Saravanan Muthiayah, professor of Information Technology, Multimedia University, Malaysia, who was the chief guest, highlighted the current trends and explained the thrust areas in the field of Computer Science and Engineering and Information Technology. Inaugurating the conference, N. Krishnamohan, Registrar (in-charge), highlighted the special features of newly introduced programmes such as B.E.-CSE (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning) and B.E.-CSE (Big Data Analytics). K. Raghukandan, Dean, faculty of engineering and technology, explained the rapid growth and impact of the recent developments in Computer Science and Information Technology. More than 100 research articles from various recent research areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, internet of things, cyber security, block chain technology, face recognition, computer networks, speech processing, image processing and so on were presented during the meet. Scientists and research scholars from across the country presented their research in the areas of computing and information technology.

One day in 2005, a mother in Evanston, Ill., joined Flickr. Then she more or less forgot her account existed. Years later, their faces are in a database that's used to test and train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in the world. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents; sticking their tongues out; costumed for Halloween. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace.

Farmers today operate self-guided tractors steered by GPS, use drones to monitor crops and employ artificial intelligence in irrigation. Robots will probably take cowhands' jobs before they take yours. Agriculture is a major export business in the United States -- which has lately been a source of stress. American agricultural exports have been hampered recently by the Trump administration's trade war with China. "China was a big and important market" for farmers in the United States, said A. Blake Brown, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University.

Insurance CIOs are continually exploring the potential applications of AI, which resonate with their business needs. FREMONT, CA: Artificial intelligence (AI) is proliferating, and its ability to explore massive data sets and extract significant insights from them makes it an essential technology in the current market space. Thus, it isn't a surprise that insurance firms are also keen to utilize AI. Sources suggest that CIOs in the insurance sector will continue investing in AI technology to drive growth, revenue, streamline business operations and serve the customers and distribution partners in a better way. However, the main consideration lies in figuring out how AI can best address their business requirements.

THE SELF-DRIVING cars that cruise around South Ronghua Road look just like their American counterparts: chunky sedans with a rack of sensors bolted to the roof and a supercomputer in the boot. Beijing's government has dubbed this south-eastern patch of the city Beijing-E-Town. It is one of a growing number of urban spaces across China designated for testing autonomous vehicles (AVs). Digital lane markers can switch parts of the road to AV-only on demand. Signs announce "National Test Roads". Cars bear the decals of China's leading AV companies: Baidu, Pony.ai,

Given the four postures I articulated via the "War of the Worlds" matrix, how shall we function in a world where man, woman, and machine will have interchangeable and complementary functions? It is one thing to have the capabilities and capacities to blend artificial and human intelligences, quite another to have organisational structures to enable such sharing. Structure can be an enabler or an impediment to progress and a full OD review will be needed to facilitate such changes. How then will we reorganise organisations to make best use of collective cybernetic and human intelligence? Following the statistic about the veritable Tsunami of data that now rains upon us (34 Gb daily), how shall we become more intelligent, individually, collectively and corporately?

An open-source disaster response tool that uses visual recognition and learns through artificial intelligence and cloud tools began as an idea that a self-taught developer had at IBM's Call for Code hackathon in Puerto Rico last year. IBM announced DroneAid on Oct. 2 as an open-source project through Code and Response, the company's $25 million program dedicated to the creation and deployment of open-source solutions tackling real-world problems. DroneAid uses visual recognition technology to detect and count SOS icons on the ground gleaned from drone video streams and automatically plots the emergency needs on a map for first responders. Developer Pedro Cruz had planned to use optical character recognition to detect messages, but reading different handwriting and languages complicated that approach. Instead, the tool relies on a subset of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' 500 humanitarian icons – symbols that DroneAid can learn and first responders can quickly understand.

Data Science is such a broad field that includes several subdivisions like data preparation and exploration; data representation and transformation; data visualization and presentation; predictive analytics; machine learning, etc. For beginners, learning the fundamentals of data science can be a very daunting task especially if you don't have proper guidance as to the necessary training required, or what courses to take, and in what order. Before discussing the steps necessary to become a data scientist, let's discuss the skills that every data scientist should have in his skills set toolbox. I started learning data science about a year ago. It was quite challenging from the beginning, but let me share with you the approach that worked for me.

The government has unveiled plans to invest £13m in postgraduate conversion courses in data science and artificial intelligence. The initiative will see universities and higher education providers partner with industry to develop new courses that train graduates, who may have studied a non-STEM degree, in the skills required to take up jobs in the field. The funding forms part of a wider £400m investment in maths, digital and technical education through the government's AI sector deal, which was launched last year amid criticism that ministers were failing to protect the UK's tech scene ahead of Brexit. Under the new initiative, the Office for Students and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have allocated £3m to course development and £10m to scholarships for candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, including female, disabled and black students. It is hoped that 2,500 students will have enrolled in one of the new courses by 2023.

How do you defeat "deepfakes"? According to Google, you develop more of them. Google just released a large, free database of deepfake videos to help research develop detection tools. Google collaborated with "Jigsaw", a tech "incubator" founded by Google, and the FaceForesenics Benchmark Program at the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples. They worked with several paid actors to create hundreds of real videos and then used popular deepfake technologies to generate thousands of fake videos.