Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the IT services company, said it will give a Rs 24-crore grant over the next three years to Delhi-based Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) to set up a research centre for artificial intelligence (AI). For Infosys, which carries out its Corporate Social Responsibility through the foundation, supporting educational institutions has been a fundamental part of its CSR strategy. The grant comes at a time when Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, who has a doctorate degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford University, has been trying to increasingly build out capabilities around the strategic focal points of automation and artificial intelligence in the company. The proposed Infosys Center for Artificial Intelligence will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of AI and focus on areas such as robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics. The research will draw on real-time data to develop a deeper understanding of AI for social benefits, and the application of AI in education and related areas, said the release.

DeepMind was a relatively unknown artificial intelligence (AI) startup in London up until 2014, when it was bought by Google for around 400 million. Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy.

Whirring engines, hairpin turns and the occasional crash -- but today, instead of top performance cars with millions of dollars of research behind them, it's tiny drones crossing the finish line. "There's really nothing like it," said Tom Buckley, who founded the Boston Multi Rotor Club. "You're in the driver's seat, you are the pilot, you're going around these courses at very fast speeds." Today, Buckley and a couple dozen others will fire up their drones, connect their remote controllers and zoom around a track as fast as they can at BMRC's latest race. The races are often scored based on how many laps each drone can fly in two minutes.

This weekend, the world's greatest Go player beat Google's AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Google's DeepMind unit. Lee Se-Dol, the 33-year-old South Korean has been pitted against a machine in a game that is arguably the most technically challenging thing to take place on a board of squares. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! AlphaGo had already won three of the five games in the 1 million series, making Se-Dol's victory somewhat hollow. Machines have already beaten us mere mortals at chess – way back in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue dispatched Garry Kasparov.

When we were born, the idea of such a small, powerful computer was a sci-fi dream, and now these smart-devices are everywhere, transforming personal health, relationships and business transactions so completely that life without these seems impossible. We're entering a new era of technology that's bound to reshape the lives of our children predominantly. Yes, this is the era of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked subjects these days, and recent advances in technology have made AI even closer to reality than most of us can imagine. In Simplest terms AI is: "The capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior" Artificial intelligence is a program that does a task and its performance gets better every time it does that task.

Google recently put up its Boston Dynamics robotics unit up for sale, but that doesn't mean that the company is getting out of the automaton business. A new bipedal robot from Google's Schaft robotics was shown off on Friday at the New Economic Summit conference in Tokyo, Japan on Friday. The small robot is shown walking in a number of situations that can be challenging even for humans, including a sandy beach, a rocky terrain, snow, and a steep, narrow staircase. At one point during the demonstration video (top of page), we even see how the robot handles random, rolling obstacles thrown under its "feet." Spoiler: It handles the surprise instability better than many humans might.

NEW DELHI: Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine intelligence has always been a little scary. We picture evil robots controlling the world and making human beings obsolete or, even worse, using us as energy sources as in the Matrix. The defeat by Google's DeepMind – a computer program – of the world champion in Go, an ancient Chinese board game, has reinforced the apocalyptic vision of machines taking over the world in the popular media. Not that this vision is totally wrong. The more we transfer human skills to the machine, the more obsolescence in the work force.

By 2020, a quarter of Europeans will be over 60. In their silver age, many would like to stay in their homes and will require care from family or social workers. Unfortunately, the number of caregivers is diminishing year-after-year due to shifting demographics and an increase in working families. This leads to a'care deficit' that poses a major challenge to most European societies. And today's social workers are often hard pressed, wishing they had more time to connect with the people they care for, rather than the minuted dance of tasks that need to be done.

In just a few years, it will provide customer service in airports, hospitals, train stations and other facilities, speaking four languages so that it can even serve the masses of foreign tourists streaming into Japan. It is Hitachi's Emiew3 -- a smaller, faster and more agile competitor unveiled Friday. The new robot marks the third generation, and first commercially viable member, of a series that began with an experimental model in 2005. The company seeks to put it on the market in 2018. In a demonstration Friday, an Emiew3 prototype surveyed its surroundings and approached an actress playing a lost foreigner.

Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise Immune System technology, presented a radical vision of cyber defense at InfoSec World 2016, Orlando, yesterday, where'immune system'-inspired technology can automatically find and respond to evolving cyber-threats. IT Security Architect at Steelcase, Stuart Berman, joined Sean O'Connor, Director at Darktrace on the conference stage as a guest speaker, to discuss how enterprises can tackle the cyber security challenges of tomorrow. As one of the world's leading manufacturers of corporate office environments, Steelcase is known for embracing new technology and innovation, and was quick to recognize the importance of adopting new models of security. Speaking at the InfoSec World Conference in Florida yesterday, Stuart Berman, who has over 20 years' experience in information security, shared his views on the future of cyber defense. "Math and machine learning are an important part of advanced threat defense, in the context of today's fast-moving, distributed work environments," Berman commented.