A student learning to speak Mandarin wanders into a marketplace on the streets of China on a sunny summer afternoon. Before long, two vendors approach and begin hawking products, trying to outbid one another. The student must now grasp what's being said and formulate an appropriate response using proper pronunciation to avoid being misunderstood. It's a challenging, yet common, scenario for anyone trying to learn a new language by interacting with native speakers and immersing themselves in a foreign culture. Fortunately, the student in this case is able to pause the unfolding scenario to check the accuracy and tone of her planned response.

Emotional Intelligence(also known as Emotional Quotient, or EQ) training courses and workshops in Dubai, the UAE have become very popular recently among managers of all levels. What reason stands behind the popularity of emotional intelligence trainings? A lot of people dream about taking on a managerial or leadership role, but only a few think about the drawbacks and consequences of this role. The responsibility for success or failure always puts a heavy burden on the shoulders of the leader. To manage that pressure and successfully accomplish daily tasks, each leader must have a certain set of characteristics, skills, and traits.

NEW DELHI: Andhra Bank has partnered with Floatbot to offer an Artificial Intelligence-powered virtual assistant for online banking users. The AI chatbot named "ABHi" --made by Floatbot-- is integrated with Core Banking Servers (CBS) of Andhra Bank and will automate customer support for 5 crore Andhra Bank account holders. Floatbot will also develop a chatbot for over 20,000 internal employees of Andhra Bank to automate on-boarding and training. Floatbot is incubated at NASSCOM Center of Excellence DS-AI, an initiative of the Department of IT, BT and S&T, Government of Karnataka. "Floatbot has launched the chatbot for Andhra Bank after going through end to end security audit and a rigorous user acceptance testing (UAT). More than 50,000 queries were tested before the final sign-off," the company claimed in a statement.

Back in 1973, Daniel Bell published a pioneering book, called The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. He described how society was undergoing relentless change, driven by rapid advances in technology. Services would become more important than goods. There would also be the emergence of a "knowledge class" and gender roles would evolve. According to Bell: "The concept of the post-industrial society deals primarily with changes in the social structure, the way in which the economy is being transformed and the occupational system reworked, and with the new relations between theory and empiricism, particularly science and technology." Among the many readers of the book was a young Tom Siebel.

So is it possible to interpret how someone is feeling based on their gait alone? That's exactly what scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland at College Park have taught a computer to do. Using deep learning, their software can analyze a video of someone walking, turn it into a 3D model, and extract their gait. A neural network then determines the dominant motion and how it matches up to a particular feeling, based on the data on which it's trained. According to their research paper, published in June on arXiv, their deep learning model can guess four different emotions--happy, sad, angry, and neutral--with 80% accuracy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not considered just an emerging technology with a bright future, it is indeed a robust growing platform, impacting several industries and touching numerous spheres of life. AI algorithms need enormous volumes of datasets to be trained appropriately, after which the system can not only decipher pictures, such as recognizing a dog is a dog or differentiating a chair from a table, it can also generate original images and create exceptionally amazing artistry of quality associated with those of Picasso or Michelangelo. AI model that makes it possible has matured substantially over the recent years and it produces perfect output for certain applications but needs more refinement in other cases. Computer scientists have spent around two decades to teach, train and build machines which can visualize the world around them, a normal skill that humans take for granted, yet it's one that's highly challenging to train a machine to do, kudos to artificial intelligence for making it possible!! Two major ground-breaking improvements in AI image processing have been facial-recognition technology in both retail and security, as well as image generation in all fields of art. The commercialized usage of facial recognition technology is to improve sales and marketing of products including efficient targeting of audience.

With new technology available to us, we're inching closer to the end of the days when deciphering ancient languages is a painstaking task filled with frustration and confusion. Nifty machines following complex algorithms are helping researchers around the globe as they take on the often monumental task of understanding ancient texts and lost languages. Big Think reports that linguistic experts estimate there have been approximately 31,000 languages spoken throughout human history. Many of them are now dead and forgotten, but a new AI project may be part of the answer in how to decipher the writing of ancient languages. "While languages change, many of the symbols and how the words and characters are distributed stay relatively constant over time. Because of that, you could attempt to decode a long-lost language if you understood its relationship to a known progenitor language."

Patrick Winston, a beloved professor and computer scientist at MIT, died on July 19 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A professor at MIT for almost 50 years, Winston was director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to become MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). A devoted teacher and cherished colleague, Winston led CSAIL's Genesis Group, which focused on developing AI systems that have human-like intelligence, including the ability to tell, perceive, and comprehend stories. He believed that such work could help illuminate aspects of human intelligence that scientists don't yet understand. "My principal interest is in figuring out what's going on inside our heads, and I'm convinced that one of the defining features of human intelligence is that we can understand stories,'" said Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, in a 2011 interview for CSAIL.

Fernando "Corby" Corbató, an MIT professor emeritus whose work in the 1960s on time-sharing systems broke important ground in democratizing the use of computers, died on Friday, July 12, at his home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Decades before the existence of concepts like cybersecurity and the cloud, Corbató led the development of one of the world's first operating systems. His "Compatible Time-Sharing System" (CTSS) allowed multiple people to use a computer at the same time, greatly increasing the speed at which programmers could work. It's also widely credited as the first computer system to use passwords. After CTSS Corbató led a time-sharing effort called Multics, which directly inspired operating systems like Linux and laid the foundation for many aspects of modern computing.

In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Federico Pecora about AI and robotics. Federico Pecora is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems at Örebro University, Sweden.