NEW DELHI: Unitus Ventures has led a $1 million (Rs 6.75 crore) in healthcare and life insurance-focused artificial intelligence startup i3systems, the marquee impact investment firm announced on Wednesday. The seed-stage investment also saw participation from two of i3systems' existing list of high net-worth backers - Behram Vakil, founding partner of AZB Partners, one of India's top law firms, and Jerxis Vandrevala, founder of Sanchez Computers. The company is expected to use the proceeds from the funding round to partner with the country's top 20 life and health insurance companies, and process 1 million policies through its digital platform, it said in an official statement. "Unitus' funding will enable us to grow our medical data science team to increase the depth of our diagnostic-risk and secondary care evaluation technology. We are also setting up a dedicated customer success team to execute 10 insurance partnerships in India and abroad," said Mallesh Bommanahal, chief executive of i3 Systems.

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating more than 170 million cameras so far. In a December test of the dragnet in Guiyang, a city of 4.3 million people in southwest China, a BBC reporter was flagged for arrest within seven minutes of police adding his headshot to a facial recognition database. And in the southeast city of Nanchang, Chinese police say that last month they arrested a suspect wanted for "economic crimes" after a facial recognition system spotted him at a pop concert amidst 60,000 other attendees. These types of stories, combined with reports that computer vision recognizes some types of images more accurately than humans, makes it seem like the Panopticon has officially arrived. In the US alone, 117 million Americans, or roughly one in two US adults, have their picture in a law enforcement facial-recognition database.

At more than 2,000 years old, the Great Wall of China is getting a touch up thanks to technology. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. At more than 2,000 years old, the Great Wall of China is getting a touch up thanks to technology.

When industrial factories were introduced in Europe in the nineteenth century, even staunch critics of capitalism such as Friedrich Engels acknowledged that mass production necessitated centralized authority, regardless of whether the economic system was capitalist or socialist. In the twentieth century, theorists such as Langdon Winner extended this line of thinking to other technologies. He thought that the atom bomb, for example, should be considered an "inherently political artifact," because its "lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command."

Mario may be super, but even he must get bored hurdling the same Goombas and falling off the same cliffs over and over. Fortunately, a new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can endlessly produce new levels, and even tailor them to a player's skill level. Computer scientists have spent decades honing "procedural content generation," the use of algorithms to automatically design new characters, landscapes, and weapons for video games, saving humans hours of labor. But programmers still need to handcraft the rules that tell the computer how to create such content. In recent years they've applied machine learning, an AI technique by which computers learn from examples, so AI can simply produce more content in the style of existing content without needing explicit instructions.

As part of its plans to set out a roadmap for artificial intelligence (AI) in the country, Indian government think-tank Niti Aayog said that it will be working with tech giant Google to develop AI-based solutions aimed at improving the overall economic productivity of the nation. The move is aimed at fostering growth for India's nascent AI and machine learning (ML) ecosystem, said Niti Aayog. Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer, Niti Aayog, said: "Niti's partnership with Google will unlock massive training initiatives, support start-ups and encourage AI research through PhD scholarships, all of which contributes to the larger idea of a technologically-empowered New India." Under the aegis of this programme, Google will train and incubate Indian AI start-ups in an accelerator program. These start-ups will be mentored and coached by Google and its affiliates to enable them to better leverage AI in their respective business models, said a statement from Niti Aayog.

An awe-inspiring video reveals the moment a man uses his mind to move his new bionic prosthetic hand for the first time. In the footage, the lucky recipient can be seen testing out his new hand as he executes a perfect handshake with Sultan Tukeshov, the doctor who gave it to him. The breakthrough, fitted at Kyrgyzstan's National Hospital in the capital city of Bishkek, could provide better prosthetics for amputees around the world. An awe-inspiring video reveals the moment a man moves his new bionic prosthetic hand using just his mind. The video footage shows the lucky recipient, who was born without a wrist, successfully using the hand.

Digital transformation and disruptive innovation for insurance companies have become immediate-term strategic action items instead of being vague futuristic concepts. Factors including new competitive threats, ongoing cost pressures, ageing technology, increasing regulatory requirements, highly labour intensive and predominantly "product push" sales process, 'one size fits all' mind set, and lacklustre financial performance are leading to adoption of new business models by insurers. In such an environment, digital transformation offers insurers an opportunity to "rethink" their business operations to'achieve the triple prize of customer delight, lower costs and higher profitable growth' by reimagining insurance operations from a zero base, bolstering customer satisfaction, and reducing costs and errors. This can be made possible by focussing on digital transformation across the insurance value chain with specific thrust on leveraging recent advancements in technology including: Omnichannel: It is quite common for any consumer to start researching products online, recommending and talking about them with friends and contacts on social media, and then buying them via mobile apps or through agents or at brick-and-mortar branch locations. A better omnichannel environment may also enable insurers to place new products in front of potential customers sooner and more directly than in the past.

An artificial intelligence (AI) module has been developed by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to find anomalies in standard operating procedure using CCTV footage. With this module, base kitchens will be monitored across India. The AI module realizes the value of their videos and photos with vision computing. It can detect an unexpected change or an event that does not conform to the expected pattern using machine learning algorithms. To begin with, 16 base kitchens of IRCTC have been installed with high definition cameras connected to huge monitors for AI vision detection.

LG Electronics has announced that its 2018 lineup of OLED and Super UHD TVs now have Google Assistant. The South Korean technology company took to its online newsroom Wednesday to confirm that all models of its 2018 AI TV lineup are arriving with the Google Assistant voice recognition system. The integration means users will have access to many features using Google's digital assistant. According to LG, it has collaborated with Google to bring more convenience to its consumers' lives. The company pointed out that with Google Assistant on board, users can take advantage of cutting-edge AI features operated directly through its TVs' remote control units and without the need of additional hardware.