How would you describe Buzzoole in a few words? Buzzoole is an end-to-end platform able to connect brands and Content Creators for mutual benefit. It uses a proprietary algorithm to identify suitable content creators to help brands take their message beyond traditional marketing channels. The resulting social amplification helps generate word of mouth, engagement, footfall, and purchase. What inspired you to create the platform?

Check out the session "AI in personal finance: More than just chatbots" at the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, April 29-May 2, 2018. Hurry--early price ends March 16. Here's what we'll be watching in the coming year. AI is sweeping across all industry sectors, including financial services. AI touches customer interactions (voice services like Siri and dialog systems), fraud detection, trading, and risk management (machine learning), and is being used to automate many back-office tasks (robotic process automation).

When you ask Ety Zohar what fascinates her about automated driving, she thinks back to her childhood and the science fiction books she used to binge on. "It's like all the books I read as a child are suddenly being brought to life. It's a revolution," she says. A revolution that Zohar finds herself right in the middle of – because she is actively shaping it. Ety Zohar works as senior project manager at Innoviz, a thriving Israeli start-up company that is developing LiDAR sensors – a technology considered crucial for autonomous driving to prevail.

Artificial intelligence startup Peritus.ai has raised $2 million (Rs 12 crore) in funding from early-stage venture capital firm Ideaspring Capital and early-stage fund The Hive, a company statement said. The firm will use the money to strengthen its development team in India, it said in the statement. Based in California, US, Peritus.ai Inc. was founded by Santhosh Srinivasan and Kamesh Raghavendra in 2017 with support from The Hive, which incubates startups and focuses on applications of AI in the enterprise segment. "We are looking forward to help from Ideaspring for support in building and guiding our development team in India," said Srinivasan, co-founder and vice president for engineering at Peritus.ai. The company automates professional services, support delivery and incident resolution for data centres. It also proactively predicts support needs and incident features from patterns mined across product designs, past incidents, configurations and log data, the statement said.

Named Cue, the android can shoot with nearly 100 per cent accuracy at short distances, according to the Japanese engineers behind the project. It has learned to score hoops using artificial intelligence having thrown some 200,000 practice shots. In a shootout, the robot scored more free-throws than players at Arvalq Tokyo, a team in Japan's top professional league. Cue is 6 foot 3 inches (190cm) tall, shorter than the average NBA player at 6 foot 7 inches (200cm). It was developed by the Tokyo-based Toyota Engineering Society, who kitted the android out with its own jersey and shorts.

Drake has unexpectedly appeared in a video game livestream – and smashed through records as he did so. The Canadian singer announced on Twitter that he would soon be playing Fortnite with popular streamer Ninja. He then logged onto Twitch and began to play with him. The video quickly became the most viewed ever. At some points more than 600,000 people were watching the live video, easily breaking through records on Twitch, which was just over half that.

The price of bitcoin and its competitors has fallen dramatically over the last three days, with all but two of the top 50 cryptocurrencies further tumbling in value this morning. Bitcoin, ethereum, ripple and bitcoin cash have all dropped in value by at least 7 per cent in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap, having slid steadily since Monday. One bitcoin is worth $8,118 (£5,826) at the time of writing, down 7.15 per cent compared to Wednesday morning, 13.48 per cent on this time last week and 4.41 per cent on mid-February, going by Coinbase data. Of CoinMarketCap's top 50, only tether and digixDAO - two comparatively obscure coins - saw any growth at all. The biggest slumps were suffered by nem and steem, which lost 25.06 per cent and 17.93 per cent of their values respectively in 24 hours.

In an industry known for its love of buzzwords and hype, artificial intelligence (AI) has become marketing's new'big data'. But where big data ultimately led to new layers of complexity, AI promises the opposite. Big data forced marketers to become data scientists (or hire them, if they could be found), but AI holds out the hope that marketers may get to go back to doing what they signed up for the in the first place. Recent months have seen technology providers such as Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft bring new AI-based technologies to market, promising to derive insights and improve conversions by mimicking the processes of the human brain in software. Salesforce, for example, is rolling out its Einstein AI technology to provide functions such as product recommendations within the Commerce Cloud, email content recommendations within its Marketing Cloud, and predictive forecasting tools for sales managers with its Sales Cloud.

A police officer wears a pair of smart glasses with facial recognition at Zhengzhou East Railway Station in China's central Henan province. It doesn't link a system of killer robots ticked off at the human race (just yet). But Chinese police are expanding the use of futuristic facial recognition tech powered by a system dubbed "Skynet" to track a database of blacklisted individuals. Unlike in the "Terminator" franchise where Skynet is controlled by machines to connect genocide-minded bots, this version is a tool for law enforcement and security that's being tested out for added security at two sessions of China's parliament this year, according to Reuters. The technology is the same we saw Chinese police use last month to monitor travelers leading up to Chinese New Year.

Taipei, Feb. 18 (CNA) 2018 has been dubbed by many tech and business insiders the year of artificial intelligence (AI). As Taiwan seeks to innovate on multiple scientific, cultural and humanitarian fronts, AI might just be the answer it has been looking for to make a name for itself on the global stage. CNA sat down with Ethan Tu, founder of Taiwan AI Labs, in January to talk about the potential for AI development on the island. According to Tu, who leads a team of 30 at the labs, Taiwan is well-positioned to be what he calls the "AI island of the world." He explained that Taiwan has several advantages when it comes to software and big data, and can utilize them to put AI to good use. Using the health care system as an example, Tu said that Taiwan currently has the most comprehensive national health insurance system in the world and is a world leader in digitalizing hospital records.