Confident about continuing growth opportunities for the Indian job market, United States-based consultancy giant Korn Ferry Hay Group feels the outsourcing story is no more about cheap labour and the key drivers going forward will be value addition and technology. "There would continue to be opportunities for the Indian job market for sure. But substitution of certain jobs by technology would mean that the role of labour and labour arbitrage is not that important. "So I think the technology solutions to issues has an impact. I think technology is going to play a role in what those opportunities is going to be in the future," Korn Ferry Hay Group CEO Stephen D. Kaye told PTI in an interview. Kaye, who heads one of the world's largest management consultancies and was on a visit to India, said outsourcing was a response to a particular situation where companies were looking for cheap labour but the situation is now changing with the advent of technology and artificial intelligence. Many global leaders, including United States President Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner in the presidential race, have voiced concerns about outsourcing in their bid to save local jobs. This has led to fears about loss of business for back-office service providers from India. Experts believe advances in the field of automation and robotics are expected to radically change the job market and to survive this period, employees are required to re-skill to remain relevant in the job market. With the increasing levels of sophistication and artificial intelligence, I don't think it is cheaper labour that is going to be the driver," Kaye said.

Receiver algorithms which combine belief propagation (BP) with the mean field (MF) approximation are well-suited for inference of both continuous and discrete random variables. In wireless scenarios involving detection of multiple signals, the standard construction of the combined BP-MF framework includes the equalization or multi-user detection functions within the MF subgraph. In this paper, we show that the MF approximation is not particularly effective for multi-signal detection. We develop a new factor graph construction for application of the BP-MF framework to problems involving the detection of multiple signals. We then develop a low-complexity variant to the proposed construction in which Gaussian BP is applied to the equalization factors. In this case, the factor graph of the joint probability distribution is divided into three subgraphs: (i) a MF subgraph comprised of the observation factors and channel estimation, (ii) a Gaussian BP subgraph which is applied to multi-signal detection, and (iii) a discrete BP subgraph which is applied to demodulation and decoding. Expectation propagation is used to approximate discrete distributions with a Gaussian distribution and links the discrete BP and Gaussian BP subgraphs. The result is a probabilistic receiver architecture with strong theoretical justification which can be applied to multi-signal detection.

Ratnesh Pandey, Co-Founder, Healthkhoj.com worked in multi cultural International business environments in Europe and US. He has executed complex engagements with globally distributed teams and vendors. He possesses domain knowledge on B2B IT marketing, Lead progression, Campaigns, Branding and Promotions. Healthkhoj is changing the way healthcare services are delivered and consumed. We are doing this by bringing different service providers in the patient care cycle together, which means that the people will be able to access everything they need through healthkhoj.

Chinese workers have seen the future, and it involves artificial intelligence, robots, and other forms of automation replacing them, at least for repetitive tasks. That's how workers responded to interviews about the future of work (pdf) conducted in 13 countries by the ADP Research Institute, part of the payroll systems company ADP. In contrast to China, a minority of workers in Germany think machines will take over repetitive tasks in the future. Workers in Chile, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and France among other countries agree. But American workers and those in India are inclined to see things the Chinese way; nearly two-thirds of those polled said they thought the machines were coming for repetitive work.

Many would jokingly describe their smartphone as a fifth limb, but developments in wearable technology are hinting that one day our devices will actually be part of us. In some cases, they already are. Cyborgs are organisms with enhanced abilities thanks to the integration of an artificial component or technology, and many of us already fall under this category. We tend to associate the word cyborg with science fiction representations of super humans like Robocop or Roy Batty from the film Blade Runner, but our present day cyborgs tend to be those with health complications. Those suffering from irregular heartbeats rely on cardiac pacemakers and implantable defibrillators to maintain consistent heart function. Most of know at least one person with more common augmentations, like hearing aids or contact lenses -- two of our most popular biological enhancements.

In the age of ultra-high-frequency trading, financial institutions are turning to artificial intelligence to improve their stock trading performance and boost profit. One such company is Japan's leading brokerage house Nomura Securities. The company has been pursuing one goal: to simulate the insights of experienced stock traders with the help of computers. After years of research, Nomura is set to introduce a new stock trading system for institutional investors in May. The new system stores vast amounts of price and trading data in its computer.

Robot'Jia Jia' appears to represent a leap by engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) towards the'Replicant' androids witnessed in the dystopian thriller Blade Runner. The AI droid, designed in the shape of a woman, has been created with the ability to interact with humans through audible and physical expression. The robot's speech is synced with its lips, and it can blink and move its eyes. Even minute details such as eyelashes have been included by the developers, making Jia Jia difficult to pick out from a crowd of humans. China's first interactive robot, "Jia Jia", unveiled at the University of Science & Technology, Hebei.

The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance.

Instead, what captured viewers' attention most was Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence program, which made its global debut on the program to predict the series finalists and winner. Named "Ai," the system got every one of its algorithm-induced guesses right. I Am Singer, broadcast by Hunan TV, has been one of China's top-rated shows since its debut in 2013. During the show's four-hour season finale on Friday, Alibaba's Ai analyzed various factors in real time, such as the popularity of the songs contestants performed, their pitch and energy onstage, lyrical content and audience feedback. Meanwhile, the show's in-house audience of 500, whose vote determined the real winner, deliberated separately.

The bad news is, Japan is beset by seemingly insoluble problems. The good news is the word "seemingly." No nation whose rise to economic superpowerdom began a bare decade after being bombed to rubble in history's most destructive war will ever find anything truly "insoluble." Give it 34 years, says Clyde Prestowitz. His name rings bells in Japan -- alarm bells mostly, because Prestowitz, an American labor economist who served in the 1980s as economic adviser to the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, earned notoriety here as a prime "Japan basher."