Very few know that the legal sector was one of the first to adopt Artificial Intelligence, with some corporate legal firms using it in some form since 2005. Even as the judiciary takes baby steps to digitise court work, lawyers across the country are using software like'Casemine', 'Mitra', 'Legitquest', 'Mike' and'Kira' for basic research, the sort of work which otherwise would have been handled by an entry-level legal associate. This analysis and retrieval of data otherwise takes an immense amount of time. Huzefa Tavawalla, who heads International Commercial Law Practice at Nishith Desai Associates, allays the fears that jobs are at stake. "That can never happen because one of the things that a machine lacks is a conscience. This is one of the biggest challenges of AI," says Tavawalla, whose firm was among the first to develop an in-house AI model.

Indian manufacturing companies are going all out to woo expat talent in digital, artificial intelligence and other new-age technologies, as they seek to strengthen their global footprint with improved products. Companies in sectors such as automobile, industrial, pharmaceutical, chemical and packaging are keen on bringing in people familiar with international best practices who can replicate the quality and precision of developed markets such as North America, the UK, Korea, Japan and Germany. Over the last six months, automaker Mahindra & Mahindra has hired six expats for top-level posts while the diversified Vedanta Ltd in February brought in five expats at senior levels in India. A spokesperson for Hero MotoCorp said several experts have joined the company of late. "There has been an increase in expat hiring in the last six months. Expat hiring isn't about numbers but about inducting appropriate capabilities and talent," said Rajeshwar Tripathi, chief people officer, M&M, which last year inducted 15 expats at senior levels.

Pentagon technology chief Mike Griffin last week announced US military plans to form an office dedicated to procuring and deploying artificial intelligence technology. Meanwhile, the White House still doesn't have a science adviser. The US military appears to embrace AI at every strategic level, and the creation of a new office to manage the burgeoning technology is further evidence that machine learning is the future of warfare. According to Federal News Radio's Eric White, Under Secretary Griffin and fellow top brass are "alarmed at recent advances" in the field of artificial intelligence and seek to form the office as a matter of national security. US House members are also concerned about such developments, having recently introduced a bill that would allocate millions of dollars toward researching artificial intelligence with the intent of providing a study for the president to review next year. The White House, for its part, has been peculiarly silent on the subject of AI, leaving some to speculate the idea of operating a democracy without a qualified science adviser is a bad one.

Members of the House of Lords have called for an artificial intelligence code of conduct in the UK. The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, in a report titled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?, argued that the UK can lead the world in AI, as long as it puts ethics at the centre of its plans. The Committee recommended five principles guiding how researchers and businesses develop artificially intelligent systems in the UK. As part of its report, the Lords have called for these principles to be formulated into a cross-sector AI code to be adopted internationally as well as in the UK. Commenting on the report, the Committee's chairman, Lord Clement-Jones, said: "The UK has a unique opportunity to shape AI positively for the public's benefit and to lead the international community in AI's ethical development, rather than passively accept its consequences."

Artificial Intelligence, increasingly relevant in the modern world where everything is driven by technology and data, is the process of automating any system or process to carry out complex tasks and functions automatically, in order to achieve optimal productivity. This video explains the basics of AI using popular Java-based libraries and frameworks to build your smart applications. We will cover easy-to-complex artificial intelligence tasks such as genetic programming, heuristic searches, reinforcement learning, neural networks, and segmentation with the practical approach we mentioned earlier. By the end of this video, you will have a solid understanding of Artificial Intelligence concepts. You will be able to build your own smart applications for multiple domains, as required.

To the right, young software engineers sit in front of their laptops in the windowless, artificially lit rooms. To the left, computer science professor Pedro Domingos opens the door to his office, which has a view of the massive trees on campus. Domingos' book "The Master Algorithm," about the technology of artificial intelligence (AI), made him famous and is also considered a standard reference work. The best-selling book, published in 2015, describes how machines that can learn are changing our everyday lives -- from the social networks and science to business and politics and right up to the way modern wars are waged. The book drew praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Recently, a third prominent figure noted that he'd read the book: Chinese President Xi Jinping. When state television broadcast his new year's speech this year, viewers discovered that next to Marx's "Capital" and "Selected Works" by Mao Zedong, he also has a copy of "The Master Algorithm" on his bookshelf. "The book is much read in China," says Domingos. "That's probably why Xi and his people became aware of it. It's possible that it has now become even more popular."

Innovative food-related gadgets and practices don't always have to rely on things like sensors, apps, and machine learning to have a positive impact. In fact, in some parts of the world, these "low-tech" (that is, technologically simple) solutions are often all that's needed to prevent waste, improve farming practices, and even boost the local economy. That is to say that low tech, while maybe not as alluring as, say, using sensors to save the bees, plays a bigger role in advancing food than one might initially think. Their simplicity is effective, and often just as interesting, or at least thought provoking, as a high-tech alternative. Consider fermentation, specifically as a way to curb food waste.

When Facebook announced the Messenger platform for building chatbots a couple years ago, there was a lot of excitement in the market. Everybody was of the belief that bots are the next biggest thing in technology. In fact it wasn't very hard to find an article with the title along the lines of "How chatbots will replace mobile and web applications" published everyday. New tools ranging from code libraries, drag and drop tools, GUI based bot builders, mockup tools and analytics platforms were being launched within weeks of each other. Some of these tools were able to achieve amazing success like Chatfuel and ManyChat in the GUI bot builder category, Dashbot and Botanalytics in the analytics platform category and Microsoft Bot Framework and Botkit in the coding library category.

With advances in stem cell research and nanotechnology helping us fight illnesses from heart disease to superbugs, is the fusion of biology and technology speeding us towards a sci-fi future - part human, part synthetic? In Ridley Scott's seminal blockbuster Blade Runner, humanity has harnessed bio-engineering to create a race of replicants that look, act and sound human - but are made entirely from synthetic material. We may be far from realising that sci-fi future, but synthetics are beginning to have a profound effect on medicine. At their state-of-the-art laboratories in Hong Kong, scientists from Canadian company Novoheart are using stem cells to create bio-artificial hearts the company calls "hearts in a jar". From just 2.5ml of your blood, Professor Ronald Li and his team are able to create stem cells that can then be turned into a miniature "clone" version of your heart that beats like yours and reacts to new drugs the way yours would.

Belief change within the framework of fragments of propositional logic is one of the main and recent challenges in the knowledge representation research area. While previous research works focused on belief revision, belief merging, and belief contraction, the problem of belief update within fragments of classical logic has not been addressed so far. In the context of revision, it has been proposed to refine existing operators so that they operate within propositional fragments, and that the result of revision remains in the fragment under consideration. This approach is not restricted to the Horn fragment but also applicable to other propositional fragments like Krom and affine fragments. We generalize this notion of refinement to any belief change operator. We then focus on a specific belief change operation, namely belief update. We investigate the behavior of the refined update operators with respect to satisfaction of the KM postulates and highlight differences between revision and update in this context.