All the major economies in the world understand the strategic importance of artificial intelligence in empowering and transforming economic growth in the coming decades. In July 2017, China's State Council laid out an ambitious AI strategic plan to create a domestic 1 trillion yuan (US$147.80 billion) AI industry and make China the world's leading AI innovation centre by 2030. Although too early to say if China will succeed, all the factors seem to be in China's favour, such as market readiness, start-up money, talent, and supportive government policies and budget. Over the past decade, China's vast population has shown great eagerness and willingness to embrace various new technologies. Take the rapid growth of China's smartphone industry as an example: over the past 10 years, it has grown from a single-digit penetration rate to over 50 per cent in 2017.

Make a trip to any major electronics store today and you're bound to find a section selling drones. Once little more than toys for enthusiasts, today's commercially available drones come in all shapes and sizes and are used for all sorts of purposes, with prices ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of yen. But the proliferation of drone technology has brought with it questions about security, and invasion of privacy. The central government and many localities around Japan have put into place a number of ordinances in recent years limiting and forbidding drones near certain locations. Last year the National Policy Agency said there had been 68 cases of illegal drone flights, almost double the previous year's 36.

The Center for Financial Studies in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host a one-day workshop titled Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Financial Services. The workshop will take place on April 27 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Auditorium on campus. During the workshop, academic and industry experts will present a variety of perspectives and insights on using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools to address several important challenges facing the financial services industry. Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson will deliver the opening remarks at 8:45 a.m. Speakers include Kathryn Guarini, vice president for research strategy at IBM, who will deliver the Reinert Lecture, "Trends and Developments in AI for Financial Applications," and Akhtar Siddique, deputy director for enterprise risk and analysis in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, who will speak on "Risk Measurement with Machine Learning Techniques."

Scientists are known for making dramatic predictions about the future – and sinister robots are once again in the spotlight now that artificial intelligence has become a marketing tool for all sorts of different brands. At the end of World War Two, it was stated that flying cars were just around the corner and that all energy problems would be solved by fusion energy by the end of the 20th century. But decades on, we don't seem much closer to either of those predictions coming true. Pessimists predict that robots will jeopardise jobs across the globe, and not only in industrial production. They claim robot journalists, robot doctors and robot lawyers will replace human experts.

Soldiers might end up using flexible robots inspired by invertebrates to go where humans can't. Ed Habtour works in the US Army Research Laboratory's Vehicle Technology Directorate, where he specializes in nonlinear dynamical systems. The US Army Research Laboratory and University of Minnesota have joined forces to develop extra pliable materials that can be 3D-printed on the battlefield and used to build robots that can move easily within confined spaces, the way biological organisms like a squid might maneuver through small holes in underwater rocks. Current military robots can't move freely in highly populated environments because they're made with rigid mechanical parts. However, that situation may change now that researchers have recently created a prototype of soft 3D-printed dielectric elastomer actuator -- an electroactive polymer that changes shape when hit with an electrical charge.

The purpose of this paper is to re-investigate the estimation of multiple factor models by relaxing the convention that the number of factors is small. We first obtain the collection of all possible factors and we provide a simultaneous test, security by security, of which factors are significant. Since the collection of risk factors selected for investigation is large and highly correlated, we use dimension reduction methods, including the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and prototype clustering, to perform the investigation. For comparison with the existing literature, we compare the multi-factor model's performance with the Fama-French 5-factor model. We find that both the Fama-French 5-factor and the multi-factor model are consistent with the behavior of "large-time scale" security returns. In a goodness-of-fit test comparing the Fama-French 5-factor with the multi-factor model, the multi-factor model has a substantially larger adjusted $R^{2}$. Robustness tests confirm that the multi-factor model provides a reasonable characterization of security returns.

This study centers on how computer-based decision procedures, under the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence (AI), can assist in improving health and health care. Although advanced statistics and machine learning provide the foundation for AI, there are currently revolutionary advances underway in the sub-field of neural networks. This has created tremendous excitement in many fields of science, including in medicine and public health. First demonstrations have already emerged showing that deep neural networks can perform as well as the best human clinicians in well-defined diagnostic tasks. In addition, AI-based tools are already appearing in health-oriented apps that can be employed on handheld, networked devices such as smart phones.

I'm not what you would call a fan of Westworld. As an AI reporter, telling this to people often triggers an audible gasp, followed by a look of disbelief and disappointment. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the show, I plan to watch every episode of season two, which starts Sunday on HBO, and developers should too. Earlier this week, I attended a showing of episode one in San Francisco and had an opportunity to chat with members of the cast. I took the interviews because I wanted to know how people playing parts in a show that shapes the world's perception of AI felt about the impact of AI.

Authorities in Riyadh have called on drone enthusiasts to register with authorities prior to operating the aerial devices, after a toy drone was reportedly shot down near the royal palace in the capital. On Saturday, videos posted online purported to show Saudi security forces shooting down the drone near King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's palace, with heavy gunfire. Riyadh police said security forces responded to an unauthorised, small drone-type toy after spotting it near a security point in Khuzama neighbourhood. It was not clear who was operating the device. A spokesperson for the interior ministry said a framework regulating the use of drones was in "its final stages", state-run SPA news agency reported on Sunday.

Whenever an impressive new technology comes along, people rush to imagine the havoc it could wreak on society, and they overreact. Today we see this happening with artificial intelligence (AI). I was at South by Southwest last month, where crowds were buzzing about Elon Musk's latest hyperbolic claim that AI poses a far greater danger to humanity than nuclear weapons. Some economists have similarly sounded alarms that automation will put nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. at risk by 2030. The drumbeat of doomsaying has people spooked: a Gallup/Northeastern study published in March found that about three out of four Americans are convinced that AI will destroy more jobs than it creates.