France's aggressive push to develop its AI ecosystem seems to be paying dividends as the number of startups continues to soar. A new report released today identified 432 AI-related startups in France, up from 312 last year and 180 back in 2016. The report was produced by Roland Berger, a global consulting firm, and France Digitale, an association that represents venture capitalist and entrepreneurs. "It's fantastic news," said Nicholas Brien, CEO of France Digitale. The report was released on the eve of the 4th annual France is AI conference that is being held Wednesday at the Station F startup campus in Paris.

The third Tallinn Digital Summit was recently held in Tallinn with a focus on AI for public value and to mark the occasion we spoke to Dr Julien Cornebise, who leads AI for Good at Element AI. He is an awarded scientist who has worked with Amnesty International and he was an early employee at DeepMind. We talked about the hype around AI, but also the all the good it could be used for with the right incentives. We have a government team within Element AI and we've had some requests, but like every contact we get – whether it's from NGOs, agencies or governments – we make very sure to explain to the people who reach out to separate the hype from reality. In some cases, we've said that it's not feasible now, but maybe after a few more years of research. More generally, yes, we want to work with governments around AI for good, because the sustainable development goals are not just for NGOs.

Description: A down-to-earth, shy but confident take on machine learning techniques that you can put to work today.

New Delhi, October 18 (IANS) With over 35,000 cooperative societies under its umbrella, the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd (IFFCO) is generating massive amount of data that needs to be analysed, parsed and used for predictive maintenance at its plants and enhance the productivity of nearly five crore farmers. At the forefront of technology adoption in the Indian agriculture space, IFFCO along with Cloud major Oracle is trying to take the benefits of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to farmers – bet it voice-enabled chatbot, user-friendly portals or Oracle Autonomous Database for analysing data. "Oracle is a big innovator of technology and we are with them for the last 25 years. We are looking at their Autonomous Data Warehouse to utilize our data of last 30-35 years in the most efficient way. My mission is to move along with Oracle to lift and shift the entire database from on-premises to the Cloud," AK Gupta, Head-IT, IFFCO, told IANS in an interaction.

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Technology skills such as Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), digital marketing and design thinking will be important to drive the future growth, finds a survey by ed-tech firm Great Learning. The analysis of 307 corporates (ranging from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large corporate) focussed on finding out top skills that organisations will need to drive future performance and how they may plan to bridge the impending skill deficit among their ranks. As per the survey, 25 per cent of all companies believe AI/ML are the most crucial skills needed to ensure an organisation's future growth. Digital marketing emerged second with 19 per cent finding it most crucial. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday met with the members of JP Morgan's International Council in New Delhi and discussed his vision for making India a USD 5 trillion economy by 2024.

Tracking the health of underwater species is critical to understanding the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems. Unfortunately, it's a time-consuming process -- biologists conduct studies with echosounders that use sonar to determine water and object depth, and they manually interpret the resulting 2D echograms. These interpretations are often prone to error and require pricey software like Echoview. Fortunately, a team of research scientists hailing from the University of Victoria in Canada are developing a machine learning method for detecting specific biological targets in acoustic survey data. In a preprint paper ("A Deep Learning based Framework for the Detection of Schools of Herring in Echograms"), they say that their approach -- which they tested on schools of herring -- might measurably improve the accuracy of environmental monitoring.

Prof. Zhang is the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He is a member of the US National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He discovered a new state of matter called topological insulator in which electrons can conduct along the edge without dissipation, enabling a new generation of electronic devices with much lower power consumption. For this ground breaking work he received numerous international awards, including the Buckley Prize, the Dirac Medal and Prize, the Europhysics Prize, the Physics Frontiers Prize and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. He is also the founding chairman of DHVC venture capital fund, which invests in AI, blockchain, mobile internet, big data, AR/VR, genomics and precision medicine, sharing economy and robotics.

Melding the disparate worlds of art and computer science, Andreas Refsgaard and Mikkel Loose have developed a fascinating AI project called Booksby.ai, an online bookstore entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Every aspect of the site is generated by machine learning algorithms, from the entire books and accompanying cover artwork, to the reviews and pictures of people reviewing the books. And on top of that, all the books are actually available to buy on Amazon. Andreas Refsgaard is an artist exploring creative uses for machine learning. Based in Copenhagen, the Booksby.ai

HONG KONG – Hong Kong law enforcement authorities have access to artificial intelligence software that can match faces from video footage to police databases, but people familiar with the matter say it is unclear if the technology is being used to quell the pro-democracy protests. Police have been able to use the technology from the Sydney-based iOmniscient for at least three years, and engineers from the company have trained dozens of officers on how to use it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn't public. The software can scan footage, including from closed-circuit television, to match faces and license plates to a police database and pick out suspects in a crowd. In addition to tracking criminals, iOminiscient's artificial intelligence can be used for everything from finding lost children to managing traffic. In one training session after the protests began in June, the people said, officers asked how to automatically identify license plate numbers using dashboard cameras.