The space could pass for a TV control room at any major sporting event. A few dozen workers were wearing headsets, looking at a maze of computer screens. But here, footsteps away from the frigid beach in the coastal South Korean city of Gangneung--which is hosting figure skating, hockey and other arena ice events at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang--NBC wasn't covering curling. Instead ESL, a company that organizes competitions in e-sports, or competitive video gaming, was streaming the semi-finals of a tournament hosted by Olympic sponsor Intel on the Olympic Channel. The stakes were particularly high, and not just for the competitors.

NEW DELHI: A large number of workers will lose jobs due to automation in the next two decades. A PwC study has detailed which workers (by education, age, gender, industry and country) will be hit by automation at which stage. The research analyses the tasks and skills involved in the jobs of over 200,000 workers across 29 countries in order to assess the potential impact of automation on workers in different industry sectors and of different genders, ages and education levels. Transport and manufacturing sectors have relatively high potential for job automation by the 2030s while health and education are less automatable. Education is a key factor driving risk of automation, with less well-educated men at highest risk in the long run.

Following the massive theft of customer assets held with Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange operator Coincheck Inc., the Financial Services Agency plans to conduct on-site inspections at some other exchange operators this week based on the revised law on fund settlement, sources with knowledge of the matter have said. The FSA will check safety measures for the cryptocurrency exchange operators' computer systems and their methods for managing customer assets, and will apply administrative penalties if problems are found, the sources said. On Jan. 26, Coincheck lost almost all of the NEM coins belonging to some 260,000 customers, worth around ¥58 billion at the time, due to a hack of the company's computer system. On Feb. 1, the FSA ordered the 31 other virtual currency exchange operators in the country to check their safety systems -- including measures to guard against hackers, how customer assets are managed, and other areas -- and report the results to the agency. The agency examined the reports and found it necessary to carry out detailed inspections on some operators in order to prevent another theft of customer assets, according to the sources.

Astronauts are spending a month in isolation on a simulated'red planet' in the desolate Dhofar desert in Oman to help prepare humanity for a future mission to Mars. Using a drone, robotic rovers and an inflatable greenhouse, the astronauts will carry out 19 experiments on this baron area, picked for its resemblance to Mars. Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse and few animals or plants survive its temperatures that can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius. On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base is a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters. More than 200 scientists from 25 nations have chosen it as their location to field-test technology for a manned mission to the red planet which Nasa hopes to achieve by the 2030s.

Snapchat sorts itself out, Overwatch gets a new map made especially for Capture The Flag games and police in China are using wearables with face recognition to root out people trying to avoid the law. There might even be a console for it.Google is reportedly working on a video-game streaming service According to a report from The Information, Google has been floating the idea for a streaming service (like PlayStation Now or NVIDIA's GeForce Now) for around two years. The service is codenamed Yeti, and Google is apparently even testing hardware for it as well. The Information's sources say the service might stream to a Chromecast, and that hiring Phil Harrison -- formerly of Microsoft and Sony's gaming divisions -- last month as VP of hardware could point toward a standalone gaming console. "Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live."Activist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow has died John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, died in his sleep yesterday morning at the age of 71.

AI will become one of the most defining technologies across industries, and the nations that get it "right" are bound to break to the next level of economic and social development. The US and China have been at a race to harness the potential that the application of artificial intelligence holds for the national economic environment and international competitiveness. There are a number of societal and organizational characteristics that China possesses that might put it at an advantage in the development of advanced AI. The first is China's particular brand of socialist market economy gives the government a significant amount of control and involvement in market forces. Not only does this mean Beijing can push for over-the-horizon innovation where market forces would typically fail, but it also has created a unique level of cooperation between Chinese tech companies and the government.

Digital challenger bank Tandem has turned to Personetics' artificial intelligence (AI) for personalised insights and advice. Powered by Personetics' Cognitive Banking Brain, the bank will integrate the new offerings within its digital banking. Tandem's chief executive, Ricky Knox says: "Together with our use of open banking we can use AI to get to know our customers better, predict their needs, and help them make better decisions about their money with as little effort as possible on their part. We want to do the heavy lifting for them, so they can go about their lives and not worry about day-to-day finances." Examples of personalised insights delivered by the Personetics solution include unusual spending activity; tips on how to avoid fees; and opportunities for savings or investment. Knox adds: "While AI is promising, it was important for us to work with a partner such as Personetics that has proven experience in financial services.

Takeshi Niinami, chief executive officer of Suntory Holdings Ltd., believes that companies and governments need to offer proper training and education to their employees with a long-term view toward new technologies as people still lack the skills needed for "the fourth industrial revolution." "Technology will be the rule-changer in the future, and we need to maximize the sensitivity of our antenna for technological innovation," Niinami told The Japan Times in an interview during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last month. Niinami pointed out that the fourth industrial revolution, along with the growth of protectionist sentiment and female empowerment, were the topics that dominated discussions among business and political leaders. The fourth industrial revolution refers to the drastic social and industrial changes being caused by the recent emergence of disruptive technologies including the internet of things, robotics, virtual reality and artificial intelligence that will fundamentally alter the way we live and work. Last March, the WEF established the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco to bring together business leaders, governments, startups, academics and international organizations to accelerate cross-sector cooperation and to co-design policies for such emerging technologies as artificial intelligence and drones.

GENEVA – U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is to launch a major push for disarmament talks covering everything from nuclear and cyber war to small arms, braving certain U.S. resistance to such bold initiatives, officials and experts said. Guterres aims to forestall a new nuclear arms race and get the big powers back into negotiations after two decades of stalemate, according to a Geneva-based expert familiar with the plans who requested anonymity. The expert said Guterres also wants to end "state-led paralysis" in talks on cyberwarfare and robotics by getting the private sector involved, and to start talks on use of explosives in urban areas and curbing access to conventional weapons, the biggest killer. Chances of success are uncertain at best. But with nuclear tensions rising, Guterres may be uniquely placed to oil the wheels of negotiations given a 2009 U.N. Security Council pledge to "create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons."

There has been much hype, much discussion, and much consternation about the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and are the robots taking our jobs? For TechRepublic and ZDNet, I'm Dan Patterson, and it's a pleasure today to speak with Eitan Vesely. He is the CEO of Presenso, a machine learning and analytics firm based in Haifa, Israel. They focus on a really unique challenge. That challenge is fixing machinery, or helping optimize machinery, actual physical machines, using machine learning and artificial intelligent.