Africa
The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years
In 2025, in accordance with Moore's Law, we'll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we'll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade: In 2025, 1,000 should buy you a computer able to calculate at 10 16 cycles per second (10,000 trillion cycles per second), the equivalent processing speed of the human brain. The Internet of Everything describes the networked connections between devices, people, processes and data. By 2025, the IoE will exceed 100 billion connected devices, each with a dozen or more sensors collecting data. This will lead to a trillion-sensor economy driving a data revolution beyond our imagination. Cisco's recent report estimates the IoE will generate 19 trillion of newly created value. With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights. SpaceX, Google (Project Loon), Qualcomm and Virgin (OneWeb) are planning to provide global connectivity to every human on Earth at speeds exceeding one megabit per second. We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy. And they are not coming online like we did 20 years ago with a 9600 modem on AOL. Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today's data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative 3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system. Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die. Billions of dollars invested by Facebook (Oculus), Google (Magic Leap), Microsoft (Hololens), Sony, Qualcomm, HTC and others will lead to a new generation of displays and user interfaces.
Quora Q&A Session Answers
This post contains my answers from a Quora session I did on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each section contains a link to the original Quora question, the overall session can be found here. Think carefully about what you actually want to achieve with it. Most fall into the latter camp, but it seems everyone fancies themselves as containing a bit of the former (particularly if they think they're going to solve AI). To do the former well, in the international community, requires really good foundations (particularly in mathematics) followed by a PhD with a supervisor who has experience of how that community works. Doing the second well is much easier from the perspective of learning machine learning. A data generator would often be a scientist or company that is working in a particular application and wants answers. They need access to machine learning researchers or statisticians to give advice on how to answer those questions. They should try and collaborate with experts in data analytics and data science, but they should be careful, there is a lot of hype around the term'big data' at the moment. It's a difficult area to navigate. Data generators typically need an interface to consume machine learning (or statistics) effectively, if this interface is poorly chosen a lot of wasted resource can result (things get very expensive very quickly for a lot of data generators!). A data consumer is where the largest demand is right at the moment, and should probably be the starting point for someone who wants to move in the right direction. An MSc in Data Science would be a good starting point. You can also use this experience to see if you want to transit into a machine learning generator (that's basically what happened to me). What are you passionate about? That is the route in to any subject. Is it a particular approach to learning or a particular application?
A Distributed Representation-Based Framework for Cross-Lingual Transfer Parsing
Guo, Jiang, Che, Wanxiang, Yarowsky, David, Wang, Haifeng, Liu, Ting
This paper investigates the problem of cross-lingual transfer parsing, aiming at inducing dependency parsers for low-resource languages while using only training data from a resource-rich language (e.g., English). Existing model transfer approaches typically don't include lexical features, which are not transferable across languages. In this paper, we bridge the lexical feature gap by using distributed feature representations and their composition. We provide two algorithms for inducing cross-lingual distributed representations of words, which map vocabularies from two different languages into a common vector space. Consequently, both lexical features and non-lexical features can be used in our model for cross-lingual transfer. Furthermore, our framework is flexible enough to incorporate additional useful features such as cross-lingual word clusters. Our combined contributions achieve an average relative error reduction of 10.9% in labeled attachment score as compared with the delexicalized parser, trained on English universal treebank and transferred to three other languages. It also significantly outperforms state-of-the-art delexicalized models augmented with projected cluster features on identical data. Finally, we demonstrate that our models can be further boosted with minimal supervision (e.g., 100 annotated sentences) from target languages, which is of great significance for practical usage.
Wipro Ltd's (WIT) CEO Abidali Neemuchwala on Q4 2016 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
As a reminder, all participants' lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Aravind Viswanathan. Thank you and over to you, sir. We will begin the call with business highlights and overview by Abid, the Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board, followed by the financial overview by our CFO, Jatin Dalal. Afterwards, the operator will open the bridge for Q&A with our management team. Before Abid starts, let me draw your attention to the fact that during this call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are associated with uncertainties and risks, which may cause the actual results to differ materially from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are being explained in our detailed filings with the SEC. Wipro does not undertake any obligation to update the forward-looking statements to reflect events and circumstances after the date of filing thereof. The conference call will be archived and the transcript will be available on our website. Ladies and gentlemen, let me now hand it over to Mr. Abid. Today is the first opportunity for me to interact with all of you since I've taken over as the Chief Executive Officer of Wipro, and it's a special moment for me. While I will speak about the performance of our full quarter and the full fiscal year, I thought I will take this opportunity to begin by speaking about our ambition, our strategy and how we are going to execute this strategy. Since I got announced within two days, I was able to define and announce my structure and I had already preselected my leadership team which I announced on 6th of January, effective February 1. Over the past 80 days after I have taken over as CEO, I've had the opportunity to go around the globe and meet about 70 of our top 100 clients. And both with my leadership team and with the customers, I've had the opportunity to validate the strategy that we have been working on and this gives me a high level of confidence on the relevance of our overall strategy. Our ambition is to double our revenues to 15 billion by fiscal 2020 with a 23% operating margin.
There's More to Innovation Than Asking 'What's Next?'
Omoju Miller, a self-described futurist (someone who studies the future's possibilities), enjoys picturing tomorrow. As a Nigerian woman who settled in the Bay Area, she's already torn down historical barriers to work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, a white man's world. But in envisioning a new society, Miller isn't thinking only of contemporary struggles; she's pondering what humanity will need next. Take one of her projects: Hiphopathy, where she's using machine learning to parse rappers' metaphorical language, in the hopes of teaching a computer to think conceptually, developing, in the process, a form of artificial intelligence. Recently, NationSwell spoke with Miller about true visionaries that inspire her and the lessons we can all take away from their avant-garde thinking.
Woz on autonomous weapons: "I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think we can stop it."
This time last year Steve Wozniak was sounding a cautionary note about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning that computers would one day take over from humans and joking that we might even end up as their pets. In a recent interview with Australia's ABC TV's Lateline the engineering genius appeared more sanguine about the future of self-aware, super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence and much more concerned with the real world killer robots that are all but with us: Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). The Apple co-founder maintains that human-level Artificial Intelligence won't happen for "a very long time": It might take 200 years before they are really fully able to operate all of their needs in the world, until then they're going to need human beings โฆ I'm not really worried at all. It's very scary to make autonomous weapons that are just following some programmed set of instructions โฆ even when you're driving a car there is no one set of rules โฆ if a lane is closed off you have to do something against the rules โฆ I don't think it's a good idea at all. I don't think we can really stop it.
Artificial Intelligence, Genomics and Robotics Will Be Among Industries of the Future
Which industries will come to the fore in the next decade, and beyond, and become hubs of innovation? According to former State Department official Alec Ross, they won't be the industries that have dominated technology thus far. Instead, artificial intelligence (AI), genomics and robotics will lead the way. On Tuesday, the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C., held an event to discuss Ross' recently published book, The Industries of the Future. He expounded on the book's themes and highlighted what it will take for individuals, companies and countries to harness the changes that he sees coming to the global economy.
How technology will change the future of work
Niall Dunne is the Chief Sustainability Officer for BT, working with BT's Chief Executive, Chairman and executive management team to bring the company's purpose, to use the power of communications to make a better world, to life. Before joining BT in 2011, Niall was Managing Director in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Saatchi & Saatchi. Prior to that, Dunne was an executive at Accenture, where he helped establish the company's climate change and sustainability practice. Dunne has written and spoken about the power of communications to tackle major social, environmental and economic problems. Niall was vice chair of the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Sustainable Consumption 2012-14 and joined the WEF Global Agenda Council on Climate Change in 2014.
Using Defeasible Information to Obtain Coherence
Casini, Giovanni (University of Luxembourg) | Meyer, Thomas (University of Cape Town)
We consider the problem of obtaining coherence in a propositional knowledge base using techniques from Belief Change. Our motivation comes from the field of formal ontologies where coherence is interpreted to mean that a concept name has to be satisfiable. In the propositional case we consider here, this translates to a propositional formula being satisfiable. We define belief change operators in a framework of nonmonotonic preferential reasoning.We show how the introduction of defeasible information using contraction operators can be an effective means for obtaining coherence.
From the Lab to the Classroom and Beyond: Extending a Game-Based Research Platform for Teaching AI to Diverse Audiences
Sintov, Nicole (University of Southern California) | Kar, Debarun (University of Southern California) | Nguyen, Thanh (University of Southern California) | Fang, Fei (University of Southern California) | Hoffman, Kevin (Aspire Public Schools) | Lyet, Arnaud (World Wildlife Fund) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California)
Recent years have seen increasing interest in AI from outside the AI community. This is partly due to applications based on AI that have been used in real-world domains, for example, the successful deployment of game theory-based decision aids in security domains. This paper describes our teaching approach for introducing the AI concepts underlying security games to diverse audiences. We adapted a game-based research platform that served as a testbed for recent research advances in computational game theory into a set of interactive role-playing games. We guided learners in playing these games as part of our teaching strategy, which also included didactic instruction and interactive exercises on broader AI topics. We describe our experience in applying this teaching approach to diverse audiences, including students of an urban public high school, university undergraduates, and security domain experts who protect wildlife. We evaluate our approach based on results from the games and participant surveys.