Mainland China recorded robust venture capital activity in the third quarter, with the country taking half of the world's ten largest venture capital deals during the period. Artificial intelligence (AI) was a leading sector for deal making, according to KPMG's quarterly global report on venture capital trends. Continuing the momentum from the second quarter 2017, companies in mainland China attracted US$10.2 billion worth of venture capital investments in 95 deals between July and September, accounted for half of the top-ten largest global venture capital deals, and 10 of the top 12 deals in Asia. These included the US$2 billion fundraising by news aggregation app Toutiao and US$1.6 billion raised by electric vehicle manufacturer BAIC BJEV. The report highlights that AI, robotics, and other tech-enabled next-generation sectors in China are attracting significant investment, with the pace is expected to continue. "AI has been the hottest topic for VC investors for several quarters.

While tech giants Google, Microsoft and Apple are integrating AI across their user interfaces, such as personalizing search and marketing, small businesses that lack the economic muscle are benefitting from AI-powered forecasting that is driving marketing operations and personalization. Case in point – Boxx.ai that rolled out its AI-powered product AIDA, aimed at marketers to help personalize their customer touch, thereby improving engagement, increasing transactions and reducing attrition. Another Bangalore-based startup Artifacia has an AI-powered visual discovery platform that is revolutionizing visual search for e-commerce companies.

The Russian technology company Yandex has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called "Alice". Yandex, Russia's largest search engine, said in a press release Tuesday that Alice is the first conversational online assistant, possessing "near-human levels of speech." "We wanted Alice to interact with users more like a human, so that users don't need to adapt their requests," said Denis Filippov, head of speech technologies at Yandex. "In developing Alice, we leveraged our speech technologies, which currently provide the world's most accurate Russian language recognition. Based on word error rate (WER) measurements, Alice demonstrates near-human levels of speech recognition accuracy," Filippov added.

Fujitsu today announces the addition of nVidia Volta Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence and support deep learning processing on its latest Primergy x86 servers. Available to customers in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa beginning December 2017, select Primegy models are certified for the new-generation of nVidia Tesla V100 GPU accelerators. AI and deep learning computing involves large amounts of raw data and highly demanding compute environments. Fujitsu is rising to this challenge by introducing native deep learning processing capabilities to select Fujitsu Primergy CX and RX server models. To achieve the highest possible levels of system performance, Fujitsu is introducing native support for NVIDIA GPUs via direct connection to the mainboard.

Alibaba Group announced today that it's launching a new research organization aimed at tackling emerging technologies like machine learning, network security, the internet of things, and quantum computing. It's called the Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook (referred to as the DAMO Academy for short), and Alibaba plans to recruit 100 researchers to staff labs around the globe. The company plans to open two labs in China, both in the tech giant's home city of Hangzhou as well as Beijing. In addition, the Chinese ecommerce and technology titan will open labs in San Mateo, California; Seattle, Washington; Moscow, Russia; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Singapore. Over the next three years, the company plans to spend $15 billion on research and development, a significant increase over its current rate of spending.

New Delhi: Parallel Dots, a three-year old start-up developing artificial intelligence-based solutions for different industry verticals, has raised $1.4 million from US-based Multipoint Capital, the company said on Tuesday. Multipoint Capital had earlier invested $600,000 in the company last year. Parallel Dots was launched in January 2014 and was incubated at TLabs, the start-up incubator managed by Times Internet. Parallel Dots, which has offices in Gurugram and Delaware, US, is an applied AI research firm that licenses its technology to enterprise clients. In an interview, co-founder Angam Parashar said the solutions are used by companies in financial technology, insurance, healthcare, and market research.

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration is nearing completion of new "buy American" rules to make it easier to sell U.S.-made military drones overseas and compete against fast-growing Chinese and Israeli rivals, senior U.S. officials said. While President Donald Trump's aides work on relaxing domestic regulations on drone sales to select allies, Washington will also seek to renegotiate a 1987 missile-control pact with the aim of loosening international restrictions on U.S. exports of unmanned aircraft, according to government and industry sources. At home, the U.S. administration is pressing ahead with its revamp of drone export policy under heavy pressure from American manufacturers and in defiance of human rights advocates who warn of the risk of fueling instability in hot spots including the Middle East and South Asia. The changes, part of a broader effort to overhaul U.S. arms export protocols, could be rolled out by the end of the year under a presidential policy decree, the administration officials said on condition of anonymity. The aim is to help U.S. drone makers -- pioneers in remote-controlled aircraft that have become a centerpiece of counterterrorism strategy -- reassert themselves in the overseas market, where China, Israel and others often sell under less cumbersome restrictions.

Recently I attended a Data Science conference – full with celebrated & experienced speakers, nice looking agenda having multiple tracks and attended by a large number of industry professionals. What I took away from the conference was 2 days of networking, bunch of exchanged visiting cards and may be one good session which was useful for the data scientist inside me to some degree. Most of the sessions talked about Analytics / Data Science from a very high level to be useful for me. The same use cases – Alexa using Deep Learning or Target being able to predict a pregnancy in advance or Google driverless cars being slapped in sessions after sessions! This is not the first time this happened to me – this actually happens almost every time I attend an event like this.

Robots are taking our jobs. Almost everything you can learn in our current education system will be automated soon. Supply chains are in upheaval as production moves closer to the consumer and products are made by individual robots rather than rows of underpaid workers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are threatening thousands of white-collar jobs. As manufacturing shifts away from the traditional Asian hubs, shipping lines now suffer from massive overcapacity that will probably stay for a long time. We are aware of all of these trends.

Gurugram based, AI driven e-commerce fraud prevention start-up ThirdWatch has raised an undisclosed angel funding, led by lead investor Mr. Rahul Agarwalla from the Indian Angel Network. This also marks Indian Angel Network's first investment from the Rs. The round also has had participation from Mr. Keshav Sanghi, former MD of Goldman Sachs India & founder of VentureWorks India along with Batlivala & Karani Securities. Launched in April 2016 by ex HT Mobile Solutions (a HT media company) CTO, Adarsh Jain and Tech Lead, Shashank Agarwal, ThirdWatch is arguably India's first AI for real time fraud detection and prevention. Its flagship product Mitra, evaluates and flags every transaction in real-time as fraudulent or genuine on the basis of a Trust Score.