SoftBank's Pepper humanoid robot operation (a joint venture with Foxconn, Alibaba and SoftBank) has incurred a big $274 million loss while Asia more than doubled the amount of funding for tech startups thus far in 2017. No one ever said VC funding was for the faint of heart. According to PwC and CB Insights, venture capital investments in Asia in the first six months of 2017 totaled $28.8 billion. VC investments in North America for the same period totaled $18.4 billion. CB Insights reports that 45% of all dollars invested in tech in 2017 went to Asian firms.

The FCA would utilize "supervised machine-learning from these analytics," Cook said, and "unsupervised AI" to detect financial irregularities. He added: "We're looking at these underlying technology approaches and regtech solutions to try and see how we can employ them internally to be more efficient and to better identify which solution (works) for the financial markets." Cook said that the U.K. regulator was working with global regulators as well as regtech companies to showcase its work and to learn from others around the world. He said: "A lot of our fintech over the last year has been looking into regtech's application for ourselves as well, and encouraging and bringing other international regulators to the table. We take a very active role in trying to expand the regtech discussion globally. Equally though, we seek to learn what's going on elsewhere."

China's internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. [HKG:0700] has been expanding its presence in the artificial intelligence (AI) area since setting up an AI lab. Following its roll-out of'Jueyi,' an AI computer program that can play popular game Go, earlier this year, Tencent unveiled a translation software called'Fanyijun' yesterday. The software can provide translation between Chinese and English, Japanese and Korean languages in both written and oral formats. The AI-assisted translation software not only provide sentence translation, translation of photographed texts and dictionary services but also offer simultaneous interpretation services, Yicai Global learned. In terms of Chinese-to-English translation, Fanyijun can identify more than 90 percent of Chinese words but can only translate popular Chinese words of the day by using pinyin, Yicai Global finds after using it.

As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

The topic of machine learning–enabled artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining increasing visibility in the world of investment management. Of particular interest is the application of AI to the development of smarter robo-advisers that some hope, while others fear, will yield "intelligent" and cost-effective investment management advice. This topic was raised by investment professionals during recent CFA Institute traveling conference that went to Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. AI has also been the subject of a recent European Commission (EC) consultation document, to which CFA Institute submitted a response. For the uninitiated reader, some quick defining of terms could be helpful.

SEOUL (Reuters) - There was no evidence that North Korea had diverted wages paid to its workers by South Korean companies operating in now-suspended industrial park on their border to its weapons programs, a South Korean official said on Thursday.

A new type of malware that threatens to send your private pictures, messages and internet browsing history to your friends has been discovered. LeakerLocker can be accidentally downloaded through apps on Google Play. It locks your phone's home screen and claims to have made a backup of any "sensitive information" you have stored on it. It then threatens to leak it to everyone you know, unless you pay off the criminals behind it. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

U.S. officials have reportedly decided to allow a group of Afghan girls, who has previously been denied entry, into the U.S. to attend a robot competition. The decision followed backlash when it was reported the six teens would not be allowed to participate in the competition. Politico reported the decision came at the urging of President Donald Trump. The group, which consists of six Afghan teenage girls, applied – and was denied – twice for visas by the U.S. At the time, the State Department declined to comment on why the visa were denied, saying "all visa applications are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law." Afghanistan is not part of the Trump administration's executive order temporarily banning travel from six Muslim-majority countries.

FILE- In this Thursday, July 6, 2017, file photo, teenagers from the Afghanistan Robotic House, a private training institute, practice at the Better Idea Organization center, in Herat, Afghanistan. U.S. President Donald Trump intervened to allow the group of Afghan girls into the country to participate in a robotics competition. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the president's intervention Wednesday, July 12, 2017. The six female students from Afghanistan had hoped to participate in an international robotics competition this month, but their visa applications to enter the U.S. were denied twice.

Who is doing groundbreaking research into artificial intelligence right now? Google and its London-based DeepMind division springs to mind. Facebook has hired some of the biggest thinkers in AI. Then there's IBM with its Watson project - and of course China is pouring vast sums into research, as it tries to replace factory workers with robots. But today another contender is shouting out: what about us? Microsoft, the company that dominated the era of desktop computing, is holding an event at which it is showing off its expertise in artificial intelligence, and in effect demanding a bit more respect from the world.