Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who has announced a new AI startup with USD 50 million fund, believes India has the potential to become a world leader in artificial intelligence but the key to this is integrating AI into the country's education system in a massive way. India is at "an inflection point" when it comes to AI or artificial intelligence, Sikka said. Over the next 20-25 years, AI is going to be "a very, very big disruptor" for the Indian society because what one is seeing now in terms of automation and job losses because of automation is just the beginning, said Sikka, who announced his startup Vianai Systems last week. "But on the other hand, if we are able to bring AI education, the ability to build AI systems to India at a very large scale, and I'm talking about like billion plus people, then India can really leap frog and become the world's leader in artificial intelligence, in AI skill and AI talent," Sikka told PTI in an exclusive interview. Doing that requires working on multiple dimensions in parallel, he said.

Have you heard the one about a robot who walks into a bar? "What can I get you?" asks the bartender. "I need something to loosen me up," says the robot. So the bartender serves him a screwdriver. I'll bet you wouldn't have guessed that a computer wrote it – @jokingcomputer. Here's another one told by a computer: So how does Artificial Intelligence (AI) do when it comes to that most human of storytelling activities-- telling jokes?

In the next 10 years, as robots and other tech bring about the "greatest transfer from labour to capital" the industry has witnessed, per a report by Wells Fargo analysts, U.S. banks will slash over 200,000 jobs. Veteran Wall Street Analyst Mike Mayo noted that cuts of such magnitude would comprise over 10 percent of total bank jobs, and pave the way for a "golden age of banking efficiency," the Financial Times reported. Mayo said, according to the outlet, "It's been a rocky 25-year marriage for banking and technology, but it's finally getting on course." Wells Fargo's team of analysts in financial services and technology examined technology's impact throughout the banking industry in the U.S. The 225-page report discussed how artificial intelligence could cut costs for mortgage processing by 10 percent to 20 percent. Cloud computing, on the other hand, could bring in significant savings, while Big Data would enable "more surgical marketing."

SAN ANTONIO--In the warzones of the future, medics touching down amid heavy battlefield casualties will know who to treat first, how to approach every injury, and even who is most likely to live or die -- all before looking at a single wounded soldier. That's the vision of Col. (and Dr.) Jerome Buller, who leads the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research. Buller says biometric data gleaned from soldier-borne sensors, combined with in-depth medical and training data and augmented reality lenses, will help medics in combat evaluate the battlefield and everyone in it from a safe distance. They will make their most important decisions before even seeing their patients. "Imagine that [the hypothetical future] medic is able to scan the battlefield and instead of seeing rubble, he's seeing red or green dots, or amber dots, and he knows where to apply resources or not," Buller said during the Defense One and NextGov Genius Machines event here on Wednesday.

DARPA wants to break a network speed bottleneck caused by network interface cards (NICs) that aren't cut out to support tomorrow's demands for artificial intelligence. To achieve its goal, the Department of Defense agency is launching the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs) program. The FastNIC isn't a technology just yet, but DARPA's FastNICs program is seeking engineering talent to help achieve its ambition to boost the performance of the network stack on servers by 100 times. SEE: Sensor'd enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic) As DARPA explains, networking performance has tracked the same path as computing performance explained by Moore's Law. But NICs, the hardware that connects the computer to an Ethernet network, have not kept pace and, with a few other factors like memory and software design, application throughput is too slow for the future of AI and distributed computing.

The Times of India spoke to Kathy Bloomgarden, Global CEO of Ruder Finn, on the role of emerging technologies, its impact and challenges for global industries and businesses. Q: What brings you to India? A: India has fantastic potential and I think more and more people are beginning to realize this. Even though you see some slow down and people are concerned about it, it's still amongst the fastest growing economies in the world. With the focus being on digitisation means you will be increasing your ability to be productive, to go into new areas, to bring new innovations globally.

A famed Russian technical university is helping to lead the government's push for public-private efforts to develop AI technologies and applications -- including a joint project with China's Huawei -- and to stop top talent from flowing to the West. In December 2017, three months after Vladimir Putin predicted that artificial intelligence could produce "global domination," the Russian government picked the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technologies to host a new Center for Artificial Intelligence. Today, this center aims to foster partnerships among the nation's leading state-run and private companies and universities. This year's events of note include: The Amazon prize, in particular, shows an international recognition of Russian talent, as well as an acknowledgement by one of the world's leading AI players that it needs international input to develop products to be marketed globally. Be the first to receive updates.

In 2018, artificial intelligence took on new tasks, with these smarty-pants algorithms acing everything from disease diagnosis to crater counting. In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration permitted marketing of the first artificial intelligence that diagnoses health problems at primary care clinics without specialist supervision (SN: 3/31/18, p. 15). The program, which inspects eye images for signs of diabetes-related vision loss, could be a boon for people in remote or low-resource areas where ophthalmologists are scarce. Other eye-inspecting AI programs are learning to recognize everything from age-related vision loss to heart problems. One artificial intelligence is a celestial cartographer after Galileo's own heart.

LONDON – Scientists at Britain's national synchrotron facility have harnessed powerful light beams to virtually unwrap and decipher fragile scrolls dating back some 2,000 years in a process they hope will provide new insights into the ancient world. The two complete scrolls and four fragments -- from the so-called Herculaneum library, the only one surviving from antiquity -- were buried and carbonized by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 and are too fragile to be opened. The items were examined at the Diamond Light Source facility in Oxfordshire, home to Britain's synchrotron, a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun. "The idea is essentially like a CT scanner where you would take an image of a person, a three-dimensional image of a person and you can slice through it to see the different organs," said Laurent Chapon, physical science director of Diamond Light Source. "We … shine very intense light through (the scroll) and then detect on the other side a number of two-dimensional images. From that we reconstruct a three-dimensional volume of the object … to actually read the text in a nondestructive manner," Chapon said.

AI and machine learning are changing global consumption habits, and companies are playing catch-up. Good salespersonship is a species of street smarts. It's about quickly sizing up your customers and pitching your wares in terms that reverberate with their unspoken needs and desires. As AI and machine learning increasingly intersect with e-commerce, these priceless human skills are finding algorithmic analogues – not just at point of sale, but throughout the customer journey. The results will be familiar to online shoppers everywhere.