This market research report was originally published at Tractica's website. It is reprinted here with the permission of Tractica. The 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was dominated by the central theme of artificial intelligence (AI) becoming much more visible and tangible. AI had a dedicated marketplace and the impact of AI could be felt across the show floor. Ironically, the biggest news coming out of this year's "AI themed" CES was the power blackout caused by a result of the deluge of rain that hit Las Vegas during its opening days.

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A former streaming industry exec and an AI specialist walk into a bar… they leave starting an AI company for the music industry. That's not exactly how Singapore-based startup Musiio was formed, but it's close enough -- and the outcome is the same. Co-founders Hazel Savage, formerly of Pandora and Shazam, and Swedish data scientist Aron Pettersson connected at Entrepreneur First in Singapore. The program began in London as a way to help like-minded tech connect with the potential to start projects, so it does mirror the serendipity of meeting new friends in a bar. "We'd probably never have met each other if we hadn't gone to EF," Savage told TechCrunch in an interview.

Flower pollination algorithm is a recent metaheuristic algorithm for solving nonlinear global optimization problems. The algorithm has also been extended to solve multiobjective optimization with promising results. In this work, we analyze this algorithm mathematically and prove its convergence properties by using Markov chain theory. By constructing the appropriate transition probability for a population of flower pollen and using the homogeneity property, it can be shown that the constructed stochastic sequences can converge to the optimal set. Under the two proper conditions for convergence, it is proved that the simplified flower pollination algorithm can indeed satisfy these convergence conditions and thus the global convergence of this algorithm can be guaranteed. Numerical experiments are used to demonstrate that the flower pollination algorithm can converge quickly in practice and can thus achieve global optimality efficiently.

Multi-modal data is becoming more common than before because of big data issues. Finding the semantically equal or similar objects from different data sources(called entity resolution) is one of the heart problem of multi-modal task. Current models for solving this problem usually needs much paired data to find the latent correlation between multi-modal data, which is of high cost. A new kind latent correlation is proposed in this article. With the correlation, multi-modal objects can be uniformly represented in a commonly shard space. A classifying based model is designed for multi-modal entity resolution task. With the proposed method, the demand of training data can be decreased much.

December is the perfect month to predict the key insurtech trends for the year to come and to think of New Year's resolutions: what specific trends to tap into to enhance the digital strategies. We believe these trends should relate to what an insurance carrier would like to accomplish, to what a'winning insurance firm of the future' would look like. We believe that that such winning insurance firms will have four essential elements. Fast changing customer behaviour and new market dynamics make it essential for insurance carriers to increase the contact frequency and provide more added value in these contacts. Fortunately, connectivity, all sorts of connected devices offer an unprecedented entry in customers' daily life. Adding value is about solving the real problem. People don't want a mortgage; they want a nice house to live in. Insurance is usually just part of a solution, but rarely the entire solution to the real problem a customer is facing.

Artificial intelligence has mastered something that humankind has failed at, repeatedly. An autonomous robot, designed by mechanical engineers in Singapore, can now assemble an IKEA chair from scratch without a manual in less than 21 minutes. Such a feat has been described as the "equivalent of the moon landings for robotics" because the skills required are straightforward but immensely complex. And it illustrates the tremendous distance that automated systems robots have traveled in a short period time. The study was published Wednesday in Science Robotics.

OCBC Bank is the first in Singapore to launch artificial intelligence (AI) powered voice banking in collaboration with Google. With Google Home and Google Home Mini launched in Singapore today, anyone can now speak to the Google Assistant – on a smartphone or a Google Home device – to initiate a conversation about OCBC Bank's services. These services range from planning for retirement or a new home to saving for a child's education, getting the latest financial market updates, and more. The proliferation of digital voice assistants is tipped to impact the consumer technology market this year. A 2018 Digital Consumer Survey by Accenture of 21,000 online consumers in 19 countries, including Singapore, indicates year-on-year growth of stand-alone digital voice assistants will increase 50 per cent in 2018, suggesting consumers are increasingly comfortable talking to digital voice assistants and smart home devices.

With nearly 160 million hectares, India is home to the second largest concentration of agricultural land in the world -- which means inefficiencies in pesticide applications can quickly escalate into significant environmental issues. Farmers often pump a cocktail of chemicals into crops in hopes of warding off pests and diseases. But this comes at a cost to them, as well as the ecosystem. Enter Plant Pathologist, an IoT-based project devised by IBM's India Research Lab designed to help small-scale farmers better care for their crops. In a 2017 pilot program, farmers sent cell phone pictures of ailing plants to an AI model that used machine vision to identify the hallmarks of disease. Researchers paired these insights with forecasted Weather Company data to predict when certain pest or disease attacks might occur.

As per the researches and reports, within coming five years, the autonomous drones would fly into the danger zones to carry out search and rescue missions. Most of the drones rely on GPS and can detect obstacles using visual systems. But a drone that can operate in environment like earthquake, fires or other disasters, would be ideal for use. "If you want a drone that can navigate itself in a structured or unstructured environment, in a GPS-denied environment, you need to equip it with different sensors," said Antonios Tzes, Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. NYU Abu Dhabi's prototype drones use a combination of multiple cameras, telescopic vision and sensors.