This undated image, provided by KT Corp., shows its logo. KT Corp., a major South Korean telecom operator, said Sunday it signed an agreement with the country's top science and technology university to establish a research institute for artificial intelligence (AI) and software development. Under the agreement, KT will work with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) to build the research institute in the central city of Daejeon, 164 kilometers south of Seoul, by the end of this year. KT said the institute will house around 200 KAIST researchers, faculty members and KT employees to develop future technologies, including an AI model that can recognize complex situations based on voice and video recognition. The two will also conduct joint research in developing AI for industrial settings, such as in media, health care and robotics.

AI, blockchain, analytics, BI, automation & emerging technologies will fundamentally change how risk is assessed, how products are developed & how customers interact with insurers. Value chains will be adjusted to accommodate, and insurers and brokers that are not only able to integrate these advances into their current value chains but also develop entirely new ways of doing business will be the leaders in the industry in the coming decades. However, even as the industry moves in this direction, the role of humans will not diminish. Instead, it will take on a more analytic, consultative and advisory role, evolving beyond pure risk evaluation. New technologies, from enhanced data capture, particularly in the personal insurance space, to risk analytics and machine learning to digital enablement and automation are expected to fundamentally change how insurance is distributed, how risk is assessed, how products are developed, and how customers interact with insurers for servicing.

Last time around, in ZeniMax's suit against Facebook-owned Oculus, the virtual realty giant was found to owe the plaintiff $500 million because founder Palmer Luckey was judged to have violated a non-disclosure agreement. That was the bad news, but ZeniMax's other allegations were dismissed. Still, a half-billion bucks is a lot. Today, according to TechCrunch, Oculus dodged a bullet when a second breach-of-contract suit, this time filed by Total Recall Technologies, was dismissed by the court. TRT had filed suit in 2015, alleging that Luckey had violated an NDA he'd signed when he visited the company during development of the Oculus Rift.

Today is an exciting day for the advancement of AI at Microsoft. We have agreed to acquire Maluuba, a Montreal-based company with one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding. Maluuba's expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone -- consumers, businesses and developers. We've recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next -- machine reading and writing. Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans -- a vision exactly in line with ours.

Today is an exciting day for the advancement of AI at Microsoft. We have agreed to acquire Maluuba, a Montreal-based company with one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding. Maluuba's expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone -- consumers, businesses and developers. We've recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next -- machine reading and writing. Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans -- a vision exactly in line with ours.

We are currently experiencing a fundamental change in the way we live and work. It is definitely possible, that in the near future, millions of jobs are replaced by technology. This holds also true for the insurance industry. Low-level processing of claims and some standardized underwriting is automated, and it is expected that more will follow. With a significant part of an insurer's cost structure coming from human resources, there is an increasing need to shift to automation in order to deliver significant savings.