In October 2015, when Google invited the European Go champion Fan Hui to play a few games against a computer program called AlphaGo, his response was: "Oh, it's just a program. He lost all five games. A rather jovial fellow, he said his wife told him after the game that he shouldn't check the internet "because people are saying terrible things about you… that a champion has been beaten by a computer". Fan was later hired as an adviser by DeepMind, a Google-owned company that had developed AlphaGo, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program. Six months later, Google asked the world's finest Go player, grandmaster Lee Sedol of South Korea, to a game of five matches. As Lee walked in to play against the machine, he said: "Human intuition is still too advanced for AI to have caught up.

BENGALURU: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking a centre stage in operations of enterprises defying talks of hype around it, according to research reports released by Accenture and Infosys. These research reports, which covered more than 2000 business leaders across different global markets including India, state that majority of businesses globally have started seeing results of AI. Nearly 3 out of 4 businesses are actively deploying AI-based technologies and it has disrupted the way they did business before, said Infosys citing its study "Leadership in the Age of AI". AI implementation has yielded business results and would soon impact overall revenue growth of large businesses. "India, the United States and China led geographies with the most respondents saying that their organization has realized direct, tangible results from deploying AI technologies with 75 percent, 71 percent and 61 percent respectively," noted Infosys in its report.

MANILA - The use of artificial intelligence in the business process outsourcing will hit "harder" in the "next 3 to 5 years," Socioeconomic Planning Sec. Ernesto Pernia said Wednesday, as he urged the industry to upgrade the skills of its workers. Voice-based services "is not not going to be necessary anymore when you have machines to do it," Pernia told ANC's Headstart. "In the next 3-5 years it will really be hitting harder. It will be there, it will be a reality, this AI," he said.

BEIJING – Beijing is starting a special investigative campaign into online video games to root out those with "low taste," the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The monthlong campaign, which began Monday, will seek to identify games that "have severe deviation in value, distort history, smear historical figures, violate government policies on ethnicities and religions, promote content that are lurid, violent or related to gambling," Xinhua said. China's booming video game market, the world's largest, is being driven by game developers like Tencent and NetEase. The Chinese government has a tight grip on content distributed in the country, including movies, music and video games. Last year, Tencent had to change a popular battle royale-style game that the regulator said was too gory and violent and bring it closer in lines with "socialist core values" before being allowed to release it in China.

Today, the western scientific progress has physically united the world. It has not only got rid of the'space' factor, it has also equipped the various countries of the world with deadly arms. But they have not yet learnt the art of knowing and loving one another. If we want to save humanity at this most critical juncture, the only option is the Indian approach. India has a perception of life force and has a vital role to play in the performance of human conduct, which will be beneficial not only to India but to the whole world in the present sorry state of affairs.

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that one of the largest clothing manufacturers, Hong Kong-based Crystal Group, proclaimed robotics could not compete with the cost and quality of manual labor. Crystal's Chief Executive, Andrew Lo, emphatically declared, "The handling of soft materials is really hard for robots." Lo did leave the door open for future consideration by acknowledging such budding technologies as "interesting." One company mentioned by Lo was Georgia Tech spinout, Softwear Automation. Softwear made news last summer by announcing its contract with an Arkansas apparel factory to update 21 production lines with its Sewbot automated sewing machines. The factory is owned by Chinese manufacturer Tianyuan Garments, which produces over 20 million T-shirts a year for Adidas.

Speech enhancement (SE) aims to reduce noise in speech signals. Most SE techniques focus only on addressing audio information. In this work, inspired by multimodal learning, which utilizes data from different modalities, and the recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in SE, we propose an audio-visual deep CNNs (AVDCNN) SE model, which incorporates audio and visual streams into a unified network model. We also propose a multi-task learning framework for reconstructing audio and visual signals at the output layer. Precisely speaking, the proposed AVDCNN model is structured as an audio-visual encoder-decoder network, in which audio and visual data are first processed using individual CNNs, and then fused into a joint network to generate enhanced speech (the primary task) and reconstructed images (the secondary task) at the output layer. The model is trained in an end-to-end manner, and parameters are jointly learned through back-propagation. We evaluate enhanced speech using five instrumental criteria. Results show that the AVDCNN model yields a notably superior performance compared with an audio-only CNN-based SE model and two conventional SE approaches, confirming the effectiveness of integrating visual information into the SE process. In addition, the AVDCNN model also outperforms an existing audio-visual SE model, confirming its capability of effectively combining audio and visual information in SE.

In March 2016, Alphabet's DeepMind research group set a milestone in artificial intelligence when its AlphaGo program defeated professional Go player Lee Sedol, then fifth-ranked in the world, at the complex board game Go. Now China's Tencent is claiming a milestone of its own in Go--and China's ambitions in artificial intelligence. Last week, the company's Fine Art program defeated China's top professional Ke Jie, despite giving him a significant head start. Ke recently slipped to number two in the world, after holding the top spot for three years. Fine Art's victory won notice in the world of Go because it helps illustrate the gulf that has opened between human and machine players of the complex boardgame.

What do we do when we need any information? Simple: "We Ask, and Google Tells". But if the answer depends on multiple variables, then the existing Ask-Tell model tends to sputter. State of the art search engines usually cannot handle such requests. We would have to search for information available in bits and pieces and then try to filter and assemble relevant parts together.

We usually think of surveillance cameras as digital eyes, watching over us or watching out for us, depending on your view. But really, they're more like portholes: useful only when someone is looking through them. Sometimes that means a human watching live footage, usually from multiple video feeds. Most surveillance cameras are passive, however. They're there as a deterrence, or to provide evidence if something goes wrong. But this is changing -- and fast.