The company believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. It expects to save about 140 million yen (US$1.19 million) a year after the 200 million yen AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen a year, said a Guardian report. The IBM's Watson Explorer is said to possess "cognitive technology that can think like a human", enabling it to "analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video", according to IBM. Its technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, said the Mainichi Shimbun. While the use of AI is expected to drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual's payouts – which reportedly amounted to 132,000 during the current FYI– the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the Mainichi Shimbun noted.

Walking into the KFC restaurant in Beijing's financial district, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a fried chicken outlet like any other. It's only if you head right to the back corner of the shop that you realise you're actually in China's first smart restaurant. KFC has teamed up with Baidu – the search engine company often referred to as "China's Google" – to develop facial-recognition technology that can be used to predict customer's orders. Explaining the idea, a spokesperson for KFC said: "The artificial intelligence-enabled system can recommend menu items based on a customer's estimated age and mood." A press release from Baidu added that "a male customer in his early 20s" would be offered "a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings and coke", while "a female customer in her 50s" would get a recommendation of "porridge and soybean milk for breakfast". So, steeled for some patronisingly gendered suggestions of salad or maybe a small portion of chips, I headed over to try the restaurant of the future for myself.

At the end of December YerevaNN scientific educational foundation presented a deep learning guide, which received large recognition around the world. YerevaNN founder Hrant Khachatryan told Itel.am that Reddit, Hacker News and a number of other famous website contributed to making the guide popular. The guide was one of Google top global searches. "We had more than 40 000 visits in just two weeks, 35% of them being from USA, 7.7% from China and 3.7% from Armenia," he said. Touching on how they came up with the idea of such a guide, Hrant Khachatryan noted that after foundation of YerevaNN many people asked them how they could acquire deep learning knowledge.

If you're one of those who can't wait to get Alexa home, this year is definitely the year. Major brands like LG and General Electric announced at CES2017 this week that Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa will be introduced into household items such as refrigerators and lamps. But it's the drivers who might be most thrilled: Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan and BMW are all giving voice assistants a go in their upcoming rides in 2017. Ford and Volkswagen are taking Amazon's Alexa, while Nissan and BMW are going for Microsoft's Cortana. Both voice assistants can do pretty cool things – such as resuming listening to an audiobook in the car you paused midway from a separate device. You'll also be able to email on the road, and receive reminders on restaurant reservations.

For those of us in IT management, analytics is a familiar topic with a familiar value proposition. But for many organizations, success with IT analytics is less familiar. Why do so many fail in their adoption attempts? And how can you avoid failure and embrace success? As we'll see below, the problems usually boil down to products, people and processes.

A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year. The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.

The US military is no stranger to drone development. Over the past few years we've seen everything from unhackable robot helicopters to harbor-defending pontoon platoons -- including the the means to combat them -- come out of DoD research efforts. On Tuesday, the DoD showed off its latest advancement in drone technology when it released video of the first successful aerial deployment of the Perdix swarm drone. The test itself occurred last October in the skies over China Lake, California when a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets released 103 individual Perdix drones. First designed in 2013 at the MIT AeroAstro Department, these drones measure less than a foot tip-to-tip and weigh just over a half pound.

Over the next four weeks, BBC News will be offering a snapshot of the day in the life of a city - looking at how technology is transforming our urban landscapes, now and in the future. We will look at how technology is improving the morning commute, what it is doing to make our working day better, how it will transform our evening's entertainment and what goes on at night in the smart cities that increasingly never sleep. We start as urban dwellers around the world begin the day - with the morning commute. In the future, that may mean hailing a jetpack. "Jetpacks will be part of future cities," Peter Coker, vice-president of innovation at KuangChi Science, Martin Aircraft Company's major Chinese shareholder.

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Washington, Dec 26: Researchers have developed an automated technology that combines imaging with digital analysis and machine learning to help physicians detect melanoma at its early stages. People with melanoma often have mole-looking growths on their skin that tend to be irregular in shape and colour and can be hard to tell apart from benign ones, making the disease difficult to diagnose. "There is a real need for standardisation across the field of dermatology in how melanomas are evaluated," said James Krueger, Professor at Rockefeller University in the US. "Detection through screening saves lives but is very challenging visually, and even when a suspicious lesion is extracted and biopsied, it is confirmed to be melanoma in only about 10 per cent of cases," said Krueger. In the new approach, images of lesions are processed by a series of computer programmes that extract information about the number of colours present in a growth and other quantitative data.