London, March 15: Sixty-eight per cent of organisations use artificial intelligence (AI) for IT functions, but 70 per cent believe AIs greatest impact by 2020 will be in marketing, customer service, finance and HR, a new study said on Wednesday. According to global IT consulting firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), organisations with the greatest financial improvements from AI investments expect three times as many new AI-related roles by 2020 as compared to companies with smallest improvements. "Given the increasing digital disruption across every industry and the public sector, AI should become a key and integrated component of an organisation's strategy," said K Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of TCS, in a statement. Eighty-four per cent of companies see the use of AI as "essential" to competitiveness, with a further 50 per cent seeing the technology as "transformative". Financial investments in AI are set to rise, as seven per cent of companies each earmarked at least $250 million toward AI in 2016 and two per cent already plan to invest more than $1 billion by 2020, likely looking to gain a competitive advantage as early adopters, the findings showed.

LONDON MUMBAI, March 15, 2017: Tata Consultancy Services (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, today unveiled its Global Trend Study titled, "Getting Smarter by the Day: How AI is Elevating the Performance of Global Companies." Focused on the current and future impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the study polled 835 executives across 13 global industry sectors in four regions of the world, finding that 84% of companies see the use of AI as "essential" to competitiveness, with a further 50% seeing the technology as "transformative." Exploring the views and actions of decision makers from global companies with average revenues of $20 billion, the study revealed AI is spreading across almost all areas of a company. The biggest adopters of AI today are, not surprisingly, IT departments, with two-thirds (67%) of survey respondents using AI to detect security intrusions, user issues and deliver automation. However, by 2020, almost a third (32%) of companies believe AI's greatest impact will be in sales, marketing or customer service, while one in five (20%) see AI's impact being largest in non-customer facing corporate functions, including finance, strategic planning, corporate development, and HR.

Every day, more than 40 container ships pass through the Panama Canal. They chug over the narrow isthmus separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, navigating three sets of multi-chambered locks that carry them uphill to an enormous lake 90 feet above sea level. After crossing that, another network of locks lowers them to the opposite coast. The trip, which can take a full day depending on traffic, requires the careful choreography of skilled freighter pilots, tugboats, and the immense doors that separate each lock. As with most things these days, software keeps everything moving smoothly, but this most impressive feat of civil engineering relies upon a hodgepodge of systems added piecemeal over the decades.

LONDON: Sixty-eight per cent of organisations use artificial intelligence (AI) for IT functions, but 70 per cent believe AIs greatest impact by 2020 will be in marketing, customer service, finance and HR, a new study said on Wednesday. According to global IT consulting firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), organisations with the greatest financial improvements from AI investments expect three times as many new AI-related roles by 2020 as compared to companies with smallest improvements. "Given the increasing digital disruption across every industry and the public sector, AI should become a key and integrated component of an organisation's strategy," said K Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of TCS, in a statement. Eighty-four per cent of companies see the use of AI as "essential" to competitiveness, with a further 50 per cent seeing the technology as "transformative". Financial investments in AI are set to rise, as seven per cent of companies each earmarked at least $250 million toward AI in 2016 and two per cent already plan to invest more than $1 billion by 2020, likely looking to gain a competitive advantage as early adopters, the findings showed.

I live with a very big cat. He likes to sprawl across my lap when I play games. I often wonder what's going on behind his big wide eyes. So perhaps it's not surprising I fell so hard for Trico, the house-sized, big-eyed feline in The Last Guardian. Trico is obviously fake – he can fly and shoot lightning from his tail.

