This is a group for anyone interested in understanding of the mechanisms underlying thoughts and intelligent behavior and their emulation in machines. All skill levels are welcome. SLAAI is a national organization established in 2005 with the aim of developing the field of AI in Sri Lanka. Its membership consists of leading practitioners of AI in the country including academics, industry practitioners, enthusiasts and students. Its members have done yeoman service for the popularization of AI They have organized workshops and awareness creation events not only in Colombo but in many other provinces as well. This Meetup is only one of the many events that SLAAI organizes in pursuance of its mandate of developing and popularizing AI as a field in Sri Lanka.

First, Symantec revealed that hackers--probably based in Russia, although the security firm didn't go so far as to name names--had hacked more than 20 power companies in North America and Europe, and in a handful of cases, had direct access to their control systems. And then Equifax confessed it had been the target of a breach that stole 143 million Americans' data, one of the worst data spills ever, and one that raises questions about data centralization, particularly for Social Security Numbers. Megabreaches aside, Facebook admitted that a Russian troll farm had spent $100,000 on influence ads during last year's election. Google patched a flaw in Android that would allow a nasty "toast overlay" attack to take control of devices. WIRED dug into the long-running series of scams and theft plaguing new currencies in the cryptocoin economy.

As the TechSparks countdown begins, we list the top Bengaluru startups that have grabbed the spotlight due to the work they do and the growth they are projecting. Bengaluru has always been referred to as India's Silicon Valley. This is not just in terms of the number of startups that have mushroomed in the city, but also keeping in mind the funding pumped into the Bengaluru startup ecosystem. According to YourStory data, between 2016 and 2017 (YTD), the total amount of funding raised by Bengaluru startups was a whopping $6.6 billion. As many as 460 startups have made Bengaluru their home in the past two years, be it e-commerce giant Flipkart, cab aggregator Ola or Practo, one of the top funded healthcare startups in India.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise our lives, drive our cars, diagnose our health problems, and lead us into a new future where thinking machines do things that we're yet to imagine. Even billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who admits he has access to some of the most cutting-edge AI, said recently that without some regulation "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization". So what is the future of AI? Michael Milford and Peter Stratton are both heavily involved in AI research and they have different views on how it will impact on our lives in the future. How widespread is artificial intelligence today? Answering this question depends on what you consider to be "artificial intelligence".

According to the new market research report "Automotive Artificial Intelligence Market by Offering (Hardware, Software), Technology (Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Context Awareness and Natural Language Processing), Process, Application and Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the automotive artificial intelligence (AI) market report, the market is expected to be valued at USD 782.9 Million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD 10,573.3 Browse 66 Market Data Tables and 66 Figures spread through 203 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Automotive Artificial Intelligence Market - Global Forecast to 2025" The emergence of autonomous vehicle and industry-wide standards such as the adaptive cruise control (ACC), blind spot alert, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) would trigger the growth of the automotive AI market. The growing demand for convenience and safety also presents an opportunity for OEMs to develop new and innovative artificial intelligence systems that would attract customers. Software holds a major share of the overall AI market in the automotive industry because of the various developments of AI software and related development kits. In the recent years, major developments have occurred in AI software solutions, platforms, and related software development kits.

In the last one year, many of the global customers of connectivity and authentication provider, LogMeIn often enquired about automation solutions to improve personalization for customer service interactions. William Wagner, CEO, LogMeIn decided to act upon it. They acquired Israel based Nanorep which creates chat bots and AI tools for customers. And India, Wagner believes is going to be one of their major markets for AI based solution." We have 500 customers in India like Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and with Nanorep, India will be one of our biggest markets."

Given no one really understands the enormity of the strides in artificial intelligence/tech, the doomsday predictions of what it will do for jobs could either be quite correct, or totally wrong. And while the progress is truly impressive, it is not clear if this is good enough to destroy the traditional jobs that humans do, nor is it clear what sectors tech will take over, or in what order. For now, what is clear, however, is that countries like India, so far from the productivity frontier, stand to benefit a lot more from tech--not only can this help contribute to dramatically increasing productivity, it can help overcome critical shortages in areas like healthcare and education. An article in Wired that discusses an "intelligent" first-aid kit developed by Mobilize Rescue Systems gives a hint as to how this could pan out. The emergency kit, that comes equipped with the usual suspects like gauze, bandages, ointments, etc, even has tourniquets, chest seals and clotting agents--the real game-changer, though, is the iPad embedded in its lid.

For many Russian students, the academic year started last Friday with tips on planetary domination from President Vladimir Putin. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind," he said, via live video beamed to 16,000 selected schools. "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Putin's advice is the latest sign of an intensifying race among Russia, China, and the US to accumulate military power based on artificial intelligence. All three countries have proclaimed intelligent machines as vital to the future of their national security.

This paper aims to address two issues existing in the current speech enhancement methods: 1) the difficulty of phase estimations; 2) a single objective function cannot consider multiple metrics simultaneously. To solve the first problem, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) model for complex spectrogram enhancement, namely estimating clean real and imaginary (RI) spectrograms from noisy ones. The reconstructed RI spectrograms are directly used to synthesize enhanced speech waveforms. In addition, since log-power spectrogram (LPS) can be represented as a function of RI spectrograms, its reconstruction is also considered as another target. Thus a unified objective function, which combines these two targets (reconstruction of RI spectrograms and LPS), is equivalent to simultaneously optimizing two commonly used objective metrics: segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SSNR) and logspectral distortion (LSD). Therefore, the learning process is called multi-metrics learning (MML). Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed CNN with RI spectrograms and MML in terms of improved standardized evaluation metrics on a speech enhancement task.