The banking industry in India has traditionally funded corporate loans to those corporations who could navigate their labyrinthine processes. This paradigm, however, is beginning to get disrupted, thanks to the advent of consumer lending startups, armed with complex algorithms and machine learning software to replace antiquated credit rating systems. RBI has identified 12 accounts with 25 percent (Rs 1.75 lakh crore) of bank NPAs for insolvency; now, corporates are selling their assets which never happened earlier; these are amongst the top 500 exposures in the banking system. The NPAs have been attributed to cyclicality of industry sectors and that entrepreneurs shouldn't be hounded. However, siphoning of funds and CBI investigations like the one being done for Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines paves the way for banks to shift focus to retail lending.

A Drive.ai test vehicle outfitted with the company's self-driving tech, including a messaging screen to let pedestrians and other cars know what it's doing. Drive.ai is a young Silicon Valley company that's having a big year. After announcing plans this month to supply self-driving vehicles for Lyft's ride-hailing network, the autonomous tech developer has scored financial backing from Southeast Asian rideshare powerhouse Grab and plans to expand into Singapore. Grab, a Singapore-based Uber rival, was among the investors in a $15 million funding round Drive.ai The Singapore move is strategic as the Asian city-state is moving fast to adopt autonomous vehicles, Drive.ai

Smoke rises near a stadium where some Islamic State militants are holed up after an air strike by coalition forces, in Raqqa, Syria, Oct. 12, 2017. Around 100 fighters from the Islamic State group have surrendered since Friday in Raqqa, with the Syrian city said to be on the brink of falling to a U.S.-led coalition. Meanwhile, a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province on Thursday killed 14 ISIS militants, Afghan officials said Saturday. In Raqqa, all of the combatants were "removed from the city," a spokesman for the U.S-led coalition against ISIS told Reuters on Saturday. ISIS was said to be on the verge of defeat in Raqqa, the report said.

The Justice Ministry has unveiled unmanned facial recognition gates that will be introduced at Haneda airport on Wednesday to speed up immigration procedures for Japanese citizens. The system can judge whether passport photos match images of travelers taken by cameras at the gates in about 10 seconds, the ministry said Friday. The system will kick off Wednesday with three gates for Japanese nationals returning home. The ministry hopes to introduce the system at Narita, Chubu and Kansai international airports in fiscal 2018, expanding it to include departing Japanese nationals. At the new gates, travelers will be required to remove hats and masks and stand in front of a mirror-like display where photos will be taken.

For the time being, Yamaha has only revealed that its Motoroid prototype can identify its owner and interact like a living creature. This certainly leaves ample room for speculation, yet the recent road safety initiative undertaken by BMW, Honda and Yamaha steers our imagination in a specific direction. In any case, we'll know more on what Yamaha's prototype can do before the end of the month, as soon as the Tokyo Motor Show gets rolling on October 27.

The casualties of automation are on the rise, but it's not bad news for everyone. Nearly one third (700,000) of low-skilled workers in India's IT sector could lose their jobs by 2022 due to an uptick in the adoption of robotics and artificial intelligence. But those in medium- and high-skilled jobs stand to gain from the trend, a recent report (paywall) by market analysis firm HfS Research said. In the next five years, the number of medium-skilled IT employees is estimated to rise to 1 million from 900,000 while the number of high-skilled employees will jump to over half a million from 320,000, according to the report. With technological advancements, "the productivity of higher-skill workers, especially those engaged in abstract thinking, or with creative and problem-solving skills, has increased," a January 2017 report by management consultancy McKinsey & Company explained. As a result, they're more likely to be in demand in the coming years.

The future of work has always been a hotly debated subject. The heat has been turned up recently with advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). One view, expressed by Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at GigaOM Research, is that robots will yield a net reduction in jobs for humans, "The central question of 2025 will be: What are people for in a world that does not need their labor, and where only a minority are needed to guide the'bot-based economy?" This view believes that there will be less demand for human labor in the future, resulting in a net reduction in human jobs over time. An alternative view, however, is that technology is not destiny, and that throughout history, technology has been a job creator overall, not a job destroyer.

Public anonymity is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Coming soon to an airport in Dubai is an artsy, colorful video security and customs tunnel that scans your face, adds you to a database, indexes you with artificial intelligence, and decides if you're free to leave -- or not. By the end of summer 2018, Dubai International Airport's Terminal 3 will have replaced its security clearance counter with a walkway tunnel filled with 80 face-scanning cameras disguised as a distracting immersive video. Travellers' eyes will roam the enclosed tunnel and its virtual shimmering aquarium as they head to their gate, while their biometric data is seamlessly collected, compared, and stored .... somewhere, under unknown terms and conditions. According to officials presenting the security and customs tunnel at the 37th Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX) Technology Week at the World Trade Centre in Dubai, its video shows will not be limited to chicken of the sea.

Emotions run deep in every conversation we humans have. Deciphering these underlying emotions is the key to making machine interactions more human. Detecting emotions in text is difficult enough for human beings, let alone artificially created machines, as many of our emotions are conveyed through expressions and tone of voice. At Microsoft, we are working to create human-like AI, Ruuh and on this journey detecting user emotions is a critical piece. So, I teamed up with Microsoft researchers Umang Gupta and Radhakrishnan Srikanth to take on this challenge.

China's e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced plans to invest more than $15 billion over the next three years in researching emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Jack Ma, Alibaba's executive chairman, announced his decision to establish the Alibaba DAMO Academy (DAMO stands for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook) on the first day of the company's 2017 Computing Conference, which opened on Wednesday. Ma said the academy will do research aimed at "solving problems" related to the Internet of things, fintech, quantum computing, and AI. It will open seven research labs in China, the U.S., Russia, Israel, and Singapore. Chinese tech companies are increasingly looking to invest in cutting-edge research, especially artificial intelligence (see "China's AI Awakening").