Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad is introducing a new B. Tech. It is the first such full-fledged B. Tech. Even internationally, only select institutions like Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are currently offering similar courses, claimed IIT Hyderabad in a press release. According to a report in NDTV, the B.Tech. in Artificial Intelligence course will intake 20 students each year, who will be selected through the JEE Advanced entrance examination that the students across the country take every year to get admission in the graduate courses at the IITs. Commenting on the new course, Prof U.B. Desai, Director, IIT Hyderabad, said, "The basic aim is to create a complete ecosystem for Artificial Intelligence Academics and Research at IIT Hyderabad. Moreover, the R&D will be strongly entwined with academics."

Last year, we had the benefit of leaning on the recent findings of our inaugural Cycle of Progress digital transformation benchmark study to inform my predictions. This global survey examines global business leaders' hopes and fears about emerging technologies, and reveals which technologies they are actively implementing to drive the digital transformation of their business--versus which ones are yet to live up to the hype. Based on our findings, I see several technologies continuing to lead the way in 2019, namely Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain. More than half (53%) of Cycle of Progress respondents say that they have adopted IoT in some shape or form so far. Already well established in many businesses, IoT applications and services are leading the pack in having the greatest positive impact.

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By Li Yuan Some of the most critical work in advancing China's technology goals takes place in a former cement factory in the middle of the country's heartland, far from the aspiring Silicon Valleys of Beijing and Shenzhen. An idled concrete mixer still stands in the middle of the courtyard. Boxes of melamine dinnerware are stacked in a warehouse next door. Inside, Hou Xiameng runs a company that helps artificial intelligence make sense of the world. Two dozen young people go through photos and videos, labeling just about everything they see.

Using artificial intelligence, a number of European evolutionary biologists now believe that humans have an ancient ancestor whose identity is unknown to modern science. The ancestor, based out of Asia, would have been a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans, a subspecies of archaic humans. The Denisovans are less well-known than the famous Neanderthals, but the two were separate groups who split off from their common ancestor around 744,000 years ago. While Neanderthals settled in Europe and parts of western Asia, Denisovan remains have been found in central Asia and Siberia--their name comes from the Denisova Cave in the Siberian Altai Mountains, where a Denisovan bone was first discovered in 2008. The groups were genetically independent from each other.

Hyderabad: A full-fledged B-Tech programme in Artificial Intelligence would be introduced by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, from the coming academic year. Admission to the course with an intake of around 20 students would be through the JEE-Advanced, a release said here. IIT Hyderabad has become the first Indian Educational Institution to offer such a course in AI. The mission of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, IIT Hyderabad, is to produce students with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of theory and practice of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, it said. IIT Hyderabad is already offering an M-Tech course in Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning.

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Kai-Fu Lee built his career working for the giants of Silicon Valley: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. But today, as one of the most successful venture capitalists in the field of artificial intelligence, Lee has decided that best place to be an AI capitalist is in communist China. Lee's firm, Sinovation Ventures, has funded 140 AI startups, including shared-bicycle companies, education companies, and a firm that's developing dishwashing robots. Lee says that the future for AI companies in China offers more promise than anywhere else, because of the simple fact that in a country of 1.4 billion, there's just more data than anywhere else. In China, data has become its own kind of abundant natural resource.

The revolutionary development in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its dramatic consequences, is a global economic upheaval and one that will both provide opportunities for and challenge India dramatically. Discussing India's response to this global upheaval, Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator, Financial Times, London, said, "India needs to devote careful thought to the domestic implications of the revolution in artificial intelligence." He explained, "As a country with a growing population and labour force and huge employment in services, the implications might be very radical, both creating and destroying opportunities on a massive scale." Wolf, who delivered the seventh NCAER CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2019 in New Delhi on Tuesday, spoke on the theme of Challenges for India from the Global Economic Upheavals. The other upheavals he addressed were the rapid economic rise of Asia, the strategic rivalry between the US and China, growing protectionism in the US and the associated erosion of the liberal global economic order and the threat of climate change. Wolf, who has many times described India as a "premature superpower", summed up his arguments, saying that all these global upheavals will have profound implications for India as "they alter the environment in which it [India] hopes to develop, they demand substantial and far-sighted domestic responses and they will force it to clarify its global stance."

Using post-production software to place things realistically in scenes is much tougher for computers than for humans. It requires not only determining an appropriate location for said object, but trying to predict the object's appearance at the target location -- its scale, occlusions, pose, shape, and more. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to lend a hand. In a paper accepted at the NeurIPS 2018 conference last week ("Context-Aware Synthesis and Placement of Object Instances"), researchers at Seoul National University, the University of California at Merced, and Google AI describe a system that learns to insert an object into an image in a "semantically coherent" -- that is to say, convincing -- manner. "Inserting objects into an image that conforms to scene semantics is a challenging and interesting task. The task is closely related to many real-world applications, including image synthesis, AR and VR content editing and domain randomization," the researchers wrote.