HYDERABAD: To use artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of eyecare, Microsoft India, in collaboration with L V Prasad Eye Institute launched Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), on Monday. This is a consortium of different institutions with similar goals who have joined hands to apply artificial intelligence to help eliminate avoidable blindness and scale delivery of eyecare services across the globe. The partner organizations, which include Bascom Palmer from University of Miami, Flaum Eye Institute from University of Rochester, Federal University of Sao Paulo and Brien Holden Vision Institute, will collectively work on diverse datasets of patients across geographies to come up with machine learning predictive models for vision impairment and eye disease. Microsoft will deploy its cloud platform technology Cortana Intelligence Suite for advanced analytics and to build intelligence models on eyecare. "MINE, a global collaboration, reinforces Microsoft's belief in the combined power of data, cloud and advanced analytics to drive public good," said Anil Bhansali, managing director of Microsoft India (R&D).

Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA), a Chilean government agency within the civil aeronautics directorate (the DGAC, roughly equivalent to the United States' Federal Aviation Administration) released a video taken by a Navy helicopter of a mysterious craft in 2014. The remarkable footage was captured by two naval officers on a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera, typically used in covert, aerial surveillance. If you've seen Predator drone footage, you've seen these cameras in action. Captured west of Santiago at an altitude of approximately 4,500 feet (far lower than commercial airliners), the Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon (UAP, the new preferred term for UFOs) was first observed with the naked eye from an estimated distance of 35 to 40 miles. The helicopter crew -- a Navy captain and camera technician -- captured 10 minutes of some of the most baffling and well-sourced video ever taken of a UFO.

Barbed wire surrounds the site of a cancelled Ford auto manufacturing plant, one day after the U.S. auto company announced the project was called off, in Villa de Reyes, outside San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. The perception in this region was largely that President-elect Donald Trump, who had promised for months to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. while at the same time disparaging Mexicans, had made good before even settling into the White House. Barbed wire surrounds the site of a cancelled Ford auto manufacturing plant, one day after the U.S. auto company announced the project was called off, in Villa de Reyes, outside San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. The perception in this region was largely that President-elect Donald Trump, who had promised for months to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. while at the same time disparaging Mexicans, had made good before even settling into the White House. Alfredo Martinez, left, a 22-year-old robot technician at General Motors, and Angel Rodriguez, 19, who had hoped to find work at the now-cancelled Ford plant, get their hair cut at the barbershop of Omar Rojas, right, in Villa de Reyes, outside San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017.

WASHINGTON – Ford scuttled a plan to build a new factory in Mexico Tuesday following criticism from Donald Trump, and just hours after the president-elect attacked General Motors for importing Mexican-made cars into the US. Following months of criticism from Trump for its investments in Mexico, Ford said it was spiking a plan to build a new $1.6 billion plant in San Luis Potosi, and would instead invest $700 million over the next four years to expand its Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Michigan to build electric and self-driving vehicles. Ford chief executive Mark Fields said the second-biggest U.S. automaker was hopeful Trump's policies will boost the U.S. manufacturing environment. "It's literally a vote of confidence around some of the pro-growth policies that he has been outlining and that's why we're making this decision to invest here in the U.S. and our plant here in Michigan," Fields told CNN. Earlier, GM became the latest multinational to end up in Trump's line of fire -- via Twitter as usual -- with the president-elect threatening to impose a tariff on GM's imports of a small number of Mexican-made Chevy Cruze cars to the U.S. Trump took to Twitter again to crow about the Ford reversal.

Ford is building 13 new electric cars, including groundbreaking models like an F-150 Hybrid pick-up, a 300-mile electric SUV and a hybrid Mustang. Seven of the new models will be released by 2020, the company announced on Tuesday. Ford is currently investing $700 million toward creating new eco-friendly cars like two electrified police vehicles. It's all part of a larger $4.5 billion effort to produce more EV models in the next couple years. But the automaker is making some other big changes, too. SEE ALSO: Ford's new self-driving Fusion looks like a actual car During a press conference on Tuesday, Ford's chief executive, Mark Fields, said the company is cancelling plans for a new $1.6 billion plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico and adding 700 jobs to its assembly plant in Flat Rock, Michigan.

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

The $\mathcal{G}_I^0$ distribution is able to characterize different regions in monopolarized SAR imagery. It is indexed by three parameters: the number of looks (which can be estimated in the whole image), a scale parameter and a texture parameter. This paper presents a new proposal for feature extraction and region discrimination in SAR imagery, using the geodesic distance as a measure of dissimilarity between $\mathcal{G}_I^0$ models. We derive geodesic distances between models that describe several practical situations, assuming the number of looks known, for same and different texture and for same and different scale. We then apply this new tool to the problems of (i)~identifying edges between regions with different texture, and (ii)~quantify the dissimilarity between pairs of samples in actual SAR data. We analyze the advantages of using the geodesic distance when compared to stochastic distances.

Historically, more than half of the sales through eBay Inc.'s online auction site are made overseas. There was a problem, though: Users on the site saw only listings posted in their preferred language. People could change their settings and browse the site in different languages, one at a time. But they had little visibility into products and goods listed in languages other than the selected one. With different sellers posting the same items in a variety of languages, this meant that individual users were only seeing a segment of all the listings for a given product.

I wrote this article at Alexandria (VA) during the first meeting on artificial intelligence in medical imaging, C-MIMI (Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging), organized by SIIM (Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine). Almost 200 participants attended 16 presentations of scientific papers, classes and lectures. The abstract presenters didn't just attend to showcase the results of their research, but also for the variety of topics covered. From algorithms for reading bone age to the prediction of deletion of the chromosomal arm 1p / 19q in low-grade gliomas, it is difficult to find an area in radiology in which the techniques of machine learning cannot be applied. The idea of using computers for evaluating medical images is not new.