The United States and China currently dominate the world of artificial intelligence, but used very different approaches to get there. While the US's academic system has generated and incubated the research that made today's AI possible, China's government has pledged billions in funding and offered the technology its full-throated support. It's a space-race redux, where world superpowers battle to define generations of technology to come. Despite the duopoly narrative, other countries, including Canada and the UK, have ramped investment in the technology, announcing deals to fund private and public AI ventures. After years of a slow trickle, the first months of 2018 have seen an explosion of government-backed projects announced all over the world.

The United States and China currently dominate the world of artificial intelligence, but used very different approaches to get there. While the US's academic system has generated and incubated the research that made today's AI possible, China's government has pledged billions in funding and offered the technology its full-throated support. It's a space-race redux, where world superpowers battle to define generations of technology to come. Despite the duopoly narrative, other countries, including Canada and the UK, have ramped investment in the technology, announcing deals to fund private and public AI ventures. After years of a slow trickle, the first months of 2018 have seen an explosion of government-backed projects announced all over the world.

In this episode Andrew Vaziri speaks with Nicolas Economou, CEO of the eDiscovery company H5 and co-founder and chair of the Science, Law and Society Initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School. Economou discusses how AI is applied in the legal system, as well as some of the key points from the recent "Global Governance of AI Roundtable". The roundtable, hosted by the government of the UAE and Harvard's Kennedy school, brought together a diverse group of leaders from tech companies, governments, and academia to discuss the societal implications of AI. Nicolas Economou is the chief executive of H5 and was a pioneer in advocating the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. He contributes actively to advancing dialogue on public policy challenges at the intersection of law, science, and technology.

As much as I liked LG's V30 and G6 last year, numbers don't lie: The company's latest earnings show just how a tough the smartphone business is. So what kind of approach would LG take this time around? Play it safe or go bonkers? Well, in the end it was a bit of both. With the V30S ThinQ, LG started planting its seeds in the machine learning field, and gave us the first taste of its AI-assisted camera. But barring that, the V30S ThinQ was largely identical to its predecessor.

Today, ALTEN Calsoft Labs – An ALTEN Group Company, a leader in Technology Consulting and Product Engineering, has announced its partnership with a Machine Learning Company Bayestree Intelligence. The partnership will help transform and automate IT Service Management of ALTEN Calsoft Labs' enterprise customers based out of USA, Europe and Asia Pacific. ALEN Calsoft labs (ACL) is a digital transformation company leveraging AI, ML and IoT to create new solutions and services that are opening up business opportunities and creating new business models for customers. Bayestree has a unique product'Sentient' that assists Tier-1 product and business support teams, resolve customer issues automatically using advanced machine learning (ML) techniques. Sentient analyses historical data issues, passed resolutions as well as data collected from other related sources to learn, model and resolve. Sentient runs patent pending ML algorithms on customer's issues or ticket data to train its model that is capable of drawing inferences as well as making predictions.

New Delhi: When Vaishali Lotlikar joined Wanbury Ltd's legal department sometime in 2014, little did she know that locating a particular contract or assembling a legal brief would involve sifting through piles of documents, and wastage of precious hours and money in the process. "There was a lot of employee churn in the legal and marketing departments. Nobody really knew where the contracts were kept and what was there in each for the company to keep an eye on," she recalls. To streamline operations, Lotlikar and her team gathered all the contracts, digitized the same and put them into a document management system after tagging them for keywords, so that they could be easily searched when accessed from the firm's servers by authorized personnel. "I had used their technology at Glenmark and USV," says Lotlikar, adding that the familiarity helped her get up to speed.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are emerging as the most defining tech-marvel in this new wave of financial services. The technology, along with the abundance of data, has given way to several innovative FinTech business models. Several promising players now use AI to solve some of the major problems for customers in the banking and financial services industry – think chatbots, PFM, robo-advisors, and so on. Banks are never the ones to be left behind when it comes to tech adoption. With digital transformation and customer experience as the top most priority, banks are now banking on AI to deliver the next-gen service to their customers.

Ever been delayed on a flight because of straggling fellow passengers? That might be an annoyance of the past at Singapore's Changi airport which is testing facial recognition systems that could, in future, help locate lost travellers or those spending a little too much time in the duty-free shops. Changi Airport, ranked the world's best for six years straight in a survey by air travel consultancy Skytrax, is looking at how it can use the latest technologies to solve many problems - from cutting taxiing times on the runway to quicker predictions of flight arrivals. It comes as the island state embarks on a'smart nation' initiative to utilize technology to improve lives, create economic opportunity and build community ties. However the proposed use of cameras mounted on lampposts that are linked to facial recognition software has raised privacy concerns.

When Mukundhan Srinivasan ran a startup a few years ago, he could not find enough people to discuss machine- #chAI hosts one session almost every month with two speakers -- one from the startup world and the other from academia. It was still a nascent concept in India. So he began a small community, Deep Learning Bangalore (DLBLR), that in a couple of years has drawn in more than 2,250 enthusiasts. Srinivasan's startup failed to take off but his passion to grow the community has stayed. "It might be hard to relate to this but in 2013-14, it was very lonely to be doing machine-learning in India, let alone Bengaluru. The problem was to find people who were in the same community at the same level -- developer to developer, data scientist to data scientist," said Srinivasan, now a solutions architect for machine learning at chipmaker Nvidia, which lets him run the community's sessions at its Bengaluru premises on weekends.

China's first virtual reality (VR) theme park opened near Guiyang, the provincial capital of Guizhou. The park features 35 virtual attractions -- instead of getting on a roller coaster, you don VR goggles -- but there is a spectacular physical construction, too: a 53-meter-tall, 700-ton statue of a robot. You can watch a CGTN video report on Oriental Science Fiction Valley, or read these reports on the park from Reuters and Kotaku. Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces, is perhaps most famous for Lao Ganma 老干妈 spicy sauce and Maotai, the sorghum-based spirit that lubricated Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. But the VR theme park is just the most recent manifestation of an initiative to drastically change Guizhou's economy and image, with support from the very top: