Five students from the Kunming University of Science and Technology, a college of south-east China, have been working for a whole year for a really interesting project. The goal was to develop a tool that could help and support both blind and visually impaired people. Eye See is a helmet whose core component is a laser radar, similar to those used by the automated driving systems mounted on new generation cars: it can perform a full 360 omnidirectional scan, identifying and signaling obstacles within 3 meters by means of a special acoustic signal. All this happens thanks to a small Artificial Intelligence that is equipped with the helmet, which can recognize the colors of clothes worn by the person who is confronted by the recognition of an image, or to hypothesize the age of the person, making a verbal description. This helps to help not only those who do not see, but also people who are visually impaired in reading books, magazines, and posters.

Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male, a science fiction novel that explores the future consequences of China's one-child policy. The policy was enacted in 1979 in an attempt to curb overpopulation, and even though the country started to phase it out two years ago it led to a huge shortage of potential wives due to so many parents choosing to have sons instead of daughters. "It sounds like dystopian fiction, but in actuality China was the one nation that had the political system and the wherewithal to enforce the policy," King says in Episode 279 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And 40 years of this is very, very scary to think about." Overpopulation has been a popular theme in science fiction for decades, from the movie Soylent Green, based on the Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room! to the Star Trek episode "The Mark of Gideon."

The writing has been on the wall for years, at least since Microsoft de-bundled the motion-tracking system from the Xbox One in 2014, knocking $100 off the price tag and making the system more competitive with the PlayStation 4. The Kinect debuted in 2010 with the Xbox 360, and it had a good run, overall: Microsoft sold roughly 35 million devices in total. However, across its iterations and upgrades, the Kinect never quite found its market -- the one application that would turn the hardware into an essential piece of home technology. It wasn't a conversational, connected, voice-activated system like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and game developers lost interest in the device as virtual and mixed reality rose to the fore. The Kinect was a product out of time. That's not to say it didn't contribute to some truly wild experiences over the years. Developers quickly applied Kinect to surgery, physical therapy and a range of other medical uses.

The co-founder of online education platform Coursera has made it his mission to build talent for AI through his new project, deeplearning.ai. Andrew is preparing courses on deep-learning--advanced AI inspired by the human brain's neural networks--that will be available on Coursera. In an interview with ET's J Vignesh, the former chief scientist at Baidu also spoke about how technology disruption can help countries like India leapfrog and take a lead in the new world. Edited excerpts: How are we progressing towards the concept of singularity, or general intelligence, from sector-specific artificial intelligence? That is hard to project.

Dubai: Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), self-driving electric vehicles may soon turn up at Dubai International airport to help airside crew run its operations. The "robocars" would help the mega-facility run more smoothly, and cement the airport's status the world's busiest airport in terms of international passenger traffic in 2016, and en route to hitting 89 million passengers this year. Not only that, AI may soon also help airline passengers pick their on-board meals, too, or schedule a pickup by an airport taxi chauffeur -- or guide passengers through last-minute duty-free shopping. These are some of the AI-driven future projects now being developed by Emirates, it was announced on Saturday. The AI projects were highlighted during the visit of His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to the Emirates Airline's lab at the Dubai Future Accelerators facility in Emirates Towers.

HPE announced new purpose-built platforms and services capabilities to help companies simplify the adoption of Artificial Intelligence, with an initial focus on a key subset of AI known as deep learning. Inspired by the human brain, deep learning is typically implemented for challenging tasks such as image and facial recognition, image classification and voice recognition. To take advantage of deep learning, enterprises need a high performance compute infrastructure to build and train learning models that can manage large volumes of data to recognize patterns in audio, images, videos, text and sensor data. Many organizations lack several integral requirements to implement deep learning, including expertise and resources; sophisticated and tailored hardware and software infrastructure; and the integration capabilities required to assimilate different pieces of hardware and software to scale AI systems. Based on the HPE Apollo 6500 system in collaboration with Bright Computing to enable rapid deep learning application development, this solution includes pre-configured deep learning software frameworks, libraries, automated software updates and cluster management optimized for deep learning and supports NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.

An empty-eyed humanoid named Sophia has become the first robot to be granted citizenship in the world. Saudi Arabia bestowed citizenship on Sophia ahead of the Future Investment Initiative, held in the kingdom's capital city of Riyadh on Wednesday. "I am very honored and proud of this unique distinction," Sophia told the audience, speaking on a panel. "This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship." It didn't elaborate on the details of its citizenship.

The UAE has appointed Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama, aged 27, as the country's first minister of State for Artificial Intelligence (AI) as part of a cabinet reshuffle. Earlier, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president, prime minister and ruler of Dubai, announced the UAE Strategy for artificial intelligence, a major part of the UAE Centennial 2070 objectives. The AI initiative aims to improve government performance and create an innovative and highly-productive environment by means of investing in AI. "We initiated electronic services 16 years go and today we are launching a fresh stage relying on Artificial Intelligence," Sheikh Mohammed said. "We are seeking to adopt tools and methodologies related to artificial intelligence to expedite and ensure more efficiency for government services at all levels." In the last significant structural change, Sheikh Mohammed announced in February last year that the UAE will outsource most government tasks to the private sector and cut the number of ministries.

Founded by 26-year-olds V P Rahul and Rijin Ramesh, the platform offers customers virtual chat assistant to address business queries without delays. Growing up in the historic town of Kannur in Kerala, interactions with tourists were inevitable. While most would answer questions and go their way, V P Rahul and Rijin Ramesh took it as a classroom to hone their'customer query management skills'. The 26-year-olds are co-founders and creators of Articbot, a machine learning platform that helps organisations connect with customers in 100 different languages, and solve queries on products, and processes to procure services. The idea of building a machine learning platform to address queries was born out of the duo's personal experiences.

Investors and analysts have been expecting Ant to go public sometime in 2018. The Hangzhou-based company last raised $4.5 billion from private investors in April 2016 in a deal that gave it a $60 billion valuation--and its business has since expanded significantly. An IPO "is not a necessity or a priority" right now, said Douglas Feagin, Ant's president of international business, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Mr. Feagin, an American who was a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker for more than two decades, said he can appreciate the benefits of going public but Ant has other, more pressing, plans to implement. Among Ant's pursuits: expanding Alipay's global footprint within and beyond the 70 countries the payments system is used in, while plumbing for new technology investments globally in things like facial-recognition and machine-learning systems.