Our next interaction in the series of interviews for analytics hiring scenario in India is with Professor U Dinesh Kumar, Chairperson, Analytics Lab at IIM-B, and faculty in the Decision Sciences and Information Systems (DSIS) area at IIM Bangalore. IIM Bangalore has been a pioneer in providing analytics courses to freshers as well as working professionals to gain a strong foothold in areas like analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science, among others. Dinesh Kumar: The trend is obviously increasing with many recruiting senior management positions in analytics. Having said that, it is still behind western countries. For example, In 2016 MIT Sloan management review reported that 54 percent of Fortune 1000 companies had Chief Data Office, but the corresponding number in India is much lower.

Connected vehicle fleets are deployed worldwide in several industrial IoT scenarios. With the gradual increase of machines being controlled and managed through networked smart devices, the predictive maintenance potential grows rapidly. Predictive maintenance has the potential of optimizing uptime as well as performance such that time and labor associated with inspections and preventive maintenance are reduced. In order to understand the trends of vehicle faults with respect to important vehicle attributes viz mileage, age, vehicle type etc this problem is addressed through hierarchical modified fuzzy support vector machine (HMFSVM). The proposed method is compared with other commonly used approaches like logistic regression, random forests and support vector machines. This helps better implementation of telematics data to ensure preventative management as part of the desired solution. The superiority of the proposed method is highlighted through several experimental results.

We introduce a principled approach for unsupervised structure learning of deep neural networks. We propose a new interpretation for depth and inter-layer connectivity where conditional independencies in the input distribution are encoded hierarchically in the network structure. Thus, the depth of the network is determined inherently (equal to the maximal order of independence in the input distribution). The proposed method casts the problem of neural network structure learning as a problem of Bayesian network structure learning. Then, instead of directly learning the discriminative structure, it learns a generative graph, constructs its stochastic inverse, and then constructs a discriminative graph. We prove that conditional-dependency relations among the latent variables in the generative graph are preserved in the class-conditional discriminative graph. We demonstrate on image classification benchmarks that the deepest layers (convolutional and dense) of common networks can be replaced by significantly smaller learned structures, while maintaining classification accuracy---state-of-the-art on tested benchmarks. Our structure learning algorithm requires a small computational cost and runs efficiently on a standard desktop CPU.

WATERLOO – An exciting wave of tech industry investment is set to make Kitchener-Waterloo the Canadian hub of creating an uncontrollable line of code that goes on to wreak incalculable economic and human damage. "AI is the future, and it's important for Canada to be part of that future," said Prime Minister Trudeau. "Even if that future includes the complete destruction of all life on earth." While some experts worry that the increasing integration of tech into the realms of economics, policing, personal finance, transit, health, and parenting, exponentially increases the ability of rogue code to create human suffering, other experts are paid a lot to design it, and say that things will'probably be fine'. "On our current course, it's inevitable that some country will invent a piece of AI with the power to destroy the world in the next 20 years," said Trudeau.

WATERLOO – An exciting wave of tech industry investment is set to make Kitchener-Waterloo the Canadian hub of creating an uncontrollable line of code that goes on to wreak incalculable economic and human damage. "AI is the future, and it's important for Canada to be part of that future," said Prime Minister Trudeau. "Even if that future includes the complete destruction of all life on earth." While some experts worry that the increasing integration of tech into the realms of economics, policing, personal finance, transit, health, and parenting, exponentially increases the ability of rogue code to create human suffering, other experts are paid a lot to design it, and say that things will'probably be fine'. "On our current course, it's inevitable that some country will invent a piece of AI with the power to destroy the world in the next 20 years," said Trudeau.

To inspire you in 2018, we wanted to share our 2nd Annual Applied AI Digest Review – a recap of all the major AI news and trends of 2017. We are clearly not in a steady-state situation. Is this a bubble or a revolution? The answer surely includes a bit of revolution--the fields of vision and speech recognition have been turned over by great empirical successes created by deep neural architectures and more generally machine learning has found plentiful real-world uses. Artificial intelligence offers limitless potential for the financial industry, but at Fortune's MPW International Summit on Tuesday Mastercard vice chairman Ann Cairns also called attention to some of its existential risks.

PESHAWAR/DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - The Pakistani Taliban named Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud as the new leader on Saturday, a week after the previous chief Mullah Fazlullah was killed in a U.S.-Afghan air strike in Afghanistan, the group's spokesman said.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – Pakistani Taliban militants chose a religious scholar as their new chief in place of Mullah Fazlullah, the insurgent leader who ordered the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and was killed earlier this month in a U.S. drone strike. Mohammad Khurasani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said Saturday that the executive council of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan appointed Mufti Noor Wali Mahsud as its new chief and Mufti Mazhim, aka Mufti Hafzullah, as his deputy. Khurasani conceded for the first time that Mullah Fazlullah was killed in the drone attack in Afghanistan's Kunar province. He did not say when and where the TTP executive council met to choose the new leader. A ruthless leader, Fazlullah ordered the beheading of dozens of opponents when his band of insurgents controlled Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley from 2007 until a massive military operation routed them out in 2009. Fazlullah rose to prominence through his radio broadcasts in Swat demanding the imposition of Islamic law, earning him the nickname "Mullah Radio."

Indian Institute of Science's Machine Learning Special Interest Group: Touted as one of the best research groups in India, especially the one with a beautiful campus, IISc's MLSIG features several talented students and faculty members engaged in cutting-edge research on a variety of aspects of ML and related fields. These works range from theoretical foundations to new algorithms as well as other exciting applications. IISc MLSIG has a great roster of events that covers topics such as deep learning with GPUs, data mining (models, algorithms and applications), text analysis, knowledge representation and reasoning with DNN. MLSIG is also doing cutting-edge research that is published in top journals and conferences. Some of the research topics are ML in text mining, ML in computer vision, graphical models, clustering, support vector machines and kernel-based learning methods.

This post originally appeared on the PullString blog. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last twelve months, you've heard about voice assistants. They go by the name of Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri and can give you information about your commute or the weather, turn lights on and off, book flights, and order groceries. A line of questioning we hear a lot from CMOs in North America and Europe is: should they even care about this latest technology trend, does voice deserve its own strategy, does it warrant attention at their level of the organization? We believe there are four strategic reasons why every CMO should start thinking about what voice assistant customer engagement means for their digital transformation strategy.