Appier, the artificial intelligence startup that recently raised a $33 million Series C from three of Asia's biggest Internet companies, has hired former Microsoft Japan marketing senior director Sean Chu to oversee its growth strategy. As Appier's new chief strategy officer, Chu will be based in Tokyo and helm Appier's operations in Japan and Korea. Last month Appier announced its Series C, which brought its total funding so far to $82 million, from SoftBank Group, Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI (the Singapore Economic Development Board's corporate investment arm) and AMTD Group. Appier's goal is to strengthen in presence in the markets its new investors represent, which include Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, before expanding into other regions. The company's main products, the CrossX Programmatic Platform and Aixon, help brands use artificial intelligence to predict consumer behavior and make marketing decisions.

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World's largest bank, the State Bank of India (SBI), has deployed a new artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbot to help its customers that include addressing customer queries and help them find right kind of services from the bank. The AI solution, named SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA), is deployed by Payjo that also offers similar solutions to many other international banks including Yes Bank. The SIA, Payjo said addresses customer enquiries instantly and helps them with everyday banking tasks just like a bank representative. "With SIA, SBI will reduce significant operational expenditure over time," Payjo said in a statement. The SIA is setup, the company said, to handle nearly 10,000 enquiries per second or 864 Million in a day. "That is nearly 25% of the queries processed by Google every day," it added.

Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence and big data will reach the tens of billions by 2025. Michael Finnigan finds out what family-run operations need to know about the rise of the robots. The county of Wiltshire in the United Kingdom might seem like an unlikely setting for one of the world's most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories. It is best-known for its Neolithic monuments and iconic stone circles, most famously Stonehenge, but beneath its prehistoric landscape the future is unfolding. At family-run technology design firm Dyson, a team of engineers are using artificial intelligence to get a leg up on the competition.

Reinforcement learning is considered as a promising direction for driving policy learning. However, training autonomous driving vehicle with reinforcement learning in real environment involves non-affordable trial-and-error. It is more desirable to first train in a virtual environment and then transfer to the real environment. In this paper, we propose a novel realistic translation network to make model trained in virtual environment be workable in real world. The proposed network can convert non-realistic virtual image input into a realistic one with similar scene structure. Given realistic frames as input, driving policy trained by reinforcement learning can nicely adapt to real world driving. Experiments show that our proposed virtual to real (VR) reinforcement learning (RL) works pretty well. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of driving policy trained by reinforcement learning that can adapt to real world driving data.

Auto-encoding is an important task which is typically realized by deep neural networks (DNNs) such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). In this paper, we propose EncoderForest (abbrv. eForest), the first tree ensemble based auto-encoder. We present a procedure for enabling forests to do backward reconstruction by utilizing the equivalent classes defined by decision paths of the trees, and demonstrate its usage in both supervised and unsupervised setting. Experiments show that, compared with DNN autoencoders, eForest is able to obtain lower reconstruction error with fast training speed, while the model itself is reusable and damage-tolerable.

Video-game voice actors have agreed to end a nearly yearlong strike against several major gaming publishers. The actors union SAG-AFTRA and a representative for the publishers said Monday that they reached a tentative agreement on Saturday to end the strike. It calls for actors who work multiple sessions on games to receive additional payments and contains a requirement that companies disclose to actors what game they will be working on. The actors began a strike against several video game companies, including Activision Productions Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Take 2 Productions Inc. and WB Games. The work stoppage focused on payments to the actors, as well as complaints that actors were not being told which projects they were being considered for until after they were hired.

Dubai has showcased a flight for what it said would soon be the world's first drone taxi service under an ambitious plan by the United Arab Emirates city to lead the Arab world in innovation. The flying taxi developed by German drone firm Volocopter resembles a small, two-seater helicopter cabin topped by a wide hoop studded with 18 propellers. The vehicle was unmanned for its test flight. Dubai has showcased a flight for what it said would soon be the world's first drone taxi service under an ambitious plan by the United Arab Emirates city to lead the Arab world in innovation Meant to run without remote control guidance and with a maximum flight duration of 30 minutes, it comes with plenty of fail-safes in case of trouble. These include back-up batteries, rotors and, for a worst case scenario, a couple of parachutes. Volocopter is in a race with more than a dozen well-funded European and US firms, each with its own science fiction-inspired vision for creating a new form of urban transport that is a cross between a driverless electric car and a short-hop, vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft.

Samsung is reportedly planning to widely produce and sell AI chips in the near future now that it has introduced its advanced voice assistant Bixby for its smartphones, such as the Galaxy S8 and Note 8. The chips that it will be manufacturing will be designed for artificial applications on devices. On Monday, industry sources told South Korean publication Korea Herald that Apple's biggest rival has already embarked on research and development of its AI chips. The company is said to be planning to make its AI chips commercially available in the next few years. Samsung is rumored to be developing not only a single type of AI chip, but various types that will be capable of carrying out certain operations for AI applications.

As we get into the second half of 2017 and start setting our eyes on 2018, it's important to not only focus on the current trends impacting the banking industry, but also start anticipating the trends that will be making an impact in the coming years. In this blog, we outline the top bank technology trends of the future and predict how they will shape the digital customer experience transformation. At Avoka, we've started talking about how Platformification is impacting the way that banks will be tying together their products and services in a centralized place for their customers. Platformification is a new business model for banks that leverages a "plug-and-play" system that allows multiple participants to connect, interact, and create and exchange value. Instead of requiring consumers to interact with multiple vendors and companies, Platformification enables one place for these connections to take place. You can learn more about Platformification in our recent blog and webinar with Gonzo Banker's Ron Shevlin.