The question is no longer "when are driverless cars coming," but where. While the US and China are locked in a head-to-head showdown to see which will flood its roads with safe AI-driven vehicles, a dark horse emerges. The UK may be playing tortoise to their hares. Before we can talk about the Queen's plans, however, we'll need to bring up last year's most improved player in the space: China. The People's Republic is again revving its engines with state-sponsored programs designed to usher the AI era in. The country's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently announced it was drafting plans to put AI in at least half the cars in the country by 2020.

Military officials and industry experts have long discussed how artificial intelligence can benefit the warfighter. The technology promises to crunch mountains of data into easily digestible bites of actionable information and to predict when parts on a vehicle are about to wear out. However, there has been less emphasis on how it can improve modeling and simulations for training purposes -- a market area that is becoming increasingly important as service leaders across the board call for more investment to improve readiness. During the recent National Training and Simulation Association's Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Florida, military officials and industry experts discussed the benefits of applying the emerging technology to such scenarios. Retired Rear Adm. James Robb, president of NTSA, the host of I/ITSEC and an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association, said there was a strong emphasis during the show on big data and artificial intelligence.

Google's search engine might be banned in China, but it's been finding more and more ways to establish its presence in the country. Its latest effort is leading a $120 million investment in Chushou, a Chinese online e-sports platform that specializes in mobile game livestreams. The website is already pretty big, with 8 million users and as many as 250,000 livestreams a day, and it's unclear what percentage of total funding came from Google. According to CNBC, though, the big G will help the platform grow even bigger, more international, in order to make it look more inviting to potential users outside China. So far, the number of mobile gamers in China is almost double the number of people in the US, so Chushou definitely has the potential to become a proper Twitch competitor.

Check out Kris Hammond's tutorial, "AI in the Enterprise," at our 2018 AI Conference in New York City or Beijing. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Kristian Hammond, chief scientist of Narrative Science and professor of EECS at Northwestern University. He has been at the forefront of helping companies understand the power, limitations, and disruptive potential of AI technologies and tools. In a previous post on machine learning, I listed types of uses cases (a taxonomy) for machine learning that could just as well apply to enterprise applications of AI.

The Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs of South Korea drew up the'Sixth Construction Technology Promotion Basic Plan', a road map for construction technology policies that respond to the fourth industrial revolution such as smart construction automation. According to the basic plan, first of all, the ministry will develop smart construction technology to cope with the fourth industrial revolution. This means utilizing 3D design technology in order to overcome the disadvantages of difficulties in precise construction and accidents as work is done in the field. Especially, Korea will develop automation technology which produces with 3D printers at plants and enables AI-based construction robots after virtual construction. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is planning to prepare design standards and manuals to induce the use of BIM technology and to make BIM design obligatory for road projects which cost more than 50 billion won per project by 2020.

As reported by Reuters, the project was revealed in an article by China's official Xinhua news agency this week. The research centre will be located towards the west of Beijing, in the city's Mentougou district. The extensive complex will be large enough to house over 400 enterprises developing new AI-based technologies. China expects the facility to be a substantial contributor to the local economy. When it's fully operational, annual output could be up to 50 billion yuan, around $7.7 billion.

China aims to implement artificial intelligence technology in at least half of all its new cars by 2020 and cover 90 percent of its big cities and highways with a wireless network that can support smart vehicles, its top state planner said on Friday.

India does not face a threat of losing its edge over other countries with the rise of new emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO and president of Genpact told ET in an interview. He said the opportunity size for India has only increased given the huge technology talent pool available. "We never thought about the cost advantage as the only advantage that never stays for long but we have a huge tech base. That population doesn't learn AI and ML, but it's not that the technology population the world over is learning AI and ML," said Tyagarajan. He said Indian companies traditionally have been good at teaching people new skills.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzzword of 2017 as tech companies, from promising startups to big-name firms such as Google and Facebook, are snapping up the AI technology which has changed people's lives and the world. The AI technology, which has experienced a rapid development in the past decade, has outperformed human intelligence in some areas and grown into a "super human artificial intelligence." The stunning power of Artificial Intelligence shocked the whole world last year when Google's AlphaGo beat South Korea' top player, an 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in the game of Go based on a huge database and powerful algorithms. But its latest version, Alpha Go Zero, which learned to teach itself how to play Go with no human background, demonstrated an even more powerful talent by defeating 3-0 the world top-ranking player, China's Ke Jie, and a five world-champion team in another challenge game of Go in May 2017. Similarly, the AI Libratus invented by Carnegie Mellon, skinned the world's top poker players in a poker match in early 2017 by learning through self-play instead of human game data.

By Yasuaki Kobayashi and Shota Mizuno / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers A shortage of human resources in information technology (IT) -- including software developers and cybersecurity experts -- is becoming a serious issue. Companies across a wide range of industries using IT are struggling to secure talented workers, while shopping and services are increasingly going online and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding. If the issue is not addressed promptly, it may have a negative impact on the government's growth strategy. "We cannot debug our programs because of a labor shortage," lamented an engineer for a leading electronics maker who has been working on a project to develop an AI-equipped product. The engineer said the development of the product has not progressed well and the start of its sales has been delayed by more than a year.