Last year, when Kate Brodock, CEO and founder of Women 2.0, pointed out that one of the key problems faced in the new tech industry the world over was that it was dominated by'white men'. Lack of racial, cultural diversity and most importantly, lack of gender equality was shaping the internet in a skewed manner. The scant number of women in new tech, especially in the areas of data science, analytics, and artificial intelligence has been a worrying trend in India as well. The resultant sexism is increasingly becoming one of the side-effects, making the global protests for gender equality so much more necessary. Anuradha Sharma, chief operating officer at Scienaptic says, "There is a very prominent male culture in programming and that kind of makes women less visible in data science and analytics field… Women in analytics are hidden, they are doing all the good work, but they are not asserting themselves. I know enough number of women in analytics, who are doing great work but they are not visible."

Sony has made it much easier for parents to kick their children off their PlayStation. The company's latest update adds a new tool that lets adults automatically set a time limit for their children, and can automatically kick them off the console once that has been used up. The feature, known as Play Time Management, allows adults to set time limits for the children in their family. They will mean that kids can only play within specific hours, for instance, or that they can only be played for a specific amount of time. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

This article was first posted on The Conversation. The world is full of connected devices -- and more are coming. In 2017, there were an estimated 8.4 billion internet-enabled thermostats, cameras, streetlights and other electronics. By 2020 that number could exceed 20 billion, and by 2030 there could be 500 billion or more. Because they'll all be online all the time, each of those devices -- whether a voice-recognition personal assistant or a pay-by-phone parking meter or a temperature sensor deep in an industrial robot -- will be vulnerable to a cyberattack and could even be part of one.

You might have heard about those ATMs that use facial recognition instead of cards and PIN numbers for authentication. You might also have seen on the news a smart security algorithm that helps police identify suspects and cracks criminal cases. Artificial intelligence (AI), the wiz behind these advanced technologies, is permeating our daily lives--everything from financial services to public safety to healthcare and transportation. YITU Technology, one of China's front-running AI startups, has developed solutions that help solve real-world problems. YITU now has the ability to enable accurate facial recognition with a large database of over 1 billion faces in just one second, and their technology has in fact assisted Chinese law enforcement in criminal investigations.

For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis.

Streaming giant Netflix has pledged that it will never feature advertising on its site and has no intention of entering the battle for live news and sports broadcasting. "Our content is our crown jewel," said CEO Reed Hastings, speaking two days after the company won an Oscar for its Russian sports doping documentary Icarus and ahead of the release of the new series of Jessica Jones. "It's up to us to take [subscribers'] money and turn it into great content for their viewing benefit." Speaking at Netflix Labs Day, a rare press event at the company's headquarters in Los Gatos, California, Hastings stressed his opposition to "chopping up" the site's movies and TV shows to accommodate commercials. "Having a great experience... vastly outweighs the fact that one company is gaining a lot of influence," he said, alluding to Netflix's market dominance, now under renewed threat from rivals Amazon Prime, Hulu and Disney (bolstered by its recent multi-billion dollar takeover of Fox).

Samsung's flagship phone series is the Galaxy S, released each Spring. Last year's model, on sale last April, had a striking new design though many of the features inside were only gently upgraded from previous models. Now, the Galaxy S9 is here, and it's done the reverse: a largely similar design on the outside that hides significant changes in hidden elements such as the camera. I've been using the S9 and S9 since they were first announced 12 days ago. Though the look has been left largely unchanged, this remains a handsome, assured design.

KUALA LUMPUR: Nomura Asset Management Co Ltd expects better returns using artificial intelligence (AI) in its portfolio construction. Nomura Asset Management Malaysia Sdn Bhd managing director and CEO Nor Rejina Abdul Rahim said the returns for funds that utilise AI are higher than those using conventional methods for investment decision-making. Speaking to reporters at the Nomura Asset Management Malaysia – Breakfast Conference 2018 today, Rejina said AI takes the emotion out of investment decisions and is able to process a lot more data compared with a human, which allows it to generate patterns that are used to make investment decisions. The firm, which launched its AI fund in Japan last month, expects to launch a global version in June this year.

NEW DELHI: Haptik, a leading Indian artificial intelligence based chatbot platform, has entered into a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer cutting-edge chatbot solutions to customers in India. The tie-up aims to enable companies to leverage these conversational bots to automate some of their most critical processes across customer support, lead generation and sales funnel management. Chatbots allow for highly engaging, conversational experiences, through voice and text that can be customised and used on mobile devices, web browsers, and on popular chat platforms such as Facebook Messenger or Slack. The extended collaboration aims to enable seamless integration between Haptik's chatbots and AWS's advanced AI service portfolio, and to provide omnichannel support to customers. For its core technology platform, Haptik utilises several AWS tools and resources notably including Elastic Cloud Compute, RDS for data storage, CloudFront for scalability, Kinesis for data lake and Amazon Polly, a textto-speech service that uses advanced deep-learning technologies to synthesise speech that sounds like a human voice.

Afghanistan and Pakistan accuse each other of allowing militant groups to shelter in remote frontier regions to prepare cross-border attacks. U.S. officials have also accused Pakistan of not doing enough to crack down on such groups operating on its side of the border.