Abu Qader, 18, came to the U.S. from Afghanistan as a baby. Now a freshman at Cornell University, he has founded a medical technology company with the goal of improving diagnosis of breast cancer in poor countries. Abu Qader, 18, came to the U.S. from Afghanistan as a baby. Now a freshman at Cornell University, he has founded a medical technology company with the goal of improving diagnosis of breast cancer in poor countries. After a family trip to Afghanistan when he was 15, Chicagoan Abu Qader decided he wanted to do something to improve the country's medical care.

In a country with low insurance penetration, AI could be the solution to improve the reach and profitability of insurance companies in India.The last three years have seen a massive upswing in the use...

Three weeks ago, Yukai Engineering wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign in which it raised approximately $110,000 for the Qoobo, which is a pillow with a robotic cat tail that responds to physical interaction with the user. Now, interested buyers in the US and Japan can pre-order the Qoobo for expected delivery in fall 2018. The US price is $89 per pillow. The Qoobo was originally developed after a staff member was unable to keep a beloved cat. The company aimed to create a pillow that could provide comfort to that similar of what a cat or dog would.

In a country with low insurance penetration, AI could be the solution to improve the reach and profitability of insurance companies in India. The last three years have seen a massive upswing in the use of AI across different business verticals. And insurance, being one of the oldest industries, has multiple use-cases that can improve every aspect of business from underwriting to distribution to claim management. Insurers, in India and overseas, are aggressively investing in startups and small teams to unleash the power of AI in insurance. Let us see how AI is and will be disrupting the insurance industry.

As U.S. banks wrestle with the decision of whether to use artificial intelligence to help calculate credit scores and make loan decisions, a potential role model is MyBucks, a company that's been doing this for more than a year --and has even begun offering 15-minute, AI-based loans through WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. MyBucks is a Luxembourg-based fintech that owns several banks and provides loans and basic banking products in seven African countries, Poland and Spain; it's expanding rapidly into other countries. U.S. regulators have signaled a willingness to accept banks' use of AI in lending. And the evidence so far, at least in MyBucks' case, shows that AI can improve credit quality and reduce defaults. MyBucks' Haraka app, which is now offered in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Swaziland and Kenya, and in early 2018 is expected to be introduced in the Philippines and India, can score a customer within two minutes.

The US military has deployed an advanced AI system to analyze drone surveillance video of ISIS in the Middle East, writes Gregory Allen. The military now will likely seek to expand the use of AI throughout its operations, bringing both promise and peril.

This article is part of a series that explores how artificial intelligence could change life in China. Lü moved to Shanghai in 2014 from his hometown in central China's Henan province, one of the country's poorer provinces, to work at an app development company. A year later, his wife joined him, leaving their son back in Henan with his grandparents. Living some 800 kilometers away is not an ideal situation, says Lü, but it's a necessary compromise to give the whole family a better life. Because he's only able to visit his son around six times a year, Lü spends generously on whatever he thinks will help the boy's intellectual development -- from cheap toys and storybooks to a 1,200-yuan ($180) robot playmate named Ledi, who's powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

At Incheon International Airport (ICN), outside South Korea's capital Seoul, a team of congenial staff will help you find your boarding gate or escort you to the nearest lounge. They're well trained, well behaved and quadrilingual to boot – but they're not so good at small talk. The robotic airport guides, developed by Korean tech titan LG Electronics, have been working alongside human employees since the end of July 2017. Standing 1.4m tall, they move autonomously on a wheelbase, display an LCD information screen and navigate using cameras and ultrasonic, laser and edge sensors. You may also be interested in: • Why Milan is covering its skyscrapers in plants • Chicago's underground city that's becoming a design star • Harris Tweed: from island cloth to cutting-edge fabric They're not the only robots to be making headlines in South Korea, as the country prepares to host the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics from 9-25 February in the north-eastern city of Pyeongchang.

The ingredients would include masses of processing power, lots of computer-science boffins, a torrent of capital--and abundant data with which to train machines to recognise and respond to patterns. That environment might sound like a fair description of America, the current leader in the field. But in some respects it is truer still of China. The country is rapidly building up its cloud-computing capacity. For sheer volume of research on AI, if not quality, Chinese academics surpass their American peers; AI-related patent submissions in China almost tripled between 2010 and 2014 compared with the previous five years.

Fujitsu Limited and Microsoft Corporation announced their agreement to collaborate in the field of artificial intelligence to accelerate the transformation of the ways people work in companies. The two companies are entering into this agreement to jointly build new solutions that transform the ways people work. Based on Microsoft 365, Microsoft's integrated cloud service, these new solutions will combine the insights and experience Fujitsu has accumulated through the internal and external deployments of its Global Communication Platform, together with Fujitsu's AI technology, Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, and Microsoft AI platform services on Microsoft Azure. They aim to make these new solutions available in the Japanese market from the second quarter of 2018 (April to June), and then to roll them out globally thereafter. Since entering a global alliance in the field of corporate solutions in 2002, Fujitsu and Microsoft have expanded the scope of collaboration in line with a changing market, including in such areas as the cloud and IoT for manufacturing.