India has started building a super-fast bullet train that will fire people across the country. When it is finished in 2022, a journey will drop from eight hours to three hours. Japan is helping to construct the high-speed train that will fire people the 310 miles between Ahmadabad, the main commercial city in Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's native state, to India's financial capital of Mumbai. As well as offering help and expertise, Japan has helped finance the project by lending money at a cheap rate to India. That collaboration was reflected by the laying of a foundation stone by Mr Modi and and Japanese leader Shinzo Abe, commemorating an institute that will train about 4,000 people to actually make the high-speed train.

South Korean mobile messenger operator Kakao has partnered with Samsung Electronics in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Yonhap news agency reports. Under the terms of the deal, Kakao will integrate its'Kakao I' AI platform with Samsung's voice recognition software Bixby. Kakao also plans to expand cooperation with Samsung in other sectors, such as the IoT.

These college students could be onto something big. Five students from China have developed a smart helmet that could aid the visually impaired in their everyday activities. Called the "Eye See", the laser-equipped helmet is capable of detecting obstacles, as well as identifying text and describing people you meet. The helmet is equipped with a camera and laser radar, which allows it to detect obstacles within a distance of about 10 feet (3 meters), and will emit a warning sound when the wearer gets too close to a barrier. The radar, similar to the ones we see on self-driving cars, is capable of performing a 360 degree, omni-directional scan.

Mike Townsend started his career working as a design engineer at Brookstone in Singapore, then as a mechanical engineer at ITT Corporation in Los Angeles, designing radar systems for military grade UAVs. He is the founder of ZingCheckout and Flowtab, and remains very active in the payment industry.

The Siemens research center at Beijing's Tsinghua University would focus on combined mechanics and electronics, human-robot collaboration and the application of artificial intelligence in robotic controllers, the German firm said.

After training this model for 200 epochs or early_callbacks (whichever came first), the model tries to learn the pattern and the behavior of the data. Since we split the data into training and testing sets, we can now predict the value of testing data and compare them with the ground truth.

The new autonomous driving investment comes after the South Korean company completed its acquisition of Harman, which makes car navigation systems and technology for cars to communicate with each other and infrastructure. Samsung also announced that it has created a business unit within Harman to oversee autonomous driving.

SoftBank Vision Fund, the world's largest private equity fund, is considering a $500 million investment in the Hong Kong initial public offering of ZhongAn Online Property and Casualty Insurance Co Ltd, China's first internet-only insurer, IFR reported on Thursday, citing people close to the deal. The fund is likely to be a so-called cornerstone investor in ZhongAn's up to $1.5 billion IPO, added IFR, a Thomson Reuters publication. The IPO, the biggest by a financial technology company in the city, is expected to launch as early as Sept. 18. SoftBank and ZhongAn declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. Vision Fund, which has raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics, is backed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp, Saudi Arabia's main sovereign wealth fund and companies including Apple Inc and Qualcomm

Samsung Electronics Co. says it will spend 75 million euro ($89 million) in TTTech, a Vienna, Austria-based company that provides technologies for auto networks and safety controls to Audi cars and others. The Thursday announcement to invest in a partner company of Audi AG comes as the South Korean company completed its acquisition of Harman. Samsung said it created a business unit at Harman to be tasked with autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. Samsung's investment in TTTech is the first investment from its $300 million fund to strengthen its technology pool for autonomous driving, such as artificial intelligence and security. Samsung is the world's largest maker of memory chips and smartphones.

Booking.com acquired a tiny software company called Evature, which is based in Tel Aviv and offers natural language and chatbot-related technologies for hotels, airlines, travel agencies, and airports. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but only a small sum was likely involved. The company is said to have raised $5 million in funding, and the deal has all the appearances of being an acqui-hire. A Booking.com spokesperson said that the company acquired Evature "to support research-and-development efforts generally, but also specifically in the area of deep learning and artificial intelligence. All of this is a part of Booking's ongoing dedication to testing new areas of technology innovation."