China's Baidu said it has appointed a former Microsoft executive as chief operating officer, part of a push into artificial intelligence as earnings from its core search engine business wane. Baidu has been refocusing its business strategy after the introduction of new advertising regulations, aimed at medical advertising in particular, led to a 16 percent drop in ad customers during quarter ended in September. Qi Lu, who was an executive vice president at Microsoft and headed its unit in charge of Office, Bing and Skype until last September, will help develop artificial intelligence as a key strategic focus for Baidu over the next decade. Lu possesses a wealth of leadership and management experience, and is a leading authority in the area of artificial intelligence," Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li in a statement. The company launched a $200 million fund in October to focus on artificial intelligence, augmented reality and deep learning, followed by a $3 billion fund announced in September to target mid and late stage start-ups.

Microsoft Corp. and its competitors should eschew artificial intelligence systems that replace people instead of maximizing their time, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview Monday. "The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, 'let us replace you'," Nadella said in an interview at the DLD conference in Munich. "This year and the next will be the key to democratizing AI. The most exciting thing to me is not just our own promise of AI as exhibited by these products, but to take that capability and put it in the hands of every developer and every organization." Nadella is pushing Microsoft into consumer and industrial applications of software that can make inferences about its environment.

Bangalore: The insurance sector is slowly but certainly going big on leveraging technologies. Insurance technology, popularly known as insurtech primarily aims to help insurance companies to improve its services and business operations with better reach and connect with their customers and benefiting them overall. However, it also offers huge opportunities for technology vendors, financial platform companies as well as third party services and solutions providers to come up with insurance industry specific technologies. The global insurtech market is expected to grow steadily over the next four years with a CAGR of more than 10% by 2020, according to research firm Technavio's recent market research. The research predicts the insurance industry offers a big scope for innovation that links insurance and payment platforms through partnerships and leveraging mobile and smart devices for enhancing customer services.

In developing my keynote presentation for a Next Money event in Hong Kong around the future of banking and contextual commerce, I analyzed if the banking industry is prepared to embrace the Internet of Things ecosystem. New technologies, digital devices and the pace of innovation are impacting the banking industry's operating models and influencing the banking ecosystem. The most prominent of these innovations include cloud computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotic process automation, blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). Many of these technologies are interrelated. The world of IoT is a network of Internet-connected sensors that can be embedded into physical devices that collect data and share it across the web with people, applications and other devices.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have finally cracked problems that they've worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself -- AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications. Before we discuss applications, let's first review what's different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB. We can think of blockchains as "blue ocean" databases: they escape the "bloody red ocean" of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space. Famous blue ocean examples are Wii for video game consoles (compromise raw performance, but have new mode of interaction), or Yellow Tail for wines (ignore the pretentious specs for wine lovers; make wine more accessible to beer lovers). By traditional database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughput, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. While the worst was expected for South Korea's startup scene in 2016, we found that it wasn't so bad at all, especially for the already strong brands like cosmetics startup Memebox and food delivery startup Woowa Brothers, which found fresh funding. Rising startups like Memebox and Woowa Brothers (creators of Baedal Minjok) continued to power through 2016 with fresh investments.

Just a day after it opened an augmented reality lab, China's internet giant Baidu has beefed up on its AI talent after it announced the hiring of former Microsoft executive Qi Lu as group president and COO. Baidu is best known for its search engine, which dominates in China, but over the past two years it has put focus on developing artificial intelligence, which includes self-driving cars and more. In that respect, the hiring of Lu -- who exited Microsoft last year on medical grounds -- is a major coup. Lu most recently ran Microsoft's applications and services business, and previously headed up the Redmond-based company's search division having joined in 2009 following an 11-year stint with Yahoo. Fun fact: While with Microsoft, he championed a bid for Slack, but ultimately CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates decided against it.

Orange is a component based data mining and machine learning software suite written in the Python language. It is an Open source data visualization and analysis for novice and experts. Data mining can be done through visual programming or Python scripting. It has components for machine learning. There are add ons for bioinformatics and text mining.

Baidu (BIDU) has hired Qi Lu to be group president and chief operating officer as the search engine giant emphasizes artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. Dr. Lu had previously been Microsoft (MSFT) executive vice president in charge of its applications and services unit. Lu stepped down late last year, citing medical issues from a bicycle accident months earlier. Lu previously ran on Microsoft's search unit and spent 10 years at Yahoo (YHOO) before joining Microsoft in 2009. "To achieve our goals, especially in artificial intelligence, which is a key strategic focus for the next decade, we will need to continue attracting the best global talent," Baidu said in a statement.

In September 2016, Google launched its new chat app Allo in India. The app's highlight was the Artifical Intelligence powered Google Assistant -- a conversational bot that could help perform tasks such setting reminders, searching for restaurants, booking movie tickets, sending a text to someone and much more. The main caveat was that the Assistant works only online. While it is quite obvious that one would not be able to get the latest movie shows or their favorite football team scores without the Internet, there are phone functions, such as reminders and calls, which can surely be handled by an AI bot without an Internet connection. While Google Now does support some functions offline, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri always asks for online support when you tap the button.