Delhi: In one of the biggest exposes of 2016, it has been revealed that in order to bag tender for biometric facial recognition device, Cryptometrics, a company in Canada, gave kickbacks to officers of Air India. Biometric facial recognition device is used for recognition of faces of passengers. In an exclusive report, Zee Media Corp has learnt that on 24 February 2006, Air India had issued a Request for Proposal for the device and the tender for the same given by 20 companies including Canada's Cryptometrics. Later, it was revealed in order to get the tender, Cryptometrics paid kickbacks to Air India officials through a person named Nazir Karigar. His closeness with Air India officials can be ascertained from the fact that Nazir had the full copy of the tender with him on 28 December 2005 itself. Whereas Air India had issued the tender on 24 February 2006.

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and the University of Electro-Communications today announced the development of a high-speed algorithm that uses mathematical game theory as an artificial intelligence technology to aid in the development of security planning. This will work to solve city-scale road network security problems, such as where best to position checkpoints when trying to catch a criminal. For security measures at locations where people gather, it is often not possible to completely seal off all intrusion or escape routes with limited security resources, so it is necessary to effectively deploy security personnel and to minimize anticipated damage. The formulation of security plans has relied on the experience of experts and intuition, but in recent years there has been a focus on game theory, which mathematically describes both offence and defense, as a technology to support expert decision-making. However, it has been difficult to apply game theory to a city-scale security problem of catching criminals at checkpoints in real-world cities because the processing volume expands exponentially with the scale of the road network.

Abstract: First we cover the background and fundamentals to understand deep learning. No prior knowledge is required. Next, we discuss how understanding and preventing churn is important to both small and large businesses to maintain and grow revenue. Startups, especially those involved with web- and subscription-based services, should be attentive and analytical with their customer base. We will describe both unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods that address customer churn.

The data science automation specialist DataRobot Inc. is gaining traction in the big data market for its machine-learning application as new investors like Intel Capital fund its expanding operations. Boston-based DataRobot has so far raised more than 57 million in four equity investment rounds, including a 33 million funding round completed in February. Along with Intel Capital, Recruit Strategic Partners joined the startup's fourth funding round as new investors. The company's machine-learning platform runs either on top of Hadoop as a cloud application or running on-premises. The startup founded in 2012 by CEO Jerry Achin and CTO Thomas DeGodoy targets its platform at data scientists with varying skill levels. Along with speeding the deployment of more accurate predictive models, the company said it is attempting to address the critical shortage of qualified data scientists while "changing the speed and economics of predictive analytics."

WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) is expanding its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities by acquiring OPS Rules, a boutique analytics consulting company that specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. When the acquisition is completed, Accenture will add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop fresh and innovative analytics approaches for clients across many industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2012, OPS Rules has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Richardson, Texas. OPS Rules is led by David Simchi-Levi, a Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and renowned supply chain and operations analytics expert.

Subaru and IBM Japan have announced the two companies are exploring collaboration in the development of a data analytics system for test images from the advanced safety system including output from EyeSight. It uses cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the advanced driver assist system segment. Working together with IBM Japan, Subaru developed a system that integrates and comprehensively manages vast amounts of test image data. The system has been in operation starting this month. This will allow Subaru engineers to easily search for and analyze needed test images.

The legal case for using drone strikes outside of armed conflict needs "urgent clarification" from ministers, a cross-party parliamentary committee has said. The government insists it does not have a "targeted killing" policy, but the UK was clearly willing to use lethal force overseas for counter-terrorism, the Joint Committee on Human Rights said. It follows the killing of a UK citizen in Syria last year by an RAF drone. The government says it takes "lawful action" over direct threats to the UK. Reyaad Khan, a British member of the so-called Islamic State group, was killed by an RAF drone in Syria last August.

In the intellectual property plan, the government said it will consider a new registration system to protect rights for AI-created works. The system's coverage would be limited to creations with certain levels of marketability. The plan also called for the establishment of a group of municipal, school and company representatives to support intellectual property education. "We will work to enable everyone to create and use intellectual property," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a meeting of the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters.

Close on the heels of Amazon's Alexa-powered devices, which can answer health-related questions, Lybrate has empowered its Facebook Messenger chatbot to answer health queries. Users of Lybrate in India will be able to get health advice and tips from the online platform's chatbot. "It is exciting to be India's first healthcare company to be on Messenger Platform and be able to provide smooth doctor access to people and enable them to consume health information that is shared by doctors who have amassed a wealth of medical knowledge over so many years. It is one more step towards letting people in the country be more serious about their health," noted Saurabh Arora, Lybrate's CEO and Founder. Lybrate is essentially an online-based doctor consultation platform that has now protracted its offerings to the popular messaging service from Facebook.

Analyzing huge amounts of spatial data plays an important role in many emerging analysis and decision-making domains such as healthcare, urban planning, agriculture and so on. For extracting meaningful knowledge from geographical data, the relationships between spatial data objects need to be analyzed. An important class of such relationships are topological relations like the connectedness or overlap between regions. While real-world geographical regions such as lakes or forests do not have exact boundaries and are fuzzy, most of the existing analysis methods neglect this inherent feature of topological relations. In this paper, we propose a method for handling the topological relations in spatial databases based on fuzzy region connection calculus (RCC). The proposed method is implemented in PostGIS spatial database and evaluated in analyzing the relationship of diseases as an important application domain. We also used our fuzzy RCC implementation for fuzzification of the skyline operator in spatial databases. The results of the evaluation show that our method provides a more realistic view of spatial relationships and gives more flexibility to the data analyst to extract meaningful and accurate results in comparison with the existing methods.