Over the last few years, India has taken significant steps towards adoption of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning(ML), with technology solutions providers, tech leaders, startups and government agencies playing a significant role in shaping the evolution of the technology in the country. According to a recent study, which observed the country-wide AI readiness in the Asia Pacific, India was ranked third in readiness, with its overall readiness score being 50.2 out of100, while Singapore was ranked the first with 63 points and Hong Kong was at the second with 56.5 points. As straightforward as it might sound, AI readiness simply does not refer a country's preparedness in embracing AI, rather, a number of key factors like the ability of its consumers, businesses and government to adopt, deploy and support AI technologies are taken into consideration to better understand the readiness capability of a country in adopting AI. In other words, AI readiness is not a linear process instead, multiple factors shape the outcome. "AI adoption is fragmented and uneven across the region. In some cases, governments' efforts and commitment have yet to be reflected in businesses' or consumers' adoption and usage of AI. In others, business and consumers are taking the lead, showing governments the way forward in terms of change and innovation," Eric Loeb EVP, Global Government Affairs points out in the study.

Hailo, an AI startup based in Israel, has released its initial chip that the company claims is "the world's top performing deep learning processor," with the Hailo-8 chip claimed to deliver 26 tera-operations pers second (TOPS), while consuming only a few watts of power. If true, that would certainly put it near or at the top of its class in performance for edge applications in areas like self-driving cars, drones, smart appliances, and virtual/augmented reality devices. The challenge in these edgey environments has always been to get AI processors with the requisite performance for these applications but consuming only the small amounts of power available in these settings. In fact, Hailo is positioning its new offering as chip that "enables edge devices to run sophisticated deep learning applications that could previously run only on the cloud." However, doesn't mean Hailo-8 is as powerful as a top-of-the-line inference GPU for the datacenter.

Composable infrastructure, whereby resources are disaggregated and may be re-composed on the fly, stands to serve a number of key, future-forward IT infrastructure requirements. Resources may be added and then returned for use by a different application on the fly. Those resources can also be better utilized, because they are not left sitting idle, tied to a singular application or system. Serving the most demanding workloads requires a composable architecture that can get granular, essentially treating the IT infrastructure as trays of compute, storage and networking resources down to the levels of graphics processing units (GPUs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), for optimal efficiency. Liqid provides software (The Liqid Command Center) and a top of rack peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) switch that enables bare metal resources (including GPUs, field-programmable gate array (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs), Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), network interface cards (NICs), and Intel Optane memory) to be disaggregated and then dynamically provisioned over a PCIe fabric.

One example is Steward Health Choice Network's (SHCN) Health Plan Division, a division of Steward Health Care Systems. During the past two years, using RPA has led to drastic improvements in productivity for SHCN. Within 30 days of implementing its first RPA script, SHCN began realizing an ROI. Since that time, the labor automation -- Foxtrot RPA has processed 4.5 million transactions, with a cost avoidance of $2.75 million for the $1.4 billion organization. SHCN's Health Plan Division's efficiency gains illustrate what RPA can deliver to the healthcare industry.

A fleet of miniature autonomous cars has shown how driverless cars improve traffic flow by at least 35% when programmed to work together. Researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, tested how 16 miniature robotic cars driving around a two-lane track reacted when one of the cars on the inner lane stopped. When the cars were in cooperative mode, they alerted the rest of the cars to slow down as it neared the immobile car, allowing the inner lane cars to quickly pass it. However, when they were not driving cooperatively, traffic built up as cars had to stop and wait for a safe moment to overtake the stopped car. "Autonomous cars could fix a lot of different problems associated with driving in cities, but there needs to be a way for them to work together," said co-author of the study Michael He, an undergraduate student at St John's College who designed the lane-changing algorithms for the experiment.

If you board a flight out of the United States four years from now, chances are the government is going to scan your face -- an ambitious timeline that has privacy experts reeling. That's according to a recent Department of Homeland Security report, which says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to dramatically expand its Biometric Exit program to cover 97 percent of outbound air passengers within four years. Through this program, which was already in place in 15 U.S. airports at the end of 2018, passengers have their faces scanned by cameras before boarding flights out of the nation. If the AI-powered system determines that the photo doesn't match one on file, CBP officials can look into it. The goal of these airport face scans is purportedly to catch people who have overstayed their visas, but civil liberties expert Edward Hasbrouck sees them as potentially giving the government increased control over American citizens.

It was on the motorway near Phoenix, Arizona, that I realised fully driverless cars might be quite a distant dream. And that was because our Google Waymo robo-taxi seemed incapable of leaving that motorway. We were in Arizona to record a radio documentary for the BBC World Service about the progress towards creating autonomous vehicles that would make our roads safer and replace human drivers with robots. Google leads this race at the moment and for the past six months has been offering a robo-taxi service, Waymo One, to a select few early adopters in and around the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. Our first ride with Waymo took us through the quiet suburban streets, where traffic is sparse and drivers well mannered.

The Pentagon is one of the largest technology customers in the world, purchasing everything from F-35 planes (roughly $90 million each) to cloud services (the JEDI contract was $10 billion). Despite outlaying hundreds of billions of dollars for acquisitions though, the Defense Department has struggled to push nascent technologies from startups through its punishing procurement process. The department launched the Defense Innovation Unit a few years back as a way to connect startups into the defense world. Now, the military has decided to work even earlier to ensure that the next generation of startups can equip the military with the latest technology. Cambridge, Mass.-based MIT and the U.S. Air Force announced today they are teaming up to launch a new accelerator focused on artificial intelligence applications, with the Air Force committed to investing $15 million into roughly 10 MIT research projects per year.

To prepare the most effective response, public-sector professionals need the most up-to-date information on hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes or tsunamis affecting their operations, assets, employees and, more broadly, the local communities they serve. While responder agencies rely on many different sources for information on the status of natural disasters, they continue to face challenges in finding timely, relevