When Sony Corp. unveiled a cloud gaming pact with archrival Microsoft Corp., it surprised the industry. Perhaps no one was more shocked than employees of Sony's PlayStation division, who have spent almost two decades fighting the U.S. software giant in the $38 billion video game console market. Last week, the companies announced a strategic partnership to codevelop game streaming technology and host some of PlayStation's online services on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. It comes after PlayStation spent seven years developing its own cloud gaming offering, with limited success. Negotiations with Microsoft began last year and were handled directly by Sony's senior management in Tokyo, largely without the involvement of the PlayStation unit, according to sources familiar with the matter. Staff at the gaming division were caught off guard by the news.

While artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly powering a digital health boom, AI is still very much in its infancy when it comes to mental and behavioral well-being. This isn't really a surprise, as the ability to understanding human thoughts and feelings --not'merely' crunching blood test data or medical scans for signs of disease-- is much harder than telling if a person's kidney is about to fail. Boosting one's mood or providing personalized treatments for psychiatric disorders, and particularly depression, is harder still. Depression is the world's leading health burden according to the World Health Organization. Patients often face tedious trial and error processes to navigate the ocean of antidepressants.

Amazon's cloud platform - Amazon Web Services or AWS - has been operational for the past 13 years and over this time, has over 165 features as offeringss for computer storage, database, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management. Also read: Tech for good: Here's why AWS' Andy Jassy is betting big on AI and Blockchain YourStory: How are new technologies at AWS helping clients' businesses? Olivier Klein: When we talk about technologies, it is not a specific list, it is about technologies that help redefine customer experiences or just improve overall operational efficiency. A big chunk of customer experience goes into data analytics - artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) space. This in turn is used in, for example, understanding voice or speech better.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will empower banking organisations to completely redefine how they operate, establish innovative products and services, and most importantly impact customer experience interventions. In this second machine age, banks will find themselves competing with upstart fintech firms leveraging advanced technologies that augment or even replace human workers with sophisticated algorithms. To maintain a sharp competitive edge, banking corporations will need to embrace AI and weave it into their business strategy. In this post, I will examine the dynamics of AI ecosystems in the banking industry and how it is fast becoming a major disrupter by looking at some of the critical unsolved problems in this area of business. AI's potential can be looked at through multiple lenses in this sector, particularly its implications and applications across the operating landscape of banking.

Not all tech billionaires are advocates of artificial intelligence (AI). Some are so worried about the effects AI is having on society that they are spending their billions trying to monitor it. This, in turn, has created a new frontier in philanthropy. For Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, AI is such a concern that last year he set up Luminate, a London-based organization that advocates for civic empowerment, data and digital rights, financial transparency, and independent media. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, has supported monitoring artificial intelligence.

Are we designing AI or is AI designing us? What does AI have anything to do with Art which is innately a human quality? Harshit takes us to a journey of his experiments with Art and AI and the results are fascinating. Harshit Agrawal is fondly known as first AI artist from India. He is also HCI researcher, poet and traveler who builds tools to study how technology can help enhance human creative expression.

Deepfakes have made their way into the radar of much of the First World. As with many technology phenomena, deepfakes have their origins in pornography – editing (the Reddit page that originally popularized deepfakes was banned in early 2018). In April of this year, I was asked by UNICRI (the crime and justice wing of the UN) to present the risks and opportunities of deepfakes and programmatically generated content at United Nations headquarters for a convening titled: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Reshaping the Future of Crime, Terrorism, and Security. Instead of speaking about the topic, we decided it would be better to showcase the technology to the UN, IGO, and law enforcement leaders attending the event. So we took a video of UNICRI Director Ms. Bettina Tucci Bartsiotas, and created a deepfake, altering her words and statements by using a model of her face on another person.

On Tuesday, in an 8-1 tally, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to ban the use of facial recognition software by city departments, including police. Supporters of the ban cited racial inequality in audits of facial recognition software from companies like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as dystopian surveillance happening now in China. At the core of arguments around the regulation of facial recognition software use is the question of whether a temporary moratorium should be put in place until police and governments adopt policies and standards or it should be permanently banned. Some believe facial recognition software can be used to exonerate the innocent and that more time is needed to gather information. Others, like San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, believe that even if AI systems achieve racial parity, facial recognition is a "uniquely dangerous and oppressive technology."

I recently was a guest speaker at the Stanford AI Salon on the topic of accessiblity in AI, which included a free-ranging discussion among assembled members of the Stanford AI Lab. There were a number of interesting questions and topics, so I thought I would share a few of my answers here. Q: What 3 things would you most like the general public to know about AI? AI is easier to use than the hype would lead you to believe. In my recent talk at the MIT Technology Review conference, I debunked several common myths that you must have a PhD, a giant data set, or expensive computational power to use AI. Most AI researchers are not working on getting computers to achieve human consciousness.

NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) is working on an artificial intelligence-based mechanism to ease the process for companies seeking to register their names, an official said. The government recently liberalised norms for registration, allowing entities to choose names that may form part of an existing trademark as long as the businesses operate in different sectors. The new rules were notified in the gazette on May 11. "Earlier, if the name was a part of a trademark, it could be stopped," said the official. "We have made it clear that (this applies) only if the name includes a trademark registered in the same class of goods." The aim is to reduce the level of discretion in deciding on the names that can be accepted, he said.