I first confess that I will be plugging my alma mater in the process, and I come from the viewpoint of traditional, rigorous statistics training more than what is broadly and commonly regarded as'analytics'. Internationally, Stanford certainly stands out as the powerhouse of statistics programs, with well-respected faculty like Hastie and Tibshirani providing the cutting edge. As an aside, you might be interested in the Statistical Learning and Data Mining short course that Hastie et al open to the public once every 6 months or so (independently of Stanford I believe, but do check). It runs for 2 days, and could give you a flavor. You are probably right to identify India and Singapore as the hubs for analytics in Asia.

Tim Peake is set to control a robot rover while orbiting the Earth from space in a pioneering experiment at midday BST (7am ET) today. The British astronaut will remotely navigate the explorer through a simulated Martian landscape from the International Space Station today. The experiment, part of the ExoMars project, will take place in a hangar at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage. The British astronaut (pictured) will remotely navigate the'Bridget' explorer through a simulated Martian landscape from the International Space Station today. Major Peake tweeted yesterday: 'Looking forward to giving rover Bridget in Stevenage, UK, a test-drive from space.' Building on previous test and experiment campaigns, the European Space Agency, UK Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space UK are working together to investigate distributed control of robots in a simulated planetary environment.

When Cheetah Mobile CEO Sheng Fu went to the US for the first time five years ago, he asked himself, "Why is that Chinese companies work so hard but the most important inventions and new technologies come out of America?" He concluded that the difference between China and the US is that Americans think bigger and dream bigger. The global service robotics market is set to boom, and the second half of 2015 should usher the first wave of these new helpers. Here are seven devices leading the charge. This week in Beijing, Fu announced his company is going to launch itself into AI and deep learning, create a dual headquarters in Beijing and Silicon Valley, and release robots for consumers on a global scale. No one is going to accuse Fu of not thinking big enough.

BT is about to hike prices for millions of households, and other companies are likely to follow. Prices across its broadband, phone and TV packages will be hiked up from this summer, the company has announced. It has put up costs substantially in recent years, and each hike has usually been followed by a similar move from its rivals. Landline charges will go up by £1, it said, rising 5.5 per cent to almost £19. The most popular call package will also have its price increased by about 7 per cent.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials Thursday in the French city of Marseille after a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. According to Stanford, the concept for Ocean One was born from the need to study coral reefs deep in the Red Sea, far below the comfortable range of human divers.

Scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in blood samples faster and more accurately than the current standard methods. In one common approach to testing for cancer, doctors add biochemicals to blood samples. Those biochemicals attach biological "labels" to the cancer cells, and those labels enable instruments to detect and identify them. However, the biochemicals can damage the cells and render the samples unusable for future analyses. There are other current techniques that don't use labeling but can be inaccurate because they identify cancer cells based only on one physical characteristic.

This tiny robot monk could teach you something about Buddhism. Its name is Xian'er and it can perform a range of tasks, shown in the video above. Built over 1,000 years ago, this ancient sanctuary has grown into the most tech-savvy Buddhist temple in China. It promotes the collaboration of religion and technology--contrary to the traditional belief that Buddhists should be very secluded. Some of its study rooms even have fingerprint recognition systems (link in Chinese).

The last few years have seen numerous studies pointing to a bleak future with technology-induced unemployment on the rise. For example, a pivotal 2013 study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that of 702 unique job types in the United States economy, around 47% were at high risk of computerisation. This was backed up by similar findings in Australia suggesting 44% of occupations – representing more than five million jobs – were at risk over the coming 10 to 15 years. Is the situation really so dire? Are we heading towards mass unemployment as computers and robots do all the work?

From the story of Talos of Crete to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the concept of artificially-simulated intelligence has long fascinated humankind. This urge to replicate intelligence through synthetic measures is what is even today driving us on to greater innovations. Our online searches are now taking into account the previous'experiences' to curate more tailored results, our cars are becoming self-driven as a result of AI-based tech and robotic domestic helpers have crossed the menial tasks of cleaning homes off the list of their human masters. In short, each and every aspect of our lives is being increasingly taken over by AI, and these examples are barely scraping the tip of the iceberg. To gain a more detailed insight into how ingrained artificial intelligence, heuristic algorithm and machine learning is becoming to everyday functioning, one only needs to take a look at the global startup ecosystem. While traditional technology majors such as IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon do figure in prominently when it comes to AI, there are several start-ups and tech-based ventures which are focusing on the technology as a key differentiator for their services and using it to revolutionise the way that businesses are conducted.

Victor Allis in his article, 'One small step for computers, one giant step for AI', posed the question that becomes the subject of my enquiry. But I am also indebted to Roger Penrose and his seminal book, "The Emperor's new mind", which had influenced me in my life in more than one way. First of all on 21st April, we heard from Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO in his earnings call, the progress made by AlphaGo, "DeepMind's AlphaGo has been making great strides. It was a privilege to play legendary Go player, Lee Sedol, in such an important milestone for artificial intelligence", something that Victor's article was dedicated to. Indeed Penrose mentioned about the Oriental game Go in his book way back in 1989, while discussing about the strides made in the game of chess by computers.