform Deep ThinQ whose navigation capabilities are reinforced with 3-D Dual Eye sensors. It is the first time the company equipped the AI platform to its robot cleaners for commercialization. Models showcase LG's newest robot vacuum cleaners (LG Electronics) The sensors help the cleaners learn about details of an indoor space, including locations of obstacles to stop by or bypass within a wide angle view of 160 degrees, the company said. By adopting a smart AI turbo, the new cleaner models can sense dusty areas, such as carpets and corners, where they need to increase suction power and adjust the brush and speed.

The government and private companies alike are taking the first steps to deploy big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) to gain insights into and offer solutions to problems in India's agriculture sector. To experiment with such technology, the NITI Aayog, the government's main think-tank, will start a pilot project on "precision agriculture" using AI in 10 districts to be selected from seven states: Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. This month, the NITI Aayog signed an agreement with software firm IBM to develop a model for crop-yield predictions using AI so that farmers can be provided real-time advisories in these states. While the project is aimed at improving yields through last-mile solutions, the private sector is also wagering money on so-called smart-agriculture systems. Companies such as CropIn and Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, say they are equipped to provide a range of technologies based on AI in areas such as pest surveillance, climate control, controlled irrigation, and warehouse management.

"We live in a network world. Everything we do is an outcome of multiple elements. The pervasion of social media in our lives means hundreds and thousands of tweets and retweets by the minute. Gone are the times when information asymmetry was exploited," remarked Dr Alok Chaturvedi, professor of Management and Computer Science, Purdue University while initiating a talk at ORF Delhi on Big Data and Agent Based Simulation for Policy Analysis on 8 May, 2018. The discussion was moderated by Rakesh Sood, Distinguished Fellow, ORF and a former ambassador.

Teaching machines to parse through large volumes of data to learn new concepts and rules is a critical area of development in artificial intelligence, experts told CNBC. That concept is called machine learning, and it's been a longtime goal for the AI discipline: The term was coined in 1959 by AI pioneer Arthur Samuel who defined it as a computer's ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. To do that, mathematical models are built and then fed with huge volumes of data, experts said. The algorithms learn to identify patterns and assumptions from those data sets that are then applied to process new information. "We want to be able to use the machine's own capability to learn from complex data," Eric Chang, senior director at Microsoft Research Asia, told CNBC.

Elderly people in UK care homes will soon be looked after by robots that'learn and tailor their conversations' to who they are with. The £2.5 million ($3.4m) EU-funded trial scheme, starting in September, is designed help to take the strain off over-burdened carers, family and friends. The four-foot (1.2-metre) tall humanoid companions have been programmed to recognise the needs of residents, according to the firm behind the pilot. However, advocates for residents and their relatives have argued that it risks treating old people like commodities and losing the much needed'human touch'. The four-foot (1.2-metre) tall humanoid companions (pictured) are designed to recognise the needs of old people who might otherwise be alone The care-giving robots, called Pepper, have been designed by Japanese company Softbank Robotics.

Nostalgic Nintendo fans who did not get in on the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition craze of 2016 can rejoice. Nintendo announced on Sunday night that the miniaturized game console, which proved difficult to find on its first go-around, will come back to store shelves on June 29. The news came via a tweet from the official Nintendo of America account. This system and the #SNESClassic Edition system are expected to be available through the end of the year. Alongside the announcement that the NES Classic would return, Nintendo assured fans the Super NES Classic console would also be available.

Last December, a U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) declared artificial intelligence (AI) "critical to America's economic growth and security," but warned that China and other countries have attempted to "steal U.S. intellectual property" in the field of AI. To be fair, China has made great strides lately in strengthening its own enforcement of patent rights. Nonetheless, the NSS warned that stronger efforts were needed by U.S. companies to "curtail intellectual property (IP) theft by all sources" of our cutting-edge AI research. But as telecommunications giant AT&T and other firms can attest, only human intelligence can stop the theft of artificial intelligence. AT&T deploys a sophisticated suite of AI tools to manage the nearly 200 petabytes of data traffic that flows through its global telecommunications network every day (equivalent to 100 trillion pages of printed text).

We are currently experiencing another gold rush in AI. Billions are being invested in AI startups across every imaginable industry and business function. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are in a heavyweight fight investing over $20 billion in AI in 2016. Corporates are scrambling to ensure they realise the productivity benefits of AI ahead of their competitors while looking over their shoulders at the startups. China is putting its considerable weight behind AI and the European Union is talking about a $22 billion AI investment as it fears losing ground to China and the US.