Google has announced that it will establish an artificial intelligence research center in the Ghanaian capital later this year -- a first for the company on the continent. Expert machine learning researchers and engineers will work together at the new AI research center in Accra which will be dedicated to artificial intelligence research and its applications in a wider African context, according to Quartz. The research center will focus on using artificial intelligence applications in areas that include healthcare, agriculture and education. Announcing the AI research center in a Google blog post, senior Google AI fellow Jeff Dean and staff research scientist Moustapha Cisse wrote about the growing interest artificial intelligence has experienced across Africa. "In recent years, we've witnessed an increasing interest in machine learning research across the continent," the pair wrote in the Google blog post.

President Donald Trump is poised to hike the prices of Chinese-made technology products that might include flat-screen TVs and ultrasound machines for American buyers. They could be among tech imports worth up to $50 billion on which Trump is preparing to slap 25 percent tariffs in response to complaints Beijing steals or pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. The White House has yet to release a final list of products. A tentative version in April ran the technology gamut from TVs and telecoms equipment to medications and industrial chemicals. It would be the first direct impact on American consumers of the dispute over a state-led technology development strategy the White House says violates Beijing's free-trade commitments and hurts foreign competitors.

Washington: The chief executive officer of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. warned that the US has only a small advantage over China in the rising field of artificial intelligence and is at risk of falling behind without a "national strategy." "It's not the 50-year edge that we have in building aircraft carriers," Horacio Rozanski said Thursday in a meeting with Bloomberg editors and reporters in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a 10-fold increase in AI output a national priority as the world's second-largest economy seeks to dominate the industry by 2030. The US has little formal AI strategy at the federal level, although resources and government projects have accelerated in the last year or so, Rozanski said. "The investments are being driven at this point by the strategies of the different parts of the government, as opposed to collective strategy," he said.

ISLAMABAD – Pakistani caretaker Prime Minister Nasir-ul-Mulk has described the killing of Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan as a "significant development in the fight against terrorism." Mulk made the comment in a telephone conversation with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and thanked him for sharing information about Fazlullah's killing. The call was initiated by Ghani. A government statement says an "action had finally been taken against an enemy of the people and state of Pakistan." Mulk told Ghani the news about Fazlullah's death would be received throughout Pakistan with relief as Pakistanis had borne the brunt of terrorist attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which Fazlullah headed.

TL;DR, we released the largest and most diverse driving video dataset with rich annotations called BDD100K. You can access the data for research now at http://bdd-data.berkeley.edu. We have recently released an arXiv report on it. And there is still time to participate in our CVPR 2018 challenges! Autonomous driving is poised to change the life in every community.

KABUL – President Ashraf Ghani confirmed Friday that Pakistani Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. Fazlullah is believed to have ordered the failed 2012 assassination of Malala Yousafzai, who became a global symbol of the fight for girls' rights to schooling, and who later won the Nobel Peace Prize. U.S. forces targeted Fazlullah in a counterterrorism strike Thursday in eastern Kunar province, close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. officials said, without confirming his death. "I spoke with Prime Minister of #Pakistan Nasir ul Mulk and Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa and confirmed the death of Mullah Fazlullah," Ghani tweeted, adding: "His death is the result of tireless human intel led by #Afghan security agencies." Ghani added the Pakistani leaders had assured him the strike was "a great step toward building trust between the two nations," while urging them to "bring (the) Afghan Taliban residing in Pakistan to the negotiation table."

We are living in a technology-driven era where we are surrounded by the latest technologies which are making our life simpler, easier and quicker. Although in the past two decades, technology has given us lots of gifts, one of the most precious gifts which we have received through technology is the Artificial Intelligence (AI). Businesses are getting benefited by adopting the AI at various levels of their organization and in return, their different operations are getting more accurate, precise and effective. The automation and speed brought by AI with the analysis of huge amount of data is bringing the real change for business. So, in this blog post, we will be looking at the various implementations of AI in the different business procedure so that we can have an idea of how the future of AI will be.

The European Commission recently announced plans to increase that funding, to make more data available for use in AI, and to work with EU member states on a strategy for deploying AI in the European economy. But at the same time, the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) puts tight restrictions on uses of AI that involve personal data, and EU policymakers continue to search for additional restrictions on AI to address their remaining fears. Unlike tobacco, AI has many beneficial uses, and the potential risks depend on how it is developed and used over the long-term. The irony is that if Europe over-regulates AI now, it will miss its chance for global influence over the technology's future. The commission does not see a contradiction because it believes that stringent regulation will engender consumer trust in AI. But that reasoning is flawed.

We propose a method for simultaneously detecting shared and unshared communities in heterogeneous multilayer weighted and undirected networks. The multilayer network is assumed to follow a generative probabilistic model that takes into account the similarities and dissimilarities between the communities. We make use of a variational Bayes approach for jointly inferring the shared and unshared hidden communities from multilayer network observations. We show the robustness of our approach compared to state-of-the art algorithms in detecting disparate (shared and private) communities on synthetic data as well as on real genome-wide fibroblast proliferation dataset.

Regional language extraction from a natural scene image is always a challenging proposition due to its dependence on the text information extracted from Image. Text Extraction on the other hand varies on different lighting condition, arbitrary orientation, inadequate text information, heavy background influence over text and change of text appearance. This paper presents a novel unified method for tackling the above challenges. The proposed work uses an image correction and segmentation technique on the existing Text Detection Pipeline an Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector (EAST). EAST uses standard PVAnet architecture to select features and non maximal suppression to detect text from image. Text recognition is done using combined architecture of MaxOut convolution neural network (CNN) and Bidirectional long short term memory (LSTM) network. After recognizing text using the Deep Learning based approach, the native Languages are translated to English and tokenized using standard Text Tokenizers. The tokens that very likely represent a location is used to find the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of the location and subsequently the regional languages spoken in that location is extracted. The proposed method is tested on a self generated dataset collected from Government of India dataset and experimented on Standard Dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique. Comparative study with a few state-of-the-art methods on text detection, recognition and extraction of regional language from images shows that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.