"An essential point is to increase productivity," said Masataka Tamaki, general manager of corporate planning at H.I.S. He said only one person needs to oversee the robot cafe, compared to several people needed at a regular coffee shop, so it can serve better quality coffee at a reasonable price.

BISHKEK – I was recently offered the presidency of a university in Kazakhstan that focuses primarily on business, economics, and law, and that teaches these subjects in a narrow, albeit intellectually rigorous, way. I am considering the job, but I have a few conditions. What I have proposed is to transform the university into an institution where students continue to concentrate in these three disciplines, but must also complete a rigorous "core curriculum" in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences – including computer science and statistics. Students would also need to choose a minor in one of the humanities or social sciences. There are many reasons for insisting on this transformation, but the most compelling one, from my perspective, is the need to prepare future graduates for a world in which artificial intelligence and AI-assisted technology plays an increasingly dominant role. To succeed in the workplace of tomorrow, students will need new skills.

Where is China headed in 2018? President Xi Jinping promised "world peace" for the new year - but his 2017 track record suggests otherwise. Remember the singular stain of the July death of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, surrounded by state security? Many condemned China's conduct, but such interventions are fewer and further between these days. Increasingly, abusive Chinese authorities are garnering international support for their principles and policies.

India has a severe shortage of engineers in these technologies, especially when countries like the US have a talent pool of 850,000 AI engineers. Finally, India begins to take Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, 3D Printing, and IOT technologies seriously. The finance minister announced during his Budget 2018 speech emphasised the need to set up centres of excellence to enhance their impact on business and the economy. The budget has allocated Rs 3,073 crore for this purpose, which has doubled from last year. This comes at a time when China has put in $2 billion for its centre for excellence.

Alibaba Launches AI-Based Traffic Solution in Malaysia, Alibaba's cloud computing a unit of Alibaba Group led by Jack Ma has introduced Artificial Intelligence-based Malaysia City brain solution in alliance with Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur, the city's capital council. "The initiative was taken to organize and combat traffic congestion at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," said Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Mansor, minister at the ceremony in Kuala Lumpur. The solution'Malaysia City Brain' will harness and support the AI capabilities of Alibaba Cloud including image and video acceptance, machine learning technology, data mining, and analyze the huge amount of heterogeneous data in real-time produced by 300 traffic light junctions, 400 CCTV cameras and through other streams. Speaking at the inauguration of the City Brain solution powered by the Alibaba' cloud computing technology and artificial intelligence, the Federal Territories Minister said improvising the traffic management and infrastructure is crucial to creating a habitable city. Through the City Brain system, there will be an increase in mobility and can optimize traffic volume and speed in particular lanes which further facilitate incident detection, identifying the shortest and quickest route for an emergency.

Kazuo Hirai looks set to end his six-year reign at Sony Corp. on a high note. The electronics giant said Friday its president and chief executive officer credited for turning around the once-struggling company will assume chairmanship and be replaced by his right-hand man. The announcement came as Sony posted a nearly fourfold jump in third quarter operating profit and raised its full year profit to a record high, underscoring how a restructuring drive led by Hirai, focusing on image sensors and gaming, is reaping rewards. Effective April 1, Chief Financial Officer Kenichiro Yoshida, who alongside Hirai worked to steer Sony back to profitability after years of losses, will take on the role of CEO. "I have been pondering about when to step down and decided this to be the ideal timing, both for Sony and myself, as the company prepares to embark on a new mid-range plan," Hirai said at the company's headquarters in Tokyo.

There has been little innovation in the analysis of male fertility since the 1950s. Why? Tobias Boecker, Paris-based medtech entrepreneur is co-founder of Nanovare – a system that uses AI to help medical professionals to improve and speed up male fertility analysis – explores the current crisis in this field and what can be done to change things Birth rates are dropping, notably in the Western world. Between 1960 and 2015, the birth rate per woman in Germany decreased from 2.4 to 1.5, in the UK from 2.7 to 1.8 and in the US from 3.7 to 1.8. There are many external factors that influence this trend such as the increased age of marriage, the focus on professional careers, or the modernisation of social systems which eliminate parents' need to have many children to help support them in old age. Another factor that is becoming increasingly important is our own reproductive health, which depends on our lifestyle choices (eg smoking), environmental influences (eg pollution), and medical factors (eg genetic preconditions).

Insurance companies have the opportunity to create new sources of revenue by rethinking their traditional roles and adopting an ecosystem mind-set. An ongoing drive toward digitization has put the insurance industry on the verge of a paradigm shift. The pace of change has accelerated thanks to tremendous increases in the volume of electronic data, the ubiquity of mobile interfaces, and the growing power of artificial intelligence. In the early years, companies that digitized were at the forefront of the industry. Today, digitization has permeated every level of the competitive landscape. Society's growing reliance on digital technologies is not only reshaping customer expectations but also redefining boundaries across industries. Insurers cannot avoid this phenomenon: as traditional industry borders fall away, the future of insurance stands to be greatly influenced by platforms and ecosystems.

This past November, Avi Patchava and Paul Meinshausen participated in panel discussions at the Data Hack Summit in Bangalore and were encouraged to see Kunal Jain's keynote on developing the data science ecosystem in India. They have been a part of the community for several years and have worked in data science roles across start-ups, management consulting, industry, and venture capital. They share the strong conviction that an important area for development in the ecosystem is in Data Science's intellectual infrastructure. In the early stages of development, data science is often mistaken for a thin layer of popular statistical tools and packaged algorithms that are applied bluntly to a problem of choice. As data science evolves as a discipline in India, it will take more robust shape as an intellectual approach to discovering, as well as building solutions, for tough problems across business and society.

Describing how his company's fraud prediction system is like an unaccompanied child visiting a zoo, is when Wally Wang becomes the most animated… and the unsupervised machine-learning approach starts to make sense: "There's no mom to teach a child what a tiger is. The child by intelligence will automatically get the point of how to recognize a tiger or a goose. The connection will be built by the child. That's how the AI part plays here, the algorithm does the detection… We build up a model, making the child more intelligent, to be able to tell automatically when an animal is evolving into another species." DataVisor uses unsupervised machine learning to predict fraud attacks on companies.