Microsoft and Alibaba have independently developed AI models that scored better than humans in a Stanford University reading comprehension test. This AI milestone was reached using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), which consists of over 10,000 question-and-answer pairs that apply to more than 500 Wikipedia articles. Alibaba's model achieved a score of 82.44, while the submission from Microsoft Research Asia bested that with a mark of 82.65. The human score for the SQuAD test is 82.304. Although that's a slim margin to claim superior performance, it represents the first time any natural language processing (NLP) software has been able to eclipse humans on this particular benchmark.

NEW DELHI: India and Japan will work together to introduce artificial intelligence and robotics in the defence sector, the next level of strategic cooperation between the two Asian partners. Kentaro Sonoura, Japan's state minister for foreign affairs and a close adviser to PM Shinzo Abe, told TOI in an exclusive chat, "You should expect to see increased bilateral cooperation between us to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and robotics." The strategic sphere is where the bulk of India-Japan convergence lies. After the nuclear agreement was ratified by the Japanese parliament late 2017, Sonoura said India and Japan would be setting up a joint task force for commercial agreements by the end of January. With the legislation behind them, the Japanese minister said Tokyo was keen to get this going.

The international Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2018), held last week in Las Vegas, saw the arrival of a new generation of robots for the home which promise to make our life easier. They can assist with housework, accompany the elderly and the children, and even protect the home while the owners are away. The Aeolus Robot is one of the first household robot assistants. Equipped with an agile arm, it is able to move household objects and can recognise and adapt to changing environments. The robot can learn, navigate and complete tasks independently.

Achieving sustainable growth while coping with a population decline calls for "Society 5.0," a super smart society where we can resolve various social challenges by incorporating the innovations of the fourth industrial revolution such as the "internet of things," big data, artificial intelligence, robots and the sharing economy into every industry and society. Japan, in a sense, is far ahead of the rest of the world in realizing this new society, as it is compelled to do so. About 27.3 percent of Japan's 127 million people were aged 65 or higher in 2016, with the ratio expected to reach 38.4 percent by 2065, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The country's medical expenses are also expected to increase. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reported ¥41.3 trillion in medical costs in fiscal 2016, and they are expected to increase to ¥57.8 trillion by fiscal 2025, according to the National Federation of Health Insurance Societies.

In 2016, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab proclaimed the fourth industrial revolution as a distinct evolution from its predecessor because of the rapid onset of ubiquitous change. This revolution -- the current environment in which disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and the "internet of things," among others -- is profoundly changing the way we live and work. The complexity and scale of such change have seen the need for new means and approaches to linking intelligence, understanding and specialists at the global level. Transformation Maps, a collaborative digital tool developed by the WEF available in English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese that harnesses knowledge, charts interactions and analyzes links between industries, countries and issues that are shaping the world, may very well be the platform to do so. According to Jeremy Jurgens, managing director and head of knowledge and digital engagement at the Swiss-based non-profit, Transformation Maps are certainly a solution made only available because of the accelerated change brought about as part of the current industrial revolution.

Baidu Inc. took a walloping when the mobile Internet era arrived. The advent of the age of artificial intelligence has, by contrast, made it feel very comfortable, however, because "we positioned ourselves in AI technology and its market six or seven years ago," said Robin Li, founder of the Chinese internet behemoth. "This time has finally come, and our day is finally dawning," he said. Baidu failed to stake out an early position on the mobile internet, so when that time arrived, "We took a bit of a hit." Because many others had already deployed there, "It was very bad for Baidu, so the company at that time was a little nervous," Li admitted frankly at the GeekPark 2018 Innovation Festival in Beijing yesterday. Compared with the internet era, the era of AI changed both the supply side and the consumer side, and so Baidu can do a lot more than before, Li believes.

"A collection of smart devices may not make you smarter. There seems to be a gap between what technology has to offer and what we are naturally able to do" Suranga Nanayakkara slips a black ring onto his finger and points. This ring, he explains, helps visually impaired people read by converting text into speech. Nanayakkara points at a poster on the wall more than a metre away, clicks a small button on the side of the ring, and almost instantaneously a female voice starts reading out the poster's header through the headphones he's wearing. Such optical character recognition technology, or OCR, already exists but is often locked inside clunky highlighter-style devices that are slow and cumbersome.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new technological frontier over which companies and countries are vying for control. According to a recent report from McKinsey, Alphabet invested roughly $30 billion in developing AI technologies. Baidu, which is the Chinese equivalent of Alphabet, invested $20 billion in AI last year. Companies aren't the only ones investing time, money and energy into advancing AI technology -- a recent article in The New Yorker reported that the Chinese government has been pursuing AI technology aggressively in an attempt to control a future cornerstone innovation. Considering that some of the largest entities in the world are focused on advancing AI tech, it is all but certain that 2018 will see significant advancements in the space.

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI), described as the development of computer systems capable of performing tasks which, in general, require human intelligence, arose more than 60 years ago.However, this technology did not reach the field of financial services until the early 1980s.It had limited implementation and use at that time due to the state of the technology and power of computer systems. But in recent years there has been significant growth in injecting AI into the financial planning process. In the early 1980s, for example, the Citibank Investment Bank attempted to build expert systems, using artificial intelligence that imitated the decision-makingpower of a human expert. And Citibank was not the only one, many other Wall Street companies launched similar projects at that time. And in 1987, the Security Pacific National Bank launched a Fraud Prevention Task Force to automatically counter, through the use of artificial intelligence, unauthorized use of debit cards at ATMs and stores.

A U.S. company will be deploying the world's most advanced undersea search vessels in a renewed bid to search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Texas-based Ocean Infinity -- which has signed a "no cure, no fee" deal with the Malaysian government to find the jetliner -- will for the first time use a swarm of eight drone-like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to scour a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, where the ill-fated plane is believed to have gone down. The company will be paid only if it succeeds in locating the plane, which is believed to have gone down while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. According to the Daily Beast, Ocean Infinity will conduct the new search with the latest technology north of the original search area, where an underwater operation for more than three years yielded no concrete clues. Talking about the technology that the company will use, the Daily Beast reported that the system was being used for the first time and that while en route from the Caribbean to the search site, the command ship, Seabed Constructor, paused several times to carry out trials at depths similar to those at the Indian Ocean search site.