HYDERABAD: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) found a place in this year's Union Budget and Niti Ayog is set to establish a programme on AI, the topic dominated most of the sessions and talks at the WCIT-2018 and NASSCOM ILF on Monday. Andrew Ng, a leading expert on AI and Co-Founder of Coursera, said there is a shortage of skilled individuals in the field of AI and Machine Learning and that India has a great opportunity to grow in the field. He also said that those who improved their skills in the field of AI would be "richly rewarded". When asked as to what are chances of developing countries like India making it big in AI when US and China are already making strides, he said every country was far from being developed when it came to AI and everyone had an equal chance. Speaking on regulations on AI which is being debated across the world as AI becomes a hotly pursued technology, he said that a generalised horizontal regulation on AI would halt its development and regulations should be implemented only in verticals where it was required.

Start-ups, graduate school students and others are expected to compete for new designs, processing speed of AI and other areas. In 2018, the government plans to hold a contest for AI semiconductors to be used in self-driving cars and robots. For the best start-up or talent, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry will subsidize their development costs, and participating companies will then invest in them to facilitate the commercialization of new technologies and their mass production, according to the sources. This will benefit start-ups and others with scarce funds, as financial and other support from the government and major companies will help them commercialize their own technologies. At the same time, large companies will also be able to develop advanced technologies and find talent through the initiative.

In the tech world in 2017, several trends emerged as signals amid the noise, signifying much larger changes to come. As we noted in last year's More Than Noise list, things are changing--and the changes are occurring in ways that don't necessarily fit into the prevailing narrative. While many of 2017's signals have a dark tint to them, perhaps reflecting the times we live in, we have sought out some rays of light to illuminate the way forward. The following signals differ considerably, but understanding them can help guide businesses in the right direction for 2018 and beyond. When a team of psychologists, linguists, and software engineers created Woebot, an AI chatbot that helps people learn cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for managing mental health issues like anxiety and depression, they did something unusual, at least when it comes to chatbots: they submitted it for peer review. Stanford University researchers recruited a sample group of 70 college-age participants on social media to take part in a randomized control study of Woebot. The researchers found that their creation was useful for improving anxiety and depression symptoms.

The world's most powerful rocket may be good for more commercial missions than Mars supply trips. One astronomer says it could open access to lots of asteroids on which humans could strike it rich mining metals. Backstory: Earlier this month, SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket. It's twice as powerful, and costs a quarter the price to launch, as its closest competitor, Delta IV Heavy. What's new: Falcon Heavy's power could get humans to more asteroids to tap them for supplies.

Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the "singularity" -- that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs. These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever.

As China's largest news network Xinhua reported, a new deal worth millions of yuan has been signed between livestock farming companies the Sichuan Tequ Group, the Dekon Group and Alibaba, China's technology giant. This united approach has the goal of identifying and predicting fertility by analysing swine behaviour. The system should be able to keep a record of every single pig, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement. The system is said to be able to help each sow give birth to 3 more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3%, according to an early-stage experiment. Tequ Group's chief information officer, Zhang Haifeng, told Xinhua: "If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes."

Think that human augmentation is still decades away? This week, government leaders met with experts and innovators ahead of the World Government Summit in Dubai. To determine the future of artificial intelligence. It was an event that attracted some of the biggest names in AI. Managers from IBM Watson, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, Nest, Drive.ai, and Amazon AI.

How scarce is AI talent in India? As Artificial Intelligence starts dominating the market, India does stare at a significant talent shortage just like the global market where AI has taken over low-skilled IT jobs. A LinkedIn report on the Digital Workforce Future states that India is like a testing ground for some of the most exciting applications of AI such as Microsoft's application that helps farmers in predicting crop yields in the agriculture sector, to Google's Deep Learning application that detects diabetes-related eye diseases in health care.

Fans of self-driving cars will have breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Uber and Google's Waymo, two giants in the industry, have settled their intellectual-property lawsuit. This removes a huge distraction for companies, and freeing them up to focus on their own research. Driverless cars will be an incredible boon to society. They could save tens of thousands of American lives every year, and even more in countries such as India and China, and prevent millions of injuries. They could save the average American hundreds of hours each year -- hours that she or he would then have to do work or rest while on the road.

Jefferson Graham visits the Kyoto, Japan Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories to meet Erica, a lifelike humanoid. KYOTO, Japan --Erica greets me, asks my name and how I'm enjoying my trip to Japan. She nods her head as I speak and her eyes wander as if she's going to work the room, but she seems only to be listening to me. This eerie humanoid just happens to be a "conversational" robot companion. And the conversation only goes so far: She's reciting from a digital file that has been placed inside her as I read into a microphone from a script of questions researchers have given me to prompt her.