Inc. said Wednesday its smart speakers will debut in Japan starting next week. Amazon is dominant in the sector overseas, and its entry into the Japan market is expected to further fuel competition. The e-commerce giant said it will offer three Echo speaker models -- Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot -- priced at ¥11,980, ¥17,980 and ¥5,980, respectively. The voice-controlled devices are equipped with Alexa, Amazon's AI voice agent. "We are extremely excited to bring Echo and Alexa to Japan," said Tom Taylor, an Amazon senior vice president who overseas Alexa.

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.

HPE Rapid Software Installation for AI: HPE introduced an integrated hardware and software solution, purpose-built for high performance computing and deep learning applications. Based on the HPE Apollo 6500 system in collaboration with Bright Computing to enable rapid deep learning application development, this solution includes pre-configured deep learning software frameworks, libraries, automated software updates and cluster management optimized for deep learning and supports NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. HPE Deep Learning Cookbook: Built by the AI Research team at Hewlett Packard Labs, the deep learning cookbook is a set of tools to guide customers in selecting the best hardware and software environment for different deep learning tasks. These tools help enterprises estimate performance of various hardware platforms, characterize the most popular deep learning frameworks, and select the ideal hardware and software stacks to fit their individual needs. The Deep Learning Cookbook can also be used to validate the performance and tune the configuration of already purchased hardware and software stacks.

Why do you think that could help you regain your edge? LI: First, every company has its own DNA. Baidu is a technology company. During the desktop age, in order to serve the users better, you just needed to come out with the best technology to rank contents on the internet. I think that's what we are good at.

How often has any piece of consumer technology had as eventful a year as 2017 has been for Amazon's Alexa voice service and Echo hardware? Consider the evidence: A year ago, Amazon boasted that there were 4,000 Alexa skills–tasks the service can perform, from setting a Nest thermostat to playing Jeopardy–up from 135 the previous January. Today, the count stands at 25,000. Alexa can now make phone and video calls, distinguish between the voices of multiple household members, and display information on screens, none of which it was able to do when the year began. In August, Amazon and Microsoft even announced that Alexa and Cortana would be able to talk to each other, a first-of-its-kind arrangement in the voice-assistant market.

Sparsity inducing regularization is an important part for learning over-complete visual representations. Despite the popularity of $\ell_1$ regularization, in this paper, we investigate the usage of non-convex regularizations in this problem. Our contribution consists of three parts. First, we propose the leaky capped norm regularization (LCNR), which allows model weights below a certain threshold to be regularized more strongly as opposed to those above, therefore imposes strong sparsity and only introduces controllable estimation bias. We propose a majorization-minimization algorithm to optimize the joint objective function. Second, our study over monocular 3D shape recovery and neural networks with LCNR outperforms $\ell_1$ and other non-convex regularizations, achieving state-of-the-art performance and faster convergence. Third, we prove a theoretical global convergence speed on the 3D recovery problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first convergence analysis of the 3D recovery problem.

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.

The BBC headquarters in London is getting a new resident: he's tall, bronze and likes a smoke. From Tuesday a statue of novelist George Orwell is to adorn the exterior of New Broadcasting House, a few minutes from where Orwell worked as a radio producer in World War Two. But what was the author of Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell's original worded title) doing in the BBC? For decades its staff have delighted in the suggestion Orwell took his notion of absolute hell from two years spent at the BBC. Near the end of Nineteen Eighty-four (1984 is now more commonly used on book covers), Winston Smith finds himself trapped in the Ministry of Love's Room 101, "many metres underground".

The first question I ask Mahdi Bahrami is, "How do you say the name of your game?" He laughs and responds smoothly, "Yes, it's called En-gar-ay." Engare is an eye-catching game. Engare is sparse yet richly detailed at the same time, filled with looping lines and delicate curves. Put simply, it's a game about beauty.

As China continues to steam ahead, marketers looking to carve out a slice of the pie should be mindful of consumer trends in the world's most populous consumer market. Market research & insight firm, Mintel, has released their take on what to look for in terms of the key consumer trends that will have the greatest impact in China for the coming year. One takeaway we found most interesting was the increasing sophistication of younger consumers and how they expect brands to interact with them. "Higher levels of social stress are driving China's youngest generations to demand more informal and playful interactions in both the virtual and physical world," said the report. This, along with other insights in the report, make clear that brands should take heed of China's ever-evolving segments and what road they are most comfortable taking on their customer journey.