Active search (AS) on graphs focuses on collecting certain labeled nodes (targets) given global knowledge of the network topology and its edge weights under a query budget. However, in most networks, nodes, topology and edge weights are all initially unknown. We introduce selective harvesting, a variant of AS where the next node to be queried must be chosen among the neighbors of the current queried node set; the available training data for deciding which node to query is restricted to the subgraph induced by the queried set (and their node attributes) and their neighbors (without any node or edge attributes). Therefore, selective harvesting is a sequential decision problem, where we must decide which node to query at each step. A classifier trained in this scenario suffers from a tunnel vision effect: without recourse to independent sampling, the urge to query promising nodes forces classifiers to gather increasingly biased training data, which we show significantly hurts the performance of AS methods and standard classifiers. We find that it is possible to collect a much larger set of targets by using multiple classifiers, not by combining their predictions as an ensemble, but switching between classifiers used at each step, as a way to ease the tunnel vision effect. We discover that switching classifiers collects more targets by (a) diversifying the training data and (b) broadening the choices of nodes that can be queried next. This highlights an exploration, exploitation, and diversification trade-off in our problem that goes beyond the exploration and exploitation duality found in classic sequential decision problems. From these observations we propose D3TS, a method based on multi-armed bandits for non-stationary stochastic processes that enforces classifier diversity, matching or exceeding the performance of competing methods on seven real network datasets in our evaluation.

It's 3/14, also known as Pi Day – a mathematics holiday to celebrate the irrational, transcendental number we learned in school, for the most part, to calculate the circumference or area of circles. While there are a number of fulfilling Pi(e) related activities you can indulge in, from feasting on scrumptious pies to chasing down the value of Pi (good luck!), it is also an apt moment to turn attention to where children across the world stand in mathematics achievement and other learning outcomes. While countries have made impressive gains in access to education, a recurring theme is that not nearly enough learning is happening. The 2018 World Development Report (WDR) takes on the learning crisis and its possible underlying factors. The report also takes stock of a growing evidence base to identify key principles and effective interventions to improve learning, challenges in taking successful interventions to scale, and strategies to overcome those challenges.

Often seen as futuristic, and maybe a bit silly, robots are already changing urban life. Over the past couple of weeks, tech news outlets all seem to be talking about one thing – robots in our cities. Some of these are really interesting, and others a bit hype-filled. And then there are those robots that have been quietly transforming the city for decades. A 20 foot-tall Optimus Prime figure stands amidst the Hong Kong skyline at the Transformers movie premier in 2014.

When 27-year old Mayank Ranka is looking for love, he turns to a chatbot. "It instantly finds me a match which is all I need at the end of the day. The even better part is I can end the conversation anytime I want and not chat ever again," says Mumbai-resident Mayank, who works with an event company in Mumbai. Tech-savvy singles like Mayank don't blink before using a speed-dating chatbot like Neargroup which helps them zoom into the right date. The chatbot's in-built AI helps the user to find the right match based on nearby locations, interests and also conversations.

Welcome to the Coupa Software Fourth Quarter and FY '17 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Miss Cynthia Hiponia. This is Cynthia Hiponia, Coupa Investor Relations and I'm pleased to welcome you to Coupa Software's fourth quarter earnings conference call. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our FY '17 fourth quarter performance, in addition to our financial outlook for our FY '18 first quarter and full year. Just a reminder that our remarks today include forward-looking statements about our guidance and future results of operations, business strategies and plans, market size, products, competitive position and potential growth opportunities. Our actual results may be materially different. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are described in our earnings release and our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on December 9, 2016. These forward-looking statements are based on our beliefs and assumptions today and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statement. If this call is replayed after today, the information presented during this call may not contain current or accurate information. During the call, we'll also present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings release which you could find on our Investor Relations website. A link to the replay of this call will also be available there and if you prefer to access the replay via phone you can find that information in the earnings release as well. Unless otherwise stated, gross comparisons made on this call are against the same period of the prior year. On behalf of my colleagues at Coupa, I'd like to start by thanking our customers. We thank them for their enthusiasm and embracing our game-changing value as a service approach. Together, we're doing things never before done in our industry in terms of time to value, teamwork, agility and the attainment of measurable results. I'd also like to thank our fast growing list of global Partners, who work with us and our customers hand in hand with the relentless customer success orientation. And last but certainly not least, I'd like to thank all our investors for their continued support as we continue to develop our business.