BENGALURU: Customer engagement plays an important part in traditional retail outlets which seems to be missing among the plethora of e-commerce portals. To resolve this, a bunch of young entrepreneurs have come up with an Artificial Intelligence-driven sales chatbot which engages customers with a human touch. And the good news is that it's live and will provide round-the-clock hands-on solutions and technical support. Navneet Gupta, Chief Technical Officer of Racetrack.ai We understand that customer engagement is of utmost priority for any business and we have designed it to not only intelligently engage with the customer but also make the conversations fruitful with every chat." He points out that the AI-driven platform can not only convert a simple query to a customer but can also attain a loyal customer for life by a unique customer engagement."

This is the first of a multi-part series explaining the fundamentals of deep learning by long-time tech journalist Michael Copeland. Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.

Tesla removed the word "autopilot" and a Chinese term for "self-driving" from its China website after a driver in Beijing who crashed in "autopilot" mode complained that the car maker overplayed the function's capability and misled buyers. The Tesla driver crashed earlier this month while on a Beijing commuter highway after the car failed to avoid a vehicle parked on the left side, partially in the roadway, damaging both cars but causing no injuries. It was the first known such crash in China, though it follows a fatal accident in Florida earlier this year that put pressure on the auto executives and regulators to tighten rules for automated driving. "At Tesla we are continuously making improvements, including to translations," a Tesla spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to Reuters. "We've been in the process of addressing any discrepancies across languages for many weeks. Timing had nothing to do with current events or articles."

Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket on a floating drone ship at sea on Sunday morning. The company's eighth launch this year was part of its ongoing effort to re-use costly rocket parts instead of discarding them into the ocean. It is the fourth time SpaceX has vertically landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform at sea. The company has also landed another rocket safely on land. The rocket launched under a dark night sky from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Microsoft India today announced the winners of the 24 hour hackathon, held as part of the first Machine Learning & Data Sciences (ML&DS) Conference. Team Builders won the grand prize, while Eavesdroppers and NHacks emerged as the first and second runners up respectively by creating applications to address challenges in the field of agriculture, call center management and human behavior. The hackathon invited students and early-stage developers to work in teams to build intelligent, working applications with the help of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft R Services. The top three teams won cash prizes worth INR 50,000, INR 40,000 and INR 30,000 for developing solutions fulfilling parameters on design, innovation, foreseeable impact and marketability. In addition to the cash awards, the student participants from the winning teams will also be offered interviews for internships and full time positions at Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd. "Microsoft has the vision, strategy and talent to democratize data and machine learning and use it to realize our mission to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more. The hackathon was designed to spark curiosity among diverse talent to develop applications using our services and demonstrate the versatility and potential of using the platform. It has also shown us how Microsoft's APIs could help scale ideas with global relevance in a very short time," said Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd.

Global software major Microsoft on Monday invited developers to use its machine learning and data platforms for building digital products and solutions to transform businesses and drive inclusive growth. "Our ambition is to democratise access to new technologies so that software developers can build, innovate and transform the world with them," said Microsoft data group Vice President Joseph Sirosh at a conference on machine learning and data sciences in India. Noting that cloud-based services for machine learning and big data, coupled with the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to revolutionise every aspect of life, including sports, healthcare, education and even government, he said the company's unique platforms such as the Cortana Intelligence suite were helping customers to harness the power of artificial intelligence. The two-day conference is aimed at exploring the possibilities with big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and open source technologies in enabling platforms, intelligent apps, services and experiences to accelerate economic growth, empower people and drive real impact. Demonstrating the power of data analytics, Microsoft unveiled an Azure machine learning-based approach for calculating target scores in weather-interrupted T-20 cricket matches.

For more on this, we are joined in the studio by CCTV's Jin Yingqiao. Q1, Tell us more about some of the new trends in the industry in China. A1, It seems like everyone is betting on AI, or Artificial Intelligence, for the future. Be it Google, Facebook, IBM, Amazon or Apple racing against each other globally. And in China, tech giants the BAT, or Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, and Huawei, and home appliance makers Midea and Changhong all have weighed in.

The Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit has opened in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Our reporter Ge Yunfei went to China's southern technology center to find out more about the potential of the budding industry. The success of Alpha Go in defeating the human mind has aroused the world of artificial intelligence. But at the Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit in Shenzhen, it's limitations have been projected. Michael Wooldrige -- who is leading a cooperation initiative between Oxford University and Google on artificial intelligence -- said although Alpha Go is unique in its own right, it's not THAT smart.

Shopping has never been the same experience from person to person, and merchants are constantly searching for a service that creates the ultimate personalized experience. While a few companies are using some machine learning to tailor things for consumers, NeoWize believes there's a better solution. It thinks that its use of artificial intelligence can offer better customization in real time. The company has launched and is offering its services to ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento. Founded by Omer Nevo, Yoav Cafri, and Ronen Ness, this Y Combinator-backed startup leverages active machine learning, a process that looks at a person's journey on a site or app and continuously analyzes their behavior -- did they scroll past a particular product?

ISLAMABAD – The U.S. drone strike that killed the Islamic State group's commander for Afghanistan and Pakistan was the latest blow to the Middle East-led movement's ambitions to expand into a region where the long-established Taliban remain the dominant Islamist force. The Islamic State group has enticed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jihadi fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to switch loyalty and has held a small swath of territory in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, where leader Hafiz Saeed Khan was killed on July 26 by a U.S. drone, Washington confirmed late Friday. But outside that pocket of territory, security officials and analysts say that the group remains -- for now -- more of a "brand name" than a cohesive militant force in much of the region. "Groups around the world want to jump on that bandwagon and cash in on their popularity and the fear they command," said a Pakistani police official based in Islamabad, on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media. Anxiety over the Islamic State group -- also known as ISIS or "Daesh" -- in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been building since the al-Qaida breakaway movement seized portions of territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014 and began promoting itself worldwide.