A new signal has been found deep in space that could come from aliens. The community of astronomers and scientists who scan the skies with telescopes in an attempt to find extraterrestrial life is abuzz with excitement over a "strong signal" detected deep in space that could come from an alien civilisation. But some scientists have cautioned people not to get quite so excited – at least yet. The evidence remains preliminary and more work will need to be done to establish whether it is not just a mistake, let alone wheat it's actually a message from aliens. The message appeared to have come from a nearby star, HD164595, in the constellation Hercules.

The world is not moving towards a dystopian future just as yet, but one can't deny the effect innovations in the robotics field will have on human life, especially when it comes to a waning workforce as a result of increased use of automation technologies. Experts have already started sounding the warning bells. As per a report published by advisory analyst firm HfS Research in July, the true impact of the emergence of intelligent automation will be felt on the global industry of 15 million IT services and BPO workers, which will see about 1.4 million job losses--a net decrease of 9%--by 2021. In India, the services industry workforce is expected to shrink by 4.8 lakh by 2021, a decline of 14%--HfS Research estimates that the IT services and BPO industry employs about 3.5 million people in the country. Last year, technology research firm Gartner predicted that one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025.

KYOTO – Shimadzu Corp. launched on Monday a near-infrared camera system to help diagnose metastatic breast cancer, making a foray into the Japanese medical camera market. Lightvision, the new product, allows surgeons to identify easily the positions of lymph nodes to be removed for diagnosis, by creating a real-time visualization that makes lymph nodes appear to glow blue or green following the injection of a special medical agent. With the system, which has 10-times zoom and auto-focus functions, surgeons will be able to perform operations while confirming the images on the monitor, the precision equipment maker said. In the future, Shimadzu hopes to use the technique to develop products for angiography.

Facebook today named the recipients of 22 servers that Facebook designed specifically for artificial intelligence (A.I.) research. This comes after Facebook's introduction of the giveaway program for academic researchers back in February. University departments in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom are getting the machines, the designs of which Facebook open-sourced in December. The servers can support as many as eight graphics processing units (GPUs), which are often used to train artificial neural networks (ANNs) with lots of data. After being trained, the ANNs can make inferences on new data.

Consumer adoption of artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants will increase, but some brands don't see the capabilities fully replacing humans. The number of active users of virtual assistants will grow to 2 billion consumers in 2021, up from 390 million last year, according to new research from Tractica. Global revenue generated by virtual assistants will grow to 16 billion by 2021, up from 2 billion last year. The majority (75%) of revenues will come from the consumer side of the market, according to Tractica. The Asia Pacific region will lead the market in revenue and multiply in value by 10 times to account for more than 5 billion by 2021. "The consumer and enterprise use cases for virtual digital assistants are proliferating rapidly thanks to accelerated innovation and scalability of underlying technologies, such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence," Mark Beccue, principal analyst at Tractica, said in a statement.

New Delhi: While artificial intelligence is making waves globally, Cognitive Business Intelligence (BI) is the next stage of machine learning to design and analyse unstructured data, video, images and human language, say experts. According to them, we are generating data but is this data being analysed to create insights which could help in running businesses more effectively is the real concern for businesses. "This potential can be leveraged using Business Intelligence. Using BI, we can understand what really the data means," said Nikhilesh Tiwari, Co-Founder, Helical Insight, the world's first open source Business Intelligence (BI) framework. At the moment, less than 0.5 per cent of all data is ever analysed and used globally.

A US software firm which chose Singapore for the world's first public trial of driverless taxis hopes to be operating in 10 Asian and US cities by 2020, an executive said Monday. Doug Parker, nuTonomy's chief operating officer, said the firm is eyeing tests by early next year in three other Asian countries which he declined to name. He said an announcement of the test venues would be made within the next month or so. The company last week kicked off the world's first driverless taxi service in a limited trial for invited people in a Singapore research campus. Parker, 41, said nuTonomy was also considering trials in the Middle East, the United States and Britain.

NEW DELHI: While artificial intelligence is making waves globally, Cognitive Business Intelligence (BI) is the next stage of machine learning to design and analyse unstructured data, video, images and human language, say experts. According to them, we are generating data but is this data being analysed to create insights which could help in running businesses more effectively is the real concern for businesses. "This potential can be leveraged using Business Intelligence. Using BI, we can understand what really the data means," said Nikhilesh Tiwari, Co-Founder, Helical Insight, the world's first open source Business Intelligence (BI) framework. At the moment, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analysed and used globally.

An Indian bank is planning to get a robot to greet its walk-in customers. Call it giving your service, um, a robotic touch. The robot, which is being piloted by India's second largest private bank by assets, HDFC Bank, will assist customers with common tasks like withdrawing or transferring money or just finding the relevant department to get their task done. The robot is reportedly a part of the bank's "Project AI" program. The unnamed humanoid will come equipped with a touchscreen display which customers could use to input their query.

In an effort to deepen and advance its knowledge in artificial intelligence, Denso has entered into a technical advisory contract with one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Dr Takeo Kanade. Through this contract, Denso is looking to advance its artificial intelligence technology and expand its engineering expertise in the areas of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous drive, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Dr Kanade, a UA and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Robotics and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, will provide technical guidance to Denso engineers on image recognition and machine learning, and will also speak at lectures and seminars organized by Denso for a variety of purposes, such as recruiting, relationship building, and so on. These activities will be held mostly in Japan. Dr Kanade and Denso have worked together from 2002-2009 on a joint research of image recognition technology.