In 2017, SenseTime announced a series of significant strategic partnerships in China and abroad. With Qualcomm, it initiated an "algorithm chip" collaboration increasing the intelligence of smartphones and other devices. The Company partnered with Honda to provide industry-leading autonomous driving technologies. Working with Suning, the largest consumer electronics retailer in China, the Company has helped to develop the Store of Future, which leverages facial recognition for check-out free shopping as well as customer big data analysis. In February 2018, the prestigious Massachusets Institute of Technology announced that SenseTime was the first company to join its Intelligence Quest project and the two parties created an AI alliance to define the next frontier of human and machine intelligence.

Mark Carney knows how to illustrate economic trends through the use of creative language. And when he talks, people tend to listen. "The massacre of the Dilberts" was how the governor of the Bank of England encapsulated the fear that middle-management jobs would be wiped out by automation – for people unfamiliar with American cartoon strips, Dilbert is a white collar office worker and the strip mocks the absurdities of office life. In his native Canada this week, Carney made a number of points in a speech on automation. Most obviously, many office jobs done by people would be done by computers, a process that was already well advanced. "When I look back 30 years ago, what I used to do in the City of London when I worked at an investment bank, probably about three-quarters of what I did is now done by machine," he said.

It was the week of Zuck. As Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg slogged through more than 10 hours of testimony in front of two different Congressional committees, privacy and security advocates were listening for anything they could glean about how Facebook manages data, implements privacy protections, and helps users make informed choices--or doesn't. Neither session delved as deeply as it could have into specific information about Russian goals and strategies in conducting information operations on Facebook during the 2016 US elections. And Facebook admitted this week that the data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica could have accessed private Facebook messages, on top of everything else, for the 87 million users that were in its reach. Here's how to check if you were one of the users caught in Cambridge Analytica's dragnet.

It was only a matter of time, but Artificial Intelligence has actually made its entry into the Indian matchmaking sector. Betterhalf.AI is looking to change the way traditional matchmaking sites offer matches in India by taking into account six relationship dimensions including emotional, intellectual, relationship, moral values. It will use these and more to offer matches driven by machine learning (ML) algorithm. Yeah, this means you will not have to sift through hundreds of matches to find relevant ones. Betterhalf.AI, launched by Pawan Gupta and Rahul Namdev in 2016, has created a grid of verified working professionals at companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Adobe and Accenture and applied a six-level verification system adding Facebook profiles, personal email, phone number, work email and government ID.

This week, Silicon Valley-based Harvesting Inc launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-backed platform that uses satellite images of farms to gauge credit risk for banks that lend to farmers. The technology can be used to capture data on farms in the developing world as well as in mature markets like the US. Harvesting Inc generates "credit scorecards" using satellite imagery of farms and other data points, already in the works in the African market. "Think of us as someone who calculates the language of agriculture [into] the language of finance," Garg said. Garg told deBanked that because small farmers in emerging markets don't have credit cards, let alone smartphones, they have no credit history and their creditworthiness can't be evaluated through a traditional Western banking system.

Over the course of an accumulated 10 hours spread out over two days of hearings, Mark Zuckerberg dodged question after question by citing the power of artificial intelligence. It's not even entirely clear what Zuckerberg means by "AI" here. He repeatedly brought up how Facebook's detection systems automatically take down 99 percent of "terrorist content" before any kind of flagging. In 2017, Facebook announced that it was "experimenting" with AI to detect language that "might be advocating for terrorism" -- presumably a deep learning technique. It's not clear that deep learning is actually part of Facebook's automated system.

From advanced robotics in R&D labs to computer vision in warehouses, technology is making an impact on every step of the manufacturing process. Lights-out manufacturing refers to factories that operate autonomously and require no human presence. These robot-run settings often don't even require lighting, and can consist of several machines functioning in the dark. While this may sound futuristic, these types of factories have been a reality for more than 15 years. Famously, the Japanese robotics maker FANUC has been operating a "lights-out" factory since 2001, where robots are building other robots completely unsupervised for nearly a month at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," said FANUC VP Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." To imagine a world where robots do all the physical work, one simply needs to look at the most ambitious and technology-laden factories of today. For example, the Dongguan City, China-based phone part maker Changying Precision Technology Company has created an unmanned factory. Everything in the factory -- from machining equipment to unmanned transport trucks to warehouse equipment -- is operated by computer-controlled robots. The technical staff monitors activity of these machines through a central control system. Where it once required about 650 workers to keep the factory running, robot arms have cut Changying's human workforce to less than a tenth of that, down to just 60 workers. A general manager for the company said that it aims to reduce that number to 20 in the future. As industrial technology grows increasingly pervasive, this wave of automation and digitization is being labelled "Industry 4.0," as in the fourth industrial revolution. So, what does the future of factories hold? Manufacturers predict overall efficiency to grow annually over the next five years at 7x the rate of growth seen since 1990.

The market for AI is so overhyped, virtually anybody looking for a fast buck can repackage an old abacus and sell it as a "machine learning" platform. Misinformed people buy the idea and the mounting frustration makes it extremely difficult for legitimate AI companies to get their message heard above the din. To successfully stand out in a crowded market, creative marketers have found it critical to create unconventional educational content and enlist the support of credible B2B influencers in their space. In the ever-shifting AI solutions ecosystem, even expert-led and well-thought-out marketing campaigns can fail -- and often do. To reduce costs and save time, marketers of AI products need to learn as early as possible what works.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.