The startup will be utilising the fund to expand its operation to the US, Mauritius, and Singapore markets. With the current funding, Racetrack.ai is valued at $21 Mn. The funding will also be used to launch bot-based kiosks by early next year which will be installed at public places such as hospitals, airports, and shopping complexes to guide customers in order to get the right product/destination. Marvin is a chatbot that provides sales support to clients whereas Turing is an online and offline business accelerator that helps in better business planning and execution. This boost in our physical presence will open new doors for us to partner with intercontinental brands and decision-makers while helping us to create global footprint in the AI industry." Founded in 2015 by Subrat Parida,Racetrack.ai is a sales and support-focused AI driven platform designed for education, real estate, and ecommerce sectors.

Racetrack.ai, an artificial intelligence startup providing solution for sales and support to businesses, has raised around $5 million (33.5 crore) in pre-Series A funding from a clutch of Indian and global investors including Murali Krishna, former President and founding member of Biocon. The Bangalore-based company plans to use the funds to expand its operations in the US, Mauritius and Singapore by tapping business verticals such as BFSI, health and hospitality. "This move will help us delve into newer business verticals like retail, banking and healthcare. This boost in our physical presence will open new doors for us to partner with intercontinental brands and decision makers while helping us to create global footprint in the AI industry,"Subrat Parida, Founder and CEO Racetrack.ai, in a statement. Racetrack offers has two flagship products: Marvin and Tu ring.

BENGALURU: Artificial intelligence startup Racetrack.ai said it has secured $5 million from a group of high net-worth individuals in a funding round that has valued it at $21million. "With the fresh capital, we are now looking forward to announce our next overseas operation base in the USA, Mauritius and Singapore," Subrat Parida, founder of Bengaluru-based Racetrack.ai, "We further plan to raise our Series A by the end of this year." The 50-member startup, founded in 2015, offers two flagship products -- a chatbot for sales and support, and a business accelerator that helps in better business planning and execution. "This move will help us delve into newer business verticals like retail, banking and healthcare. This boost in our physical presence will open new doors for us to partner with intercontinental brands and decision-makers while helping us to create global footprint in the AI industry," Parida said.

ATAQ, Yemen – Again and again over the past two years, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States has claimed it won decisive victories that drove al-Qaida militants from their strongholds across Yemen and shattered their ability to attack the West. Here's what the victors did not disclose: many of their conquests came without firing a shot. That's because the coalition cut secret deals with al-Qaida fighters, paying some to leave key cities and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment and wads of looted cash, an investigation by The Associated Press has found. Hundreds more were recruited to join the coalition itself. These compromises and alliances have allowed al-Qaida militants to survive to fight another day -- and risk strengthening the most dangerous branch of the terror network that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Key participants in the pacts said the U.S. was aware of the arrangements and held off on any drone strikes.

ADEN, Yemen – Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, is considered the most dangerous branch of the terror network after a series of failed attacks on U.S. soil. AQAP has been enmeshed in conflicts in impoverished Yemen for nearly 20 years -- at times working with the government and at times facing crackdown, all the while building ties among tribes in the mountainous countryside to establish refuges and allies. The first anti-American attack in Yemen linked to al-Qaida took place in 1992 when a group called the Islamic Jihad Movement attacked a hotel in the southern city of Aden housing U.S. troops heading to Somalia, killing a Yemeni and an Australian. The group was made up of jihadis who had returned from Afghanistan, where they fought the Soviets alongside Osama bin Laden. The group fell apart after defections spurred by its cozy relationship with ruling authorities as then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh used AQAP fighters to liquidate his top foes, the socialists.

Missing data imputation can help improve the performance of prediction models in situations where missing data hide useful information. This paper compares methods for imputing missing categorical data for supervised classification tasks. We experiment on two machine learning benchmark datasets with missing categorical data, comparing classifiers trained on non-imputed (i.e., one-hot encoded) or imputed data with different levels of additional missing-data perturbation. We show imputation methods can increase predictive accuracy in the presence of missing-data perturbation, which can actually improve prediction accuracy by regularizing the classifier. We achieve the state-of-the-art on the Adult dataset with missing-data perturbation and k-nearest-neighbors (k-NN) imputation.

Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu said President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the establishment of an agency on robotics and artificial intelligence, AI, for the South East. Mr Onu revealed this at a grand rally of the All Progressives Congress in Abakaliki, capital of Ebonyi state. The rally which received defectors from the Peoples Democratic Party, was attended by the national chairman of the party, Adams Oshiomhole. Some of the defectors who were received include, Sonni Ogbuoji, former Minister of Power and Steel, Goddy Ogbaga, former Secretary to the State Government, Bernard Odoh and former attorney general and commissioner for justice, Augustine Nwankwegu. Mr Onu told the rally that in 2015 he pleaded with South-East not to put its eggs in one basket but his pleadings fell on deaf ears.

Whenever something serious happens, we usually try and determine cause and effect. What was it that caused this thing to unfold the way it did? Whilst the theory is nice, we often employ some rather dubious explanations to try and explain the series of events. There have been attempts in the past to generate mathematical models for general causality, but they haven't been particularly effective, especially for more complex problems. A new study from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India, has attempted to use AI to do a better job.

Answer triggering is the task of selecting the best-suited answer for a given question from a set of candidate answers if exists. In this paper, we present a hybrid deep learning model for answer triggering, which combines several dependency graph based alignment features, namely graph edit distance, graph-based similarity and dependency graph coverage, with dense vector embeddings from a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our experiments on the WikiQA dataset show that such a combination can more accurately trigger a candidate answer compared to the previous state-of-the-art models. Comparative study on WikiQA dataset shows 5.86% absolute F-score improvement at the question level.

Google's forays into Africa have culminated in the announcement of the company's first AI center on the continent, which is set to launch in Ghana's capital of Accra later this year. Google chose Ghana for its strong set of local universities in a bid to lure the brightest graduates. Ghana is also home to an office of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. "We're looking at Ghana, and more widely at Africa, as a location where we want to invest in new areas of interest," Jason Freidenfelds, a senior communications manager at Google, told Adweek. "There are many talented researchers working on AI in Africa now, and it's our goal to collaborate with them more closely by opening a location in Accra."