The words'private banking' can evoke some stereotypical images, like leather-backed chairs in rooms with wood-panelled walls and bookshelves filled with expensive tomes or expensively attired Swiss bankers parcelling out bits of investment wisdom over snifters of brandy and cigars. One item not typically included? The rise and rise of new technology is upending many assumptions in finance. Technologically savvy companies are already competing fiercely with banks in areas such as retail banking and small company loans. They now see private banking as their next hunting ground. Automated investment programmes, often called robo-advisers, use algorithms to arrange individual investment portfolios based upon stated preferences – for a fraction of the fees charged by private banks.

Emotional intelligence is a cornerstone of human interactions--an essential part of what it means to be human. But now, artificial intelligences are being developed to better read and process human emotions, which is already changing the way we interact with robots. In the early 1990s, psychologists Salovey and Mayer were the first to recognize emotional intelligence as a set of knowledge and skills distinct from other forms of intelligence, defining it as "the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." Emotional intelligence is something that seems wonderfully and innately human. But it turns out the tenets of emotional intelligence--which we start picking up in infancy and which seem so closely linked to human nature itself--can be quantified and reduced to logical procedures and algorithms.

A major glitch that occurred last Friday in Japan Airlines Co.'s weight management system was caused by a faulty computer program, which was designed by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the Japanese carrier said Wednesday. JAL also said that Lufthansa for its part has admitted to programming errors, adding, however, that it was "difficult to prevent the system trouble proactively." Friday's glitch led to the cancellation of 50 domestic flights to and from Tokyo's Haneda airport on the day, affecting about 24,000 passengers, according to JAL. JAL commissioned the program to a computer system firm under the Lufthansa group. JAL started using the program in 2014 and updated it March 23.

No one's quite sure on just when people will be able to summon a self-driving car and go wherever they need to go. Too many variables--how the technology advances, how regulations are developed, what consumer acceptance looks like--remain for anyone to say, but that's not keeping Volvo from offering a date: 2020. The Swedes synonymous with safety want to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries in their cars by the end of the decade. Because airbags, automatic braking and other active tech can only do so much, Volvo plans to use automated driving to do it. Next year, it plans to see how that tech works in the real world when it puts 100 customers in robocars for an extended beta test in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Volvo is about to embark on one of the greatest adventures in the history of self-driving cars... at leat, if everything goes according to plan. It's planning an experiment in China (reportedly the country's biggest to date) that will have as many as 100 autonomous vehicles driving on public streets in regular traffic conditions. Real-life tests aren't completely novel -- just ask Google. However, this would both offer a rare chance at a large-scale test and give Volvo a toehold in China's increasingly hot self-driving car space.

An Iranian-born video-game designer wants players to relive history with a new game that gives users a first-person perspective on the 1979 Iranian revolution. "1979 Revolution: Black Friday" lets gamers experience the tumultuous events through the eyes of a photojournalist who is watching his country unravel. Released Tuesday by indie game designer iNK Stories, the game has garned acclaim for its accurate depiction of the revolution. The lead on the project, Navid Khonsari -- a former Rockstar Games designer who helped developed the popular "Grand Theft Auto" series – says he wanted to create a game that is not only historically accurate but could also lead to a new genre of video games. The game offers multiple scenarios based on the revolution, but does not include the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Seoul: South Korea's top automaker Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia Motors on Tuesday announced a plan to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-based, internet-connected car to create a new future lifestyle with a "driving, high-performing computer". The driving computer means a car will become a high-performing computer itself as the car, to be developed by Hyundai and Kia, will self-drive based on AI and connect to electronic devices while driving based on internet connectivity, Xinhua cited a joint statement as saying. The main concept of the project is a "hyper-connected and intelligent car", which means an interaction between cars home as well as home and office in addition to AI-based self-driving. To achieve the goal, the automakers will focus on four major themes, intelligent remote-controlling support service, perfect self-driving, smart traffic and mobility hub. The remote-controlling support service aims to check and examine cars on a real-time basis to detect potential emergency situations in advance.

We've covered robot writers before, but to date it has never been much of a concern for actual writers. Robots just aren't that good at doing what we do; although Microsoft's'Tay' did prove to be pretty great at going from zero to off-the-rails after dealing with some nasty Twitter comments -- something any writer can relate to. Until now, "robot writers" -- artificial intelligence programs taught to write -- were mainly only good at penning quick stories based on data-heavy reports. Box scores, stock reports, and the like were basically all the programs were capable of doing well. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech.

One of the world's biggest banks has revealed it is leading the fight against criminals using state of the art AI technology. The Bank of Russia has teamed up with Yandex Data Factory to use the latter's machine learning services to identify unlicensed money lenders, and the websites hosting them. So far, Yandex Data Factory's custom search algorithm has helped to reveal 2,500 suspicious organisations, and played a significant role in spotting any inaccuracies, meaning that potentially fraudulent organisations will not be missed in the future. The system works by analysing key words across an existing Yandex database, which identified seven million web pages related to finance topics. The algorithm is then able to assign a web page to its correct category, before identifying if an organisation is licenced, which Yandex says occurred correctly in 98 percent of cases.

Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.