China's top search engine Baidu is leading the country's drive to dominate AI. The company says its aims are purely commercial, but China also seeks a strategic and military advantage over rivals.

Over the years, some ad tech trends have undergone full evolution, whereas others have only iteratively grown. Nevertheless, each trend has been instrumental in pushing advertising, including mobile advertising, a bit further into the future, while exponentially improving the experience for users, advertisers, and publishers alike. Here are five trends that will be dominating forces come 2018. History has shown that industry consolidation is a natural process and that systemic market forces make it possible to predict its evolution. In 2017, we saw consolidation of many ad tech players, with merger and acquisition deals reaching record levels.

Japanese hotelier Fujita Kanko is implementing a multilingual chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to handle guest inquiries on the websites for some of its Japanese-based properties. Website visitors can use the chatbot in Japanese, English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese or Korean to receive 24/7 assistance. If the chatbot fails to answer any questions, human operators are available to provide assistance between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. Japan time. The feature is currently available on the websites of Hotel Gracery Ginza, Hotel Gracery Shinjuku and Shinjuku Washington Hotel all in Tokyo, Hotel Gracery Naha in Okinawa, Hotel Gracery Sapporo in Hokkaido, Hotel Gracery Tamachi in Tokyo, and Hotel Gracery Kyoto Sanjo in Kyoto. "It is essential that we adapt our services to meet consumer demand for more digital interaction, while maintaining our in-person hospitality standards," Fujita Kanko President and CEO Akira Segawa said in a statement.

It's no coincidence that at about the time that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has professed the company was moving into an'artificial intelligence first' world, the Internet giant is backing AI start-ups in India to help it achieve that goal. Young ventures that analyse medical data to reduce human error, gather insights to help travellers and provide cooking apps for different culinary needs, are some of the AI companies that Google is nurturing at its'Launchpad Accelerator.' "The pace at which you can solve problems is so much faster when you apply (AI)," said Paul Ravindranath G, program manager, Google India. "We have begun including companies that are meaningfully solving problems... using AI and machine learning." The firm's six-month accelerator programme matches young companies from emerging ecosystems with the best of its people, network and advanced technologies to help scale their products. It also connects them with mentors from top tech firms and venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley, U.S. In return, Google, whose parent company Alphabet Inc. reported a revenue of $90.27 billion in 2016, is hoping that its technology and cloud computing platform gets consumed by these start-ups and they build their innovation on top of them.

Robots could treble China's bomb and shell production capacity in less than a decade according to a senior scientist involved in a programme that is using artificial intelligence to boost the productivity of ammunition factories. Xu Zhigang, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shenyang Institute of Automation and a lead scientist with China's "high-level weapon system intelligent manufacturing programme", told the South China Morning Post last Wednesday that about a quarter of the country's ammunition factories had replaced many workers with "smart machines" or begun to do so. The robots, with man-made "hands and eyes", could assemble different types of deadly explosives including artillery shells, bombs and rockets, he said. They could also make more sophisticated ammunition such as guided bombs, equipped with computer chips and sensors, that could carry out precision strikes. They were five times as productive as a human worker, Xu said, but logistical factors such as the supply of raw materials meant the overall productivity boost would fall between 100 to 200 per cent "at a minimum" once all China's ammunition factories were upgraded in the next decade, Xu said.

Dubai: A robot has joined Dubai Police to raise awareness about dangers of drug abuse. Called'Amal the volunteer', the robot will interact with public in different areas and gatherings to raise awareness about drug abuse. Social media accounts of Dubai Police posted a video of the robot saying, "Hello humans..My name is Amal..i want to help humans fight drug abuse..That's why I'm volunteering in Dubai Police. I am here to spread awareness and give you hope and I can't wait to meet all of you." Lt Colonel Abdullah Al Khayat, Director of Awareness, Anti-Narcotic Department at Dubai police said that Dubai Police commander-in-chief named the robot'Amal' which means'hope'.

BENGALURU: As the Indian IT services industry enters 2018, it will see more artificial intelligence (AI)-driven business than ever before, said analysts. While leaders of the $154-billion software services industry foresee fewer human involvement across projects; industry body Nasscom claims a lot of technology firms have started seeing AIbased decision-making. Clients of the IT service providers are increasingly using smart technologies such as using a chatbot over phone call to get banking related services giving rise to AI and automation-driven offerings. This, analysts said, requires more data and machine learning-driven work for technology services providers and lesser human intervention to do low-end work. Overall value of enterprise automation and AI is expected to reach nearly $10 billion globally in 2018, while spend on AI will be around $1.6 billion, wrote Phil Fersht, chief executive officer, HfS Research, in one of his recent blogs.

Central bankers around the world have set up or are creating departments to embrace big data in the quest for deeper insight into the economies they manage. "Isaac Asimov once said, 'I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them,'" David Hardoon, chief data officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said in a recent speech. "We are now starting to put in place the necessary tools, infrastructure and skillsets to harness the power of data science to unlock insights, sharpen surveillance of risks, enhance regulatory compliance and transform the way we do work." Authorities like Hardoon are tapping publicly-available sources such as Google Trends and jobs websites to help "nowcast" their economies, and confidential data like credit registers that can help identify a stressed bank.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said that people would need to become cyborgs to be relevant in an artificial intelligence age. He said that a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence" would be necessary to ensure we stay economically valuable. Soon afterwards, the serial entrepreneur created Neuralink, with the intention of connecting computers directly to human brains. He wants to do this using "neural lace" technology – implanting tiny electrodes into the brain for direct computing capabilities. Various forms of BCI are already available, from ones that sit on top of your head and measure brain signals to devices that are implanted into your brain tissue.

Not only have robots been able to use GPS waypoint technology to travel from one location to another, but the systems have slowly learned how to maneuver independently around other objects or obstacles in real time. Systems like the well-known Packbot progressively leveraged technology to use different software packages for different sensing or detection missions with greater levels of autonomy. The Army is transforming its fleet of transportable robots to a common set of standards to expedite modernization, interoperability, autonomy and mission flexibility. During the last decade and a half of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army acquired and fast-tracked as many as 7,000 unique robotic systems in an effort to keep pace with the emerging threat of enemy IEDs. Building upon these developments, which included the deployment of multiple transportable cave- and road-clearing robots, the service now seeks to architect design a common fleet with a single robotic chassis configurable to a wide range of varying missions, Bryan McVeigh, the Army's project manager for Force Projection, said in a service statement.