Israel has become a hotbed for artificial intelligence, integrating AI with data and a variety of platforms such as search, email and programmatic to support advertisers. My6sense, a medium-sized company based in Israel with about 120 engineers and software developers, monitors about 1 trillion transactions daily, according to Avinoam Rubinstein, the company's CEO. Rubinstein believes today's data standards are archaic, so he's tapped three professors to make a change in the industry. Rubinstein met the professors while attending the local university. He said while earnings his master's at Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, he did research on analysis and performance of multiple neural network learning structures, which today is called "deep learning."

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don't you get mad? Xiaoice: You should ask my father. LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?

If you want to start a robot company, plan to kick off by selling a service performed by robots, not the robots themselves. That was the message of robot startup founders and investors speaking at HAX demo day this week. HAX is a five-year-old hardware accelerator based in Shenzhen, China, and San Francisco. "I'm a big fan of going out and doing a service with a robot, competing with other businesses that provide that service, rather than trying to sell a $100,000 robot," said Nathan Harding, co-founder of Ekso Bionics and now co-founder and CEO of Wink Robotics, a still-mostly-stealthy company intending to bring robotics technology into the beauty salon industry. "So," Harding continued, "if you design a bricklaying robot, go out and bid on projects that involve laying bricks…. Run like hell to be the best bricklaying company in the world, then eventually traditional companies will want to buy your robot or your company."

AI apps are shaping up to be an essential part of financial institution and fintech offerings. Yet these innovative solutions are only as useful as the data they can access. Join this VB Live event to learn how predictive analytics and AI can deliver valuable insights and power more personalized user experiences. "AI and machine learning are absolutely going to alter the landscape for fintech, for big tech, for China tech, as well as for your bank," says Don Lisle, VP head of FinTech at Capgemini America. "And the question is how you go about that journey."

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said we need to be more concerned about safety with the increased use of AI. He claims it's a "bigger threat than North Korea", with an AI arms race most likely to cause World War III, and should be regulated. But given the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, is Musk being paranoid? Are robots realistically going to take over? AI has the potential to deliver scientific breakthroughs like we have never seen or imagined.

The intervention of digital is transforming the way we live. Be it to plan a holiday, watch a movie, eat at a restaurant, or to avail any lifestyle or home services, an increasing number of people are getting heavily dependent on technology. Given the data-rich and data-driven playgrounds of artificial intelligence and machine learning, several skilled human tasks have already been replaced by automated platforms. That's the impact technology is making on our lives. Education is one of the sectors ripe for technological disruption.

But turbulence could be a thing of the past thanks to new technology that promises to predict the type that lurks unseen - and steer planes around it. That's according to Boeing, which will be trialing remote-sensing technology that can detect clear-air turbulence early next year. The concept, which they hope could be rolled-out across all commercial carriers, comes from a seven-tear collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and has huge potential for travellers. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the number of turbulence-related injuries doubled in 2016, from 21 to 44. But this could be slashed by lidar (light detection and ranging technology), which will work by emitting pulses of laser light from the plane's nose, scattering small dust and other particulates.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering says there are two things you can do to stop nefarious actors from forcing you into FaceID. According to Federighi, "If you don't stare at the phone, it won't unlock," & "If you grip the buttons on both sides of the phone when you hand it over, it will temporarily disable Face ID." Clearly, iPhone X owners will have to practice their squeezing techniques. It would be painful and costly to be held up and discover that you were squeezing it all wrong. The ACLU & the EFF recently sued the DHS for searching the phones and laptops of 11 plaintiffs at the US border without a warrant. The group of plaintiffs includes 10 US citizens and one lawful permanent resident, several of whom are Muslims or people of color.

Afew years ago the cosmologist Max Tegmark found himself weeping outside the Science Museum in South Kensington. He'd just visited an exhibition that represented the growth in human knowledge, everything from Charles Babbage's difference engine to a replica of Apollo 11. What moved him to tears wasn't the spectacle of these iconic technologies but an epiphany they prompted. "It hit me like a brick," he recalls, "that every time we understood how something in nature worked, some aspect of ourselves, we made it obsolete. Once we understood how muscles worked we built much better muscles in the form of machines, and maybe when we understand how our brains work we'll build much better brains and become utterly obsolete." Tegmark's melancholy insight was not some idle hypothesis, but instead an intellectual challenge to himself at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. What will become of humanity, he was moved to ask, if we manage to create an intelligence that outstrips our own?

In the next phase of artificial intelligence development, the firm behind Sophia the robot -- who once said she wanted to destroy humans -- is integrating blockchain into its work. Hanson Robotics' new project is a marketplace in the cloud where AI developers can put up their work, which can be tapped by others to enhance existing robots or build new ones, the company's chief scientist, Ben Goertzel, told CNBC on Monday. "At Hanson Robotics, we've made a cloud-based infrastructure for robot intelligence, but now we're looking to take that to the next level and we've launched a new project called SingularityNET, which is AI and blockchain together," Goertzel said at the sidelines of Switch Singapore. "It's a decentralized, open market for AIs in the cloud so anyone who develops an AI can put it into the SingularityNET, wrap it in our cryptocurrency-based smart contract and then the AI they put there can help to serve the intelligence of robots like Sophia or any other robots or any software programs that need AI," he added. Many proposed applications on blockchain technology -- the same tech that underpins bitcoin -- use cryptocurrencies or other digitized tokens for users to pay for functions.