Artificial intelligence is on the minds of business leaders everywhere because they've either heard or believe that AI will change the way companies do business. What we're seeing now is just the beginning. For everyone's sake, more thought needs to be given to the workforce impact and how humans and machines will complement each other. Recently, professional services company Genpact and FORTUNE Knowledge Group surveyed 300 senior executives from companies in the North American, European and Asia-Pacific regions with annual revenues of $1 billion per year or more. According to the report, "AI leaders expect that the modern workforce will be comfortable working alongside robots by 2020."

Amazon has been on quite an expansion push with its smart home speaker line recently, but now it's clear that they're increasing more than just the number of Echo devices on the market. The company announced today that Echo and Alexa are now available in India by invitation only, and they'll expand to Japan later this year. Devices will start shipping in India this month. According to Tom Taylor, the SVP of Amazon Alexa, the company will also open the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service in order to allow developers to create customized software for Indian and Japanese customers. Hardware makers will also have the freedom to build devices that can work with Alexa.

Active Edge feature - Start Google Assistant by squeezing sides of the phone (Hi HTC!), works even when the phone is in a case. Now playing feature - Music identified with machine learning. "Google Assistant works with over 1,000 smart home products from over 100 brands." Google Home compatible with find my phone with Android even when the device is silent (and iPhone, with a phone call). "An assistant can only be useful if it knows who you are." "Made by Google products represent the ultimate Google experience" Google Home can pick up voices in a noisy room, Google Wi-Fi picks up connections as people move devices through rooms, Pixel revolutionized end to end photo experience for users.

Amazon unveiled their new Echo speaker to compete for consumers' money and mindshare. SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is heading to India and it will get to Japan later in the year. But while it might pick up a slight accent on arrival, so far it's sticking to English to get around. Amazon announced Wednesday that it's opening up its Alexa Skills Kit (cleverly called ASK) for customers in India. It will also begin selling three Alexa-enabled devices in India: the Amazon Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot.

A revolution is taking place in the GPU software stack in the fields of analytics, machine learning and deep learning, driven by NVIDIA's hardware innovation, that provides 100x more processing cores and 20x greater memory bandwidth than CPUs. However, systems and platforms are unable to harness these disruptive performance gains because they remain isolated from each other. The GPU Open Analytics Initiative (GOAI) and its first project, the GPU Data Frame (GDF) was created to allow seamless passing of data between processes. At this meetup, we'll explain how we have implemented an end-to-end machine learning powered by GOAI. We will show how GDFs break down the silos to enable interactive data exploration, model training, and model scoring, that is lightning-fast by virtue of avoiding any serialization overhead.

Skilling the workforce has become important today. With changing times, the workforce needs to be updated with the relevant skills to perform the job better. Industries need to plan programmes to skill the workforce with modern technology, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and so on. On similar lines, the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT) has planned to formulate new courses to train people in technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. NIELIT is part of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

File photo: Chinese movie patrons wait in front of Hollywood star Keanu Reeves poster in the movie Matrix Reloaded showing at Paradise Warner Bros Cinema City in Shanghai July 18, 2003. Some people fear we humans are nothing more than pickled brains floating in a glass bowl as we're fed a false version of reality through a bundle of wires. Now a team of scientists at Oxford University has demolished the theory that we are all living in a computer simulation that's been masterminded by alien overlords. Science fiction fans and modern philosophers have long debated whether the world is actually the same as we percieve it to be. Following the popularity of 90s classic The Matrix, many have questioned whether the philosophical "Brain in a Vat" scenario may actually be our reality.

Software solution firm Finantix launched a collection of engines, tools and data structures to inject Artificial Intelligence into wealth management platforms. The technology firm claims its new service will bring tangible benefits by automating tasks, distilling intelligence, supporting decisions and enforcing compliance for wealth managers, private banks and even robo-advisers. The main areas initially addressed by Finantix AI Gears for Wealth (Finantix AI) are: lead generation, automated client profiling and know your client (KYC), portfolio and financial planning optimisation, suitability and cross border rule enforcement, next best action determination, news tagging and content personalisation. Finantix AI has been specifically designed to slot easily into any legacy or digital wealth management platform thanks to an application programming interface (API) oriented and configurable architecture. To support its roll out Finantix is organising a series of events in Singapore, Zurich and Tokyo to discuss how AI will affect wealth management and the benefits it can bring.

We constantly talk about next-gen manufacturing, Industrie 4.0, IIoT etc, but I think the underlying nervous system supporting all these is connectivity and convergence. Increased connectivity and computational power have converted hype to reality. Previously Cloud, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and analytics were like nebulous concepts at boardroom discussions; but now they are mature enough and ready to be fully integrated into the design, engineering, and operational environment. Digitalization is impacting every aspect of our lives because three forces are reinforcing one another: consumer pull; technology push; and economic benefits. This was the theme of the two-day NASSCOM 2017 edition of the Design & Engineering Summit for which ARC Advisory Group was invited.

Layered neural networks have greatly improved the performance of various applications including image processing, speech recognition, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. However, it is still difficult to discover or interpret knowledge from the inference provided by a layered neural network, since its internal representation has many nonlinear and complex parameters embedded in hierarchical layers. Therefore, it becomes important to establish a new methodology by which layered neural networks can be understood. In this paper, we propose a new method for extracting a global and simplified structure from a layered neural network. Based on network analysis, the proposed method detects communities or clusters of units with similar connection patterns. We show its effectiveness by applying it to three use cases. (1) Network decomposition: it can decompose a trained neural network into multiple small independent networks thus dividing the problem and reducing the computation time. (2) Training assessment: the appropriateness of a trained result with a given hyperparameter or randomly chosen initial parameters can be evaluated by using a modularity index. And (3) data analysis: in practical data it reveals the community structure in the input, hidden, and output layers, which serves as a clue for discovering knowledge from a trained neural network.