The line between man and machine looks set to become increasingly blurred if one robot's quest to understand love is anything to go by. Bina48 is reportedly the first android to pass a college level course and her chosen subject was the philosophy of love. She participated in class discussions via Skype, before attending a final session in person. The line between man and machine looks set to become increasingly blurred if one robot's quest to understand love is anything to go by. Bina48 is the creation of American robotics expert David Hanson, who believes that artificial lifeforms can foster better connections with people if they take on a human form.

Two new exoplanets have been discovered thanks to NASA's collaboration with Google's artificial intelligence (AI). One of those in today's announcement is an eighth planet – Kepler-90i – found orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-90. This makes it the first system discovered with an equal number of planets to our own Solar system. The new exoplanets are added to the growing list of known worlds found orbiting other stars. The entire Kepler-90 system of eight planets would easily fit within Earth's orbit of the Sun.

The 100 startups on our list have raised $11.7B in aggregate funding across 367 deals. Today, CB Insights unveiled the second annual AI 100 -- a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across 25 industries, from healthcare to cybersecurity -- at the A-Ha! conference in San Francisco. The companies were selected from a pool of 2,000 startups based on several criteria, including investor profile, tech innovation, team strength, patent activity, mosaic score, funding history, valuation, and business model. The market map below categorizes the AI 100 companies based on their industry focus. Please click on the image to enlarge.

China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) in July 2017 began implementing the Planning for Development of New-generation AI (artificial intelligence) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on December 13 announced the Three-year (2018-2020) Action Plan to Promote Development of New-generation AI Industry. Planning for Development of New-generation AI sets forth main goals in three steps: China's development of AI technologies and application will reach an overall level abreast of the world's leading level in 2020; China will become a leading country in development of AI technologies and application in 2025, with AI to become a force driving the country's industry upgrades and economic transformation; China will become the global AI center in 2030. The MST lists 13 projects of developing cutting-edge AI technologies, with completion scheduled for 2021. One of them is to develop neural network chips with performance 20 times that of Nvidia Tesla M40. MIIT's 3-year plan is mainly to realize Planning for Development of New-generation AI and Made in China 2025 policies.

On Jan. 13, banks in the European Union will become the leaders of the so-called open banking movement, allowing access to customer account data for any third-party service provider their customers approve via a dedicated communication interface. The move is the fruit of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which the European Commission says will "facilitate innovation, competition and efficiency," give consumers more and better choice in the EU retail payment market, and introduce higher security standards for online payments. In the U.S., however, open banking is largely ad hoc and more of a workaround. A few large banks, such as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, have made bilateral agreements with data aggregators and accounting software providers. The rest have mostly opted out.

For the past 90 years, TIME magazine has named a'Person of the Year'. The result is based on who has had the most influence on the news, leading to some controversial but entirely justified selections including Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Last year, Donald Trump received the title over resounding favourite Narendra Modi. This year the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, topped the reader's poll with a clear majority. Despite this, history repeated itself yet again when the #MeToo Campaign was announced as TIME's final choice. So, despite various online polls and predictions, it's notoriously difficult to know who will be picked.

Almost a year ago, Google announced the launch of a new model for Google Translate. The company described in detail the network architecture -- Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The key outcome: closing down the gap with humans in accuracy of the translation by 55–85% (estimated by people on a 6-point scale). It is difficult to reproduce good results with this model without the huge dataset that Google has. You probably heard the silly news that Facebook turned off its chatbot, which went out of control and made up its own language. This chatbot was created by the company for negotiations. Its purpose is to conduct text negotiations with another agent and reach a deal: how to divide items (books, hats, etc.) by two. Each agent has his own goal in the negotiations that the other does not know about.

There is no shortage of attention lately on the "Internet of Things". As a case in point, see the "Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things Act" or "DIGIT Act", i.e., S. 2607, a bill introduced in the Senate on March 1, 2016 and amended on September 28, 2016, "to ensure appropriate spectrum planning and inter-agency coordination to support the Internet of Things" – A companion bill, H.R. 5117, was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 28, 2016. However, since there is no "internet" dedicated to "things", it is fair to state that the Internet of Things does not exist as such. We are left with a definitional vacuum, but it is hammering the obvious to acknowledge that there is no dearth of attempts around the world to fill the gap. Perhaps as a helpful shortcut, we could view the expression as a metaphor that captures the arrival of almost anything and everything, until now out of scope, into the communications space.

On Friday, June 24, 2016, the world watched in horror as Britain voted to commit economic suicide as a nation. On November 8, 2016, America will vote. Will it also commit economic and political suicide? Increasing inequality is building up great stress in the world economic system. The disenfranchised masses are expressing their anger, including in irrational ways such as the Brexit vote.

After 10 months in detention, on Nov. 27, the People's Court of Ha Tinh Province found Hoa guilty of inciting social unrest and promoting anti-state propaganda. He was sentenced to seven years in prison with a subsequent three years of house arrest for "sharing and disseminating articles, videos, images with negative content, inciting, distorting the truth," according to the court.