For the first time in India, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has given up to 20 credits for subjects like artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning and robotics. In December 2017, the AICTE had revised the curriculum for the four year undergraduate (BTech) program. AI, robotics and IoT had been made mandatory from academic year 2018-19. In a move which is being clearly welcomed by academicians as well as students, over 80 percent of all the technical and engineering colleges in India have agreed to follow the new curriculum as well as the grading system. Now, this new move by AICTE is being hailed by everyone as the students are hoping to get better placements, and employers are expecting to hire more industry-relevant workforce.

Provided by Quartz Pigs are seen on a family farm in Xiaoxinzhuang village, Hebei province Alibaba is best known-as China's largest e-commerce company, but it's lately made forays into artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Through a program it calls ET Brain, it's using AI to improve traffic and city planning, increase airport efficiency, and diagnose illness. The company's latest AI foray is taking place among pigs. Alibaba's Cloud Unit signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the Tequ Group, a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate that raises about 10 million pigs each year (link in Chinese), to deploy facial and voice recognition on Tequ's pig farms. According to an Alibaba representative, the company will offer software to Tequ that it will deploy on its farms with its own hardware.

Consequently, the United Nations has set a target of halving this number by 2020. A new technology being readied for its debut could be a step forward in achieving that ambitious goal: greatly improved automotive video cameras meant to replace mirrors on vehicles. In its annual R&D Open House on 14 February, Mitsubishi Electric described the development of what it believes is the industry's highest-performance rendition of mirrorless car technology. According to the company, today's conventional camera-based systems featuring motion detection technology can detect objects up to about 30 meters away and identify them with a low accuracy of 14 percent. By comparison, Mitsubishi's new mirrorless technology extends the recognition distance to 100 meters with an 81 percent accuracy.

A new technology uses artificial intelligence to generate synthetic images that can pass as real. The technology was developed by a team led by Hiroshi Ishikawa, a professor at Japan's Waseda University. It uses convolutional neural networks, a type of deep learning, to predict missing parts of images. The technology could be used in photo-editing apps. It can also be used to generate 3-D images from real 2-D images.

In this issue, we are pleased to feature expert commentary by Eric Sandosham, Founder and Partner at Red & White Consulting Partners LLP. Formerly Managing Director and Regional Head of Citibank's Decision Management and Analytics function in 14 global markets, Eric is currently based in Singapore. Specializing in Human Capital Analytics, Red & White Consulting Partners has client engagements across Manufacturing, Banking and Non-Profit organizations in Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. Eric and Marcia discuss the role of data analytics in Human Resources--and more. What exactly is the CHRO's role today? Neeraj Sanan's People Matters article, "How contextual intelligence is empowering CHROs," contends that today's businesses demand more strategic direction from HR that requires "an assertive, data-driven CHRO."

We live in a crazy world where a robot was recently given citizenship to a sovereign country for the first time. Granted, the country is Saudi Arabia and the robot's creator is creepier than the robot itself, but it's hard to ignore the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving quickly and becoming ingrained in various aspects of our lives. Programmatic advertising online is a space that was driven by empowering computers to make decisions by taking into account enormous amounts of data that the human mind could never process. Is influencer marketing, a space that has been plagued by a lack of automation, in line for a revolution? If you ask me, automation will streamline the influencer campaign process.

By 2050, humans will ditch speech and communicate using nothing but their thoughts. They'll do this through a'collective AI consciousness' that is part of the very fabric of the human brain and can reveal what anyone is thinking. Called HIBA, which stands for Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar, the consciousness will take on the personas of its users and exchange information between them. That's according to Marko Krajnovic, the producer of the exhibit in Dubai that is this week showcasing predictions by AI experts. The collective consciousness was unveiled at the Museum of the Future this week, as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai.

In October last year, Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to give a robot citizenship. When taking to the stage to announce "her" new status, Sophia said she was "very honored and proud for this unique distinction…It is historic to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with citizenship." Since becoming the world's first robotic citizen, Sophia has been putting her passport to good use. At SXSW, she commented (apparently by mistake) that she wanted to destroy humankind. She received her own set of legs and took her first steps.

Location is a unifying theme for businesses. Location can be an address, a service boundary, a sales territory, or a delivery route. Spatial relationships, patterns and trends reveal invaluable business intelligence and bring easy-to-understand visualization to business applications. Location analytics and business intelligence now extend to almost all facets of financial services. Current estimates are that 97% of large companies leverage analytics, with over 100 million users worldwide.

Alibaba is best known-as China's largest e-commerce company, but it's lately made forays into artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Through a program it calls ET Brain, it's using AI to improve traffic and city planning, increase airport efficiency, and diagnose illness. The company's latest AI foray is taking place among pigs. Alibaba's Cloud Unit signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the Tequ Group, a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate that raises about 10 million pigs each year (link in Chinese), to deploy facial and voice recognition on Tequ's pig farms. According to an Alibaba representative, the company will offer software to Tequ that it will deploy on its farms with its own hardware.