India should encourage research and innovation in establishing a legal infrastructure on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), says an Assocham-PwC study report titled'Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth.' The report highlighted the areas of application for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours such as Make in India, Skill India and other crop insurance schemes, tax fraud schemes, detecting subsidy leakage and defence and security strategy. "The Make in India initiative focussing on twin goals of strengthening the country's in-house innovation and production capabilities with added creation of employment opportunities may not end up creating as many jobs as it is poised to at this point in time," the report said. Also, information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, it noted.

AI has been one of the top funded technologies in the past 2 years with large investments coming from independent and corporate VCs. The proliferation of digital technologies has remained substantial over the past two decades. With'intelligence' being seen as the next evolution post digitisation and improvements in data acquisition and computing power, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more of a reality each day. AI proliferation is making every large company in the world sweat to arm itself for an AI powered race. IBM is offering a fully integrated ecosystem to independent developers as well as enterprises to build, scale, and manage AI capabilities.

Microsoft Pix Camera uses artificial intelligence to make your pictures of people better. It uses algorithms behind the scenes to analyze the 10 frames it snaps for every picture you take, looking for sharpness, exposure and even facial expressions to make sure you get the very best shot. It even takes good data from the pictures it doesn't use to enhance the photos it chooses. The app, launched last summer and just updated, now offers new filters that can help you make your photos look like real works of art. These artsy filters may sound a lot like what standalone app, Prisma, does, but Microsoft's implementation was developed by Microsoft's Asia research lab in collaboration with Skype.

Knowledge graph embedding aims at offering a numerical knowledge representation paradigm by transforming the entities and relations into continuous vector space. However, existing methods could not characterize the knowledge graph in a fine degree to make a precise link prediction. There are two reasons for this issue: being an ill-posed algebraic system and adopting an overstrict geometric form. As precise link prediction is critical for knowledge graph embedding, we propose a manifold-based embedding principle (ManifoldE) which could be treated as a well-posed algebraic system that expands point-wise modeling in current models to manifold-wise modeling. Extensive experiments show that the proposed models achieve substantial improvements against the state-of-the-art baselines, particularly for the precise prediction task, and yet maintain high efficiency. All of the related poster, slides, datasets and codes have been published in http://www.

Building neural networks to query a knowledge base (a table) with natural language is an emerging research topic in deep learning. An executor for table querying typically requires multiple steps of execution because queries may have complicated structures. In previous studies, researchers have developed either fully distributed executors or symbolic executors for table querying. A distributed executor can be trained in an end-to-end fashion, but is weak in terms of execution efficiency and explicit interpretability. A symbolic executor is efficient in execution, but is very difficult to train especially at initial stages. In this paper, we propose to couple distributed and symbolic execution for natural language queries, where the symbolic executor is pretrained with the distributed executor's intermediate execution results in a step-by-step fashion. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms both distributed and symbolic executors, exhibiting high accuracy, high learning efficiency, high execution efficiency, and high interpretability.

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) combines rule-based and statistical artificial intelligence methods, by learning a hypothesis comprising a set of rules given background knowledge and constraints for the search space. We focus on extending the XHAIL algorithm for ILP which is based on Answer Set Programming and we evaluate our extensions using the Natural Language Processing application of sentence chunking. With respect to processing natural language, ILP can cater for the constant change in how we use language on a daily basis. At the same time, ILP does not require huge amounts of training examples such as other statistical methods and produces interpretable results, that means a set of rules, which can be analysed and tweaked if necessary. As contributions we extend XHAIL with (i) a pruning mechanism within the hypothesis generalisation algorithm which enables learning from larger datasets, (ii) a better usage of modern solver technology using recently developed optimisation methods, and (iii) a time budget that permits the usage of suboptimal results. We evaluate these improvements on the task of sentence chunking using three datasets from a recent SemEval competition. Results show that our improvements allow for learning on bigger datasets with results that are of similar quality to state-of-the-art systems on the same task. Moreover, we compare the hypotheses obtained on datasets to gain insights on the structure of each dataset.

This shinyapp is a live shiny/R web application (hosted on shinyapps.io) The web-application visualizes simple dictionary/word-count based sentiment-analysis scores for tweets (during Mar 17th - April 4th 2014) on smartphones in India in a few different ways. The shiny application can be found up and running here.

Microsoft is rolling out an update to its AI-powered photo editing app, Microsoft Pix, that aims to give Prisma and others like it some new competition. While the app was originally designed to enhance your iPhone photos by tweaking things like color, exposure and other variables, the newly updated Microsoft Pix will now let you have a little more fun with your photos, too – this time, by turning them into art. Similar to Prisma, the new app introduces a feature called Pix Styles, which allows you to transform your photos into works of art, and use other effects. For example, one effect will make the picture look like it's on fire. These are not photo filters, to be clear – the styles actually transfer texture, pattern and tones to the photo, explains Microsoft.

Following the likes of Amiibo, Skylanders and the rest, Ubisoft's latest take on the physical toy/video-game hybrid, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, already feels like an exciting proposition -- even if we didn't quite get to play the title itself. We saw a hands-off presentation of the spaceship-based gameplay (customizable load-outs, pilot-based superpowers and weird alien threats), as well as how easily the add-on guns and mods appear in-game. We then also got to handle the physical toys themselves. All told, it's clear Ubisoft has done a good job. To do this, the company apparently poached toy makers and designers from across the industry -- Hasbro, to name just one example -- and the result is toys that feel solid, fun and, well, nice.

We knew Japanese messaging giant Line was working on an AI assistant called Clova, and that it would first inhabit a clever-looking smart speaker called the Wave. What we only just discovered, however, is that Clova's next physical avatars would include an unamused duck and a bear that always looks just a little disappointed. In case you mostly chat on other platforms, these characters are based on a slew of stickers Line users can hurl at each other inside the app. Line hasn't confirmed whether these Clova-powered speakers -- collectively known as the Champ series -- would embody their characters in different ways. Still, the laundry list of features Clova brings to the table is considerable, especially since Amazon's Alexa doesn't work in Japan yet.