To learn more about cutting-edge data science tools like Apache Kafka, check out the Strata Data Conference in Singapore, Dec. 4-7, 2017--early price ends October 20. Machine learning has become mainstream, and suddenly businesses everywhere are looking to build systems that use it to optimize aspects of their product, processes or customer experience. The cartoon version of machine learning sounds quite easy: you feed in training data made up of examples of good and bad outcomes, and the computer automatically learns from these and spits out a model that can make similar predictions on new data not seen before. What could be easier, right? Those with real experience building and deploying production systems built around machine learning know that, in fact, these systems are shockingly hard to build. This difficulty is not, for the most part, the algorithmic or mathematical complexities of machine learning algorithms. Creating such algorithms is difficult, to be sure, but the algorithm creation process is mostly done by academic researchers.

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Wednesday for the U.S. and India to expand strategic ties. He also pointedly criticized China, which he accused of challenging international norms needed for global stability. Tillerson's remarks on relations between the world's two largest democracies, ahead of his first trip to South Asia as secretary of state, risked endearing Washington to one Asian power while alienating another. Tillerson said the world needed the U.S. and India to have a strong partnership. He said the two nations share goals of security, free navigation, free trade and fighting terrorism in the Indo-Pacific, and serve as "the Eastern and Western beacons" for an international rules-based order that is increasingly under strain.

Baidu, China's search giant, is planning to release a fully self-driving bus in China next year, said CEO Robin Li in an interview at Wall Street Journal's D.Live conference. The bus will run on a designated route and Baidu is working with a Chinese company to make it. According to Li, Baidu is very serious about investing in autonomous vehicles. The company announced last week that it plans to start mass-producing L3 autonomous vehicles (where human intervention is conditional) in 2019 and L4 versions (where it's fully autonomous) in 2021. To to this, the company has partnered with Chinese automaker BAIC Motor Corp.

Google's DeepMind says it has made another big advance in artificial intelligence by getting a machine to master the Chinese game of Go without help from human players. The AlphaGo program, devised by the tech giant's AI division, has already beaten two of the world's best players. It had started by learning from thousands of games played by humans. But the new AlphaGo Zero began with a blank Go board and no data apart from the rules, and then played itself. Within 72 hours it was good enough to beat the original program by 100 games to zero. DeepMind's chief executive, Demis Hassabis, said the system could now have more general applications in scientific research.

In the 1970 sci-fi thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, a computer designed to control the United States' nuclear weapons is switched on, and immediately discovers the existence of a Soviet counterpart. The two machines have become one, and it has mankind by the throat. Development work takes a lot longer than that. Today DeepMind, a London-based subsidiary of Google, announced that it has developed a machine that plays the ancient Chinese game of Go much better than its predecessor, AlphaGo, which last year beat Lee Sedol, a world-class player, in Seoul. The earlier program was trained for months on a massive database of master games and got plenty of pointers--training wheels, as it were--from its human creators.

Baidu chief executive Robin Li on Tuesday said the Chinese internet giant will have a self-driving bus on the road soon as it races for a lead in autonomous vehicles. Baidu is collaborating with an array of companies on autonomous cars, and is working with a large bus maker in China to have a self-driving bus running a route by next year, Li said in an on-stage interview late Tuesday at The Wall Street Journal D.Live conference in Laguna Beach, California. Most major automakers and technology titans including Google-parent Alphabet have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years, convinced that these systems could eliminate most road accidents. Baidu's search engine dominates the Chinese internet, and online ads are a key revenue stream. But since a crackdown by authorities on Baidu's online advertising business after a much-publicized scandal over promoting a fake medical treatment, 'China's Google' is seeking to focus on artificial intelligence and is investing heavily in the sector.

Digital banking brought a transformational wave to the banking system. As traditional banking practices slowly adjusted to the wave, artificial intelligence quickly caught up and made the bot market hotter than ever before. VentureBeat's 2016 Bots Landscape showed that under 200 companies, which make products ranging from personal assistants to AI tools and messaging, had $22 billion in funding and came with a whopping valuation of $159 billion. But there is a reason for these massive numbers. Do you have an AI strategy -- or hoping to get one?

You don't have to look too far back to find a time where the idea of living alongside advanced, intelligent robots was little more than a fantasy. But in today's automated world, businesses and consumers have little choice but to accept that this will be, and perhaps already is, the case. It's very difficult to name an industry that hasn't been affected by advanced robots in some way, and now consumers are integrating smart machines into their homes. Combined with artificial intelligence, the clever bots we already encounter today will only get smarter. So, what does a robot reality look like?

If you're looking for AI-first companies based out of India to work or collaborate with, you've come to the right place. We've collated all the top-funded startups from the country that are harnessing AI in their respective verticals from enterprise to consumer-focused startups, from robotics to computer vision, from speech to predictive analytics, and other sectors. AI is a horizontal technology that's being harnessed across sectors -- which we've tried to map below, with data from startup tracker Tracxn and LinkedIn. Do note that there will be some overlap in the categorisation below. Another disclaimer: this is not a comprehensive list of every AI startup that exists in the country.

Google Inc. is applying its artificial intelligence (AI) technology to not only prevent spam emails but also as an email reply tool for users, a company engineer said Wednesday. Google said its machine learning model can ferret out spam and phishing messages with 99.9 percent accuracy, even spam that are carefully crafted to deceive people, "Our goal is to make Gmail the most productive email in the world," said Paul Lambert, Google's product manager. Defining five main threats to Gmail as malware, account hijacking, phishing, web attacks, spam, the engineer said Google aims to keep users safe. The new system uses an AI-based neural network to analyze and flag the suspicious messages, especially those written specifically to subvert simpler filters. Google estimates up to 70 percent of messages in Gmail's inbox are spam, Lambert said.