An alliance between Chinese and French universities and institutions to promote artificial intelligence (AI) was established Tuesday. Eight education institutions from China and France, including Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and Sorbonne University, established the France China AI Consortium Tuesday in Beijing. French mathematician and Fields medalist Cedric Villani said that the cooperation would be crucial to facing common challenges. "Strengthening international cooperation in AI will not only promote interdisciplinary research, but also help build a platform for creative talent," said Wu Fei, director of the AI research institution of Zhejiang University.

A question that every tech enthusiast is asking after the technology driven machine learning and user data has started to hit smartphones and smart home devices to millions around the world. Even though it may sound futuristic and even creepy, the next generation of AI will be able to read your mind. Yes, you read that right. Scientists in Japan were able to create an AI that could read your brainwaves. In their research paper titled'Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity', scientists were able to replicate an image based on what a person is looking at it.

MUMBAI – Mobile apps that help women in the Indian countryside and tiny villages in Japan to open their homes to visitors from across the world are generating incomes, revitalizing remote communities and helping to curb migration to cities. A women's organization in the western Indian state of Gujarat has tied up with Airbnb, the short-term home rental service, to train rural women to be hosts and list their homes on its site. A year in, the number of women earning from home sharing has doubled, according to the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which has about 2 million members, mostly in villages. "At first, we weren't sure how the women would fare and if people would respond to home stays in these areas," said Reema Nanavaty, a director at SEWA. "But once they began getting guests, the women invested in upgrading their homes and started using Google Translate to communicate with guests. It has become a significant source of income for them," she said.

The verdict is still out on Sony's new pet dog'aibo,' but that's not stopping the company from planning a deeper push into robotics. The mechanical mutt, which goes on sale in Japan on Thursday, is just the beginning of the Tokyo-based company's return to robotics, Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai told Bloomberg TV. While aibo is primarily a toy, its artificial-intelligence capabilities and robotic architecture can be used to create machines for various service fields, he said. "The technology we incorporated into aibo -- A.I., robotics, and that combination -- in different form-factors can manifest itself in other robots that can be a part of transportation, education, health care," Hirai told Bloomberg's Emily Chang. "So it has a lot of different applications beyond just being an entertainment robot."

You can be forgiven if your first reaction to hearing the term "smart cities" is an eye roll. Sure, we have smart diapers, smart toothbrushes and smart faucets, but cities? How is that even possible? While the word is a bit amorphous, there's no question that smart cities are a thing and an important one at that. Cities are the locus of much of the world's population and economic activity. By 2050, a full 66 percent of the world is expected to reside in one, according to the United Nations.

The market is segmented on the basis of type, end-users/application, and geography. The report provides information about the production, price, revenue, market share, and growth rate of each type. Geographically, the market has been analyzed across North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and India. The status and prospect through 2011-2023 for each of these regions are listed in the report. The report entails the qualitative and quantitative analysis of current and future market estimations.

European software major SAP will invest in at least 10 artificial intelligence (AI) startups every year through its SAP.iO Fund. SAP.iO is an initiative of the tech giant to create an ecosystem of products and software by working with entrepreneurs. In 2016, five Indian startups were among 10 companies selected by SAP.iO's AI accelerator's first batch. "We are looking at enterprise applications from startups that are founded around a year ago," Alexa Gorman, global vice-president of SAP.iO Fund, told VCCircle over a telephone call from Berlin. "By restricting our focus, we can add value in terms of marketing assistance and mentorship for these startups."

Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2018 China's AI boom: This may also be the year in which China starts looking like a major player in the field of AI. The country's tech industry is shifting away from copying Western companies, and it has identified AI and machine learning as the next big areas of innovation. China's leading search company, Baidu, has had an AI-focused lab for some time, and it is reaping the rewards in terms of improvements in technologies such as voice recognition and natural language processing, as well as a better-optimized advertising business. Other players are now scrambling to catch up. Tencent, which offers the hugely successful mobile-first messaging and networking app WeChat, opened an AI lab last year, and the company was busy recruiting talent at NIPS.

Packt's Video Learning Paths are a series of individual video products put together in a logical and stepwise manner such that each video builds on the skills learned in the video before Data mining is a growing demand on the market as the world is generating data at an increasing pace. R is a popular programming language for statistics. It is very useful for day-to-day data analysis tasks. Data mining is a very broad topic and takes some time to learn. This Learning Path will help you to understand the mathematical basics quickly, and then you can directly apply what you've learned in R.

Check out the machine learning sessions at the Strata Data Conference in London, May 21-24, 2018. Hurry--best price ends February 23. In this post, I share slides and notes from a talk I gave in December 2017 at the Strata Data Conference in Singapore offering suggestions to companies that are actively deploying products infused with machine learning capabilities. Over the past few years, the data community has focused on infrastructure and platforms for data collection, including robust pipelines and highly scalable storage systems for analytics. According to a recent LinkedIn report, the top two emerging jobs are "machine learning engineer" and "data scientist."