A Hong Kong venture capitalist fund credits a single member of its management team with pulling it back from the brink of bankruptcy. But the executive is not a seasoned investment professional, nor even a human being. It is an algorithm known as Vital. Dmitry Kaminskiy, managing partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures, believes that the fund would have gone under without Vital because it would have invested in "overhyped projects." Vital, which stands for Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences, helped the board to make more logical decisions, he said.

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After a 75-year incubation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a household word, reflected in popular culture through books, movies and even music. From self-driving vehicles and interactive robots to Apple's Siri concierge and IBM's Watson, which is increasingly being used to solve business problems, AI technology is playing a growing role in our day-to-day world. While true AI systems are still far less common than most people think -- often what we call "AI" is simply pre-programmed rules that the software reinforces in different contexts -- impressive advances are continually being made in autonomous, adaptive and AI systems that will see them having a greater impact over time. As President of IFIP, the global federation of information and communication technology (ICT) professional societies, I'm conscious that the work our members and others engage in to program these systems is critical to their performance and their trustworthiness. To ensure that the impacts of AI systems remain positive and constructive, it is essential that we build in certain standards and safeguards.

AI is becoming a hot topic for technology giants, who are increasingly competing against each other in a number of avenues in order to be the first to create an innovative product or solution for consumers. Back in 2016, Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, Apple and Microsoft created a non-profit organisation which will work to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field, according to a press release. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also launched Open AI, a "non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence." Other countries such as Singapore are also investing $150 million into AI within the next five years, signifying the growing appeal for AI within the work and social space. We take a look at how technology companies are working on AI and how users will benefit.

China plans to establish a village on the moon with Europe's help by 2036. Now, in a step towards that goal, the nation has created a'Lunar Palace' on Earth to simulate living in isolated conditions on the moon. Four students from the astronautics research university Beihang yesterday entered the 160-square-metre (1,720-square-foot) cabin, dubbed the'Yuegong-1'. Groups of volunteers will live in a sealed lab simulating a lunar-like environment as Beijing prepares for its long-term goal of putting humans on the moon by 2036. Two groups of four volunteers from Beijing's astronautics research university will live in a simulated space cabin, measuring 160 square metres (1,720 square foot), over the next year.

Next time you drag a document across your desktop and put it in a folder, spare a thought for acid. Organising your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his "mouse". Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team would drop acid under test conditions in the hope of inspiring new breakthroughs. His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the "tinkle toy", a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on.

Two Japanese firms are developing an instant audio translation app for use at municipal offices in a bid to overcome the language barrier between foreign residents and local officials amid an increase in workers from abroad. Toppan Printing Co. and Feat Ltd., a developer of natural language processing technologies, hope the app will help people understand each other better during administrative procedures. The app, which will be used on tablets, supports English, Chinese and Portuguese. A prototype is expected to be completed in fiscal 2019, which starts in April 2019. The team developing it is focusing on procedures foreign residents face shortly after arriving in Japan, such as registering residency status and joining the national health insurance program. The app has already been tested at municipal offices in Tokyo's Itabashi Ward and Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture.

RegTech has definitely become one of the areas to watch in 2017 and this trend is likely to continue in the years to come. Here are eight things you need to know. RegTech, short for regulatory technology, is the use of new technologies to address compliance and regulatory challenges not only more efficiently but also more effectively. There are now numerous RegTech startups globally looking at tackling pain points, from know-your-client (KYC) and onboarding to compliance monitoring and fraud detection, using some of the latest technologies, from big data analytics to artificial intelligence. Since the global financial crisis, banks across Asia and globally have dealt with the numerous new regulations by hiring thousands of compliance officers, thus solving an important problem by adding costly headcount.

Australian Securities Exchange-listed Internet of Things (IoT) company Xped has announced that it is purchasing fellow Adelaide-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Jemsoft for AU$200,000 in cash and 50 million Xped shares. The total value of the deal comes to AU$900,000, with Xped shares priced at 14 cents per share. In addition to acquiring all of Jemsoft's intellectual property -- including its computer vision machine-learning technology, Monocular API -- Xped will also gain ownership of 51 percent of Jemsoft's partially owned subsidiary Media Intelligence, which offers media measurement technologies and real-time research solutions. The acquisition will allow Xped -- which offers a platform that enables consumers of all technical capabilities to connect, monitor, and control everyday devices and appliances through their smartphones -- to provide an in-house AI solution to clients looking to enhance their IoT products using visual sensors. Monocular's account management and dashboard components, as well as its user-trainable functionality, will become "integral components" of Xped's smart home and other IoT offerings moving forward, the companies said.

Nvidia, the hot graphics chip company that's moving quickly into new markets, said Toyota would be using its chips and software in the carmaker's autonomous vehicles. Tesla already uses Nvidia chips to process the artificial intelligence software that guides its Autopilot technology. Toyota joins Audi, Mercedes, Volvo and other major auto industry players using Nvidia chips for research and production vehicles. "Now we've got the biggest [auto company] in Japan using our drive platform," said Danny Shapiro, senior director of Nvidia's automotive group. Toyota is the second-largest automaker in the world, close on the heels of Volkswagen.