Image: Shailesh Andrade / Reuters Private sector lender HDFC Bank on Monday unveiled the humanoid'IRA' (intelligent robotic assistant), which will provide assistance to bank customers. "The humanoid will be operational at one of the branches of HDFC Bank, in about two weeks' time," said Nitin Chugh, the bank's digital banking country head. He said that based on the response received for the humanoid, the bank will decide on whether to deploy additional robots in more branches. HDFC Bank, which has a strong foothold in the digital banking and financial technologies space to improve banking services for its customers, will focus on the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), block chain and rural fintech, to boost banking experience. These five platforms form the theme for the second edition of HDFC Bank's Digital Innovation Summit, details of which was announced on Monday.

An asteroid as big as a 10-story building has passed by Earth at a distance half that of the Moon, researchers have revealed. The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was only spotted only Saturday by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey. It is between 50 and 111 feet (15 to 34 meters) long, and when it passed by Earth, 2017 AG3 was moving at 9.9 miles per second (16 kilometers per second). Here, it is so close to Earth its text is almost unreadable. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

As technology like artificial intelligence and autonomous abilities have become popular, more car companies have joined in on the development process. At CES 2017, Chinese search company Baidu and state-owned car company BAIC Group announced a partnership to develop self-driving cars for the Chinese marketplace. According to Bloomberg, the companies look to debut its car at the Shanghai automotive show in April. Live testing for the car is also planned by the end of the year. Notably, the planned car will be slated to have Level 3 autonomous abilities.

The development of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles is accelerating. Here's how they could affect consumers and companies. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a major innovation for the automotive industry, but their potential impact with respect to timing, uptake, and penetration remains hazy. While high levels of uncertainty currently surround the issue, the ultimate role that AVs could play regarding the economy, mobility, and society as a whole could be profound. In an effort to look beyond today's rapidly changing predictions on AV penetration, we interviewed more than 30 experts across Europe, the United States, and Asia and combined these findings with our insights to arrive at ten thought-provoking potential implications of self-driving cars. The widespread use of AVs could profoundly affect a variety of industry sectors.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what's broadly defined as'artificial intelligence' (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we're not talking about, which is human-level AI -- often termed'strong AI' or'artificial general intelligence' (AGI). A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom reported a 50 percent chance that AGI would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90 percent by 2075; so-called'superintelligence' -- which Bostrom defines as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest" -- was expected some 30 years after the achievement of AGI (Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 33). This stuff will happen, and it certainly needs careful consideration, but it's not happening right now. What is happening right now, at an increasing pace, is the application of AI algorithms to all manner of processes that can significantly affect peoples' lives -- at work, at home and as they travel around. Although hype around these technologies is approaching the'peak of expectation' (sensu Gartner), there's a potential fly in the AI ointment: the workings of many of these algorithms are not open to scrutiny -- either because they are the proprietary assets of an organisation or because they are opaque by their very nature.

He is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. "We need to be super careful with artificial intelligence. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was Elon Musk two years ago, on Twitter. What does it mean for a technology, when it faces serious doubts from a man who is passionate about creating a better world through innovation? Since its beginnings in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has been a favourite subject of science fiction. But now AI has entered the realm of fact: several studies predict that intelligent machines will have a big impact on how we work, how we move and even how wars are fought. Innovators and scientists around the world believe that now is the time to ensure that AI is beneficial above all for humans. And even if there are plausible reasons to be anxious about machines that could one day be more intelligent than we are, many scientists are ready to take up the challenge, as we explain in our feature on the following pages. Some people fret that artificial intelligence will end civilization as we know it. Others believe it can solve every problem.

"Jia Jia" can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China.

Iran introduced blocks on pornography so aggressive that they broke the internet around the world. The country's censorship laws on adult websites are infamously stringent, and require access pornographic websites to be cut off. But last week the state internet provider did so not only for those in Iran but for people across the world – as far away as Russia and Hong Kong. The strange ban was the result of the way that the internet provider cut off access to those sites. It did so using some of the basic mechanisms of the web – not just stopping people in Iran accessing the websites, but changing the directions that power the internet so that nobody could. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.