It is one of the marvels of human innovation but artificial intelligence (AI) offers tough competition for us. The days of speculating rain and sunshine may soon fade with artificial intelligence's capability to predict right conditions with precision to an extent. It comprises one of the basic aspects of precision agriculture (PA) promoted even by the government to boost productivity and in turn, farmers' income. AI-based sowing advisories lead to 30 per cent higher yields as Microsoft, in collaboration with ICRISAT, developed an AI Sowing App powered by Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite including Machine Learning and Power BI. The app sends sowing advisories to participating farmers on the optimal date to sow without them installing any sensors in their fields or any additional cost; all they need is a phone capable of receiving text messages.

Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist who's widely considered one of the three "godfathers" of deep learning, opened up in a new interview with Bloomberg about his anxiety about how China is using the technology he helped develop to surveil and manipulate large populations. "This is the 1984 Big Brother scenario," he told the business magazine, referring to George Orwell's classic dystopic novel about universal government surveillance. "I think it's becoming more and more scary." Bengio, who's a professor at the University of Montreal and the co-founder of deep learning company Element AI, is particularly troubled by China's use of facial recognition technology. Though American tech companies including Amazon also offer facial recognition software, Benio argued that the tech should be "highly regulated" because of its capacity for abuse, according to Bloomberg.

Insurance industry has seen various up and downs in last decade, owning to a series of political and industry wide occurrences. Insurance has become one of the most challenging businesses over years and lot of insurers are venturing into newer products and line of areas. This is where the need of reinsurer has gained prominence recently. Munich Re Group or Munich Reinsurance Company is a reinsurance company based in Munich, Germany. It is one of the world's leading reinsurers.

BUSINESSES turned to digital marketing when they realized that their customers are online and no longer reading newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals. And although moving a part of their marketing budget to search and display ads and social media made a big difference, many are still struggling to optimize costs and make the most of their digital marketing dollars. What's most interesting is that many companies have access to data about actual customers, in real-time, and yet, are consistently failing to create synergies and transform their digital marketing efforts. The technology is available ready, and marketers who want to get more out of their ads and reach the right audience at the right time and on the right platforms must explore the capabilities that machine learning provides. Marketers today have access to all sorts of data.

New Delhi, Feb 6: The recent surge in demand for professionals with skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving premier engineering institutions to direct their attention towards the area. The government's push on AI has also intensified the focus on the field. Most of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are designing and offering new courses from undergraduate to master's levels and incubating AI based start-ups. IIT Madras is doing extensive work on AI beginning with dual degree specialisations in data sciences and robotics launched last year. Under the five year program, students would earn a bachelor's degree in any discipline of engineering and master's in data science.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Trump promised legislation to invest in "the cutting edge industries of the future." But the speech was characteristically backward-looking. Trump talked up gains in manufacturing jobs and oil and gas exports, but didn't once mention the word "technology," nor any other tech policy issue, such as privacy, broadband, or antitrust. Aides filled in the blanks. "President Trump's commitment to American leadership in artificial intelligence, 5G wireless, quantum science, and advanced manufacturing will ensure that these technologies serve to benefit the American people and that the American innovation ecosystem remains the envy of the world for generations to come," Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, said in a statement.

It's all keen and mean on the artificial intelligence (AI) front in China, which is now vying with the United States as the top dog in the field. US companies can still boast the big cheese operators, but China is making strides in other areas. The UN World Intellectual Property Organisation's Thursday report found that IBM had, with 8,920 patents in the field, the largest AI portfolio, followed by Microsoft with 5,930. China, however, was found dominant in 17 of 20 academic institutions involved in the business of patenting AI. The scramble has been a bitter one.

Online food ordering and delivery app Swiggy on Monday announced it has acqui-hired Kint.io, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up that applies deep learning and computer vision for object recognition in video, for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2014, the Bengaluru-based start-up would assist Swiggy in boosting its computer-vision technology and consumer experience. "This acqui-hire is part of our strategy to scale our tech prowess by bringing in entrepreneurial teams that can solve unique customer problems, while leveraging the network and resources at Swiggy," said Dale Vaz, Head of Engineering and Data Sciences, Swiggy. Kint.io is the first technology-led acqui-hire for Swiggy as it makes investments in its long-term strategy of building AI-first platforms. "AI research has leap-frogged this past year but lack of data, cultural biases and inability to adapt to our diversity has somehow always pulled us back when it comes to applying AI to India-based problems. This is where Swiggy left us stumped," said Jawahar and Veeraraghavan.

The race to implement artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into products and services across every industry has caused a job boom in the field, according to a Tuesday report from UiPath. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of job postings with "AI" or "machine learning" increased by nearly 100%, according to a recent report from Indeed, and AI skills dominated the fastest-growing jobs of the past year. UiPath examined 30,000 job listings from 15 industry-leading countries, retrieving any role that required either skill or training in AI or machine learning, or any role within a company that specializes in those fields. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) From a global perspective, China is home to the most AI professionals right now, with 12,113 AI jobs, the report found. The US came in second, with 7,465 AI professionals, followed by Japan (3,369), the UK (1,597), and India (1,326).

We first, introduce a deep learning based framework named as DeepIrisNet2 for visible spectrum and NIR Iris representation. The framework can work without classical iris normalization step or very accurate iris segmentation; allowing to work under non-ideal situation. The framework contains spatial transformer layers to handle deformation and supervision branches after certain intermediate layers to mitigate overfitting. In addition, we present a dual CNN iris segmentation pipeline comprising of a iris/pupil bounding boxes detection network and a semantic pixel-wise segmentation network. Furthermore, to get compact templates, we present a strategy to generate binary iris codes using DeepIrisNet2. Since, no ground truth dataset are available for CNN training for iris segmentation, We build large scale hand labeled datasets and make them public; i) iris, pupil bounding boxes, ii) labeled iris texture. The networks are evaluated on challenging ND-IRIS-0405, UBIRIS.v2, MICHE-I, and CASIA v4 Interval datasets. Proposed approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art and achieve outstanding performance surpassing all previous methods.