BEIJING (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google said on Wednesday it is opening an artificial intelligence (AI) research center in China to target the country's local talent, even as the U.S. search firm's products remain blocked in the country. Google said in a statement the research center is the first of its kind in Asia and will comprise a small team operating out of its existing office in Beijing. Chinese policy makers have voiced strong support for AI research and development in the country, but have imposed increasingly strict rules on foreign firms in the past year, including new censorship restrictions. Google's search engine is banned in the Chinese market along with its app store, email and cloud storage services. China's cyber regulators say restrictions on foreign media and internet platforms are designed to block influences that contravene stability and socialist ideas.

A new report from the Washington-based Center for a New American Security raised the alert level of the US defence community over China's rise as an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower, one that could effectively destroy the American military by 2030. The meticulous report no doubt will send a chill through the halls of the Pentagon. Kania, as co-founder of the China Cyber and Intelligence Studies Institute, is well suited to write the investigative report using available Chinese-language open-source materials that reveal China's military thinking and progress on AI. Kania reported that China's military is pursuing advances in'impact and disruptive military applications of AI' and given it'high-level priority within China's national agenda for military-civil fusion'. The goal is to become the world's'premier innovation centre' in AI by 2030.

Many in Russia, in fact, seem to prefer their AI helpers with sass and a dark sense of humor. The Moscow-based tech giant Yandex launched a Russian-speaking personal assistant called Alice this October (pictured above, sans snark). And unlike Siri or Alexa, the program relies less on scripted responses than on what it's learned by consuming conversational data mined from the Web, news articles, and even a little Russian literature. As a result, Alice can respond to a much wider range of queries. However, some of program's responses can be a bit surprising.

Google announced today that its first artificial intelligence research center in Asia will be set up in China, underlining the country's capacity to dominate in the fast-growing field. The company noted that the new center in Beijing will host researchers who will focus on basic AI, and "support the AI research community by funding and sponsoring AI conferences and workshops, and working closely with the vibrant Chinese AI research community." The move makes a lot of sense: research firm IDC predicts that global spending on AI will cross $46 billion by 2020, and China is going all in. In July, its State Council outlined its goals to build a domestic artificial intelligence industry worth nearly $150 billion in the next few years, and become the world leader in this domain by 2030. The Chinese city of Tianjin is also slated to create a $5 billion fund to bolster AI development.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digitisation can cut bank and financial operating costs by half, according to Abdulaziz Al Ghurair, Chairman of the UAE Banks Federation. Speaking at the Middle East Banking Forum in Abu Dhabi, Al Ghurair said that the UAE is among the most advanced nations when it comes to the implementation of technology in the banking sector. "Artificial intelligence and digitalisation save up to 30 to 50 costs for the banking and financial system," he said, adding that digitalisation is "a must" for UAE banking and financial-sector companies to keep pace with global developments. "The banking sector is an integral part of the UAE economy, playing a major role in the economic diversification drive," he added. In September, Al Ghurair told local media that Mashreq Bank may cut as much as 10 percent of its 4,000 strong workforce over the course of the next year due to the successful implementation of AI technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is simply the level of intelligence displayed by machines. While mostly associated with science fiction and futuristic technology, AI is actually a lot more ubiquitous nowadays than one might expect. Some of the AI applications that are already out in the public include those in self-driving vehicles, search engines such as Google, financial services, health care and even in art and video games. Now, the obvious question is, how is AI useful in real estate? In particular, in Dubai's real estate landscape are there initiatives to embrace the technology and make it more meaningful to landlords, homeowners and realtors?

BEIJING (AFP) - Google announced on Wednesday (Dec 13) that it will open a new artificial intelligence research centre in Beijing, tapping China's talent pool in the promising technology despite the US search giant's exclusion from the country's internet. Artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, has been an area of intense focus for American tech stalwarts Google, Microsoft and Facebook, and their Chinese competitors Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu as they bid to master what many consider is the future of computing. AI research has the potential to boost developments in self-driving cars and automated factories, translation products and facial recognition software, among others. Google's move to open a Beijing office focused on fundamental research is an indication of China's AI talent, widely seen as being neck-and-neck with the United States in research capability. "Chinese authors contributed 43 per cent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015," Li Feifei, a researcher leading the new centre, wrote in a blog post on Google's website.

Komatsu, one of the world's largest manufacturers of construction and mining equipment, has selected NVIDIA as its partner to bring AI to jobsites, making them safer and more efficient, NVIDIA announced today. The partnership – described at GTC Japan by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang – will focus on Komatsu using NVIDIA GPUs to visualize and analyze entire construction sites. The NVIDIA Jetson AI platform will serve as the brain of heavy machinery deployed on these sites, enabling improved safety and productivity. "Artificial intelligence is sweeping across industries, and its next frontier is autonomous intelligent machines," said Huang, speaking at NVIDIA's final of seven global GPU Technology Conferences this year. "Future machines will perceive their surroundings and be continuously alert, helping operators work more efficiently and safely. The construction and mining industries will benefit greatly from these advances."

Google is deepening its push into artificial intelligence (AI) by opening a research centre in China, even though its search services remain blocked in the country. Google said the facility would be the first its kind in Asia and would aim to employ local talent. Silicon Valley is focusing heavily on the future applications for AI. China has also indicated strong support for AI development and for catching up with the US. Research into artificial intelligence has the potential to improve a range of technologies, from self-driving cars and automated factories to translation products and facial recognition software.

This presents a challenge for its adoption in healthcare. To address this problem, Tokyo, Japan-based Hitachi developed a technology for risk prediction with analyzing the results presented by deep learning and extracting the several dozens of actionable factors for each patient from the vast amount of data collected from heart failure patients. These are elements familiar to clinicians and can support medical decision-making in clinical practice. Through a standard statistical approach based on this risk prediction model, the extracted factors were used to calculate the risk of hospital readmission, and the relevance of the factors was calculated. Thus, this explainable AI technology can enhance prediction accuracy and the quality of medical decision-making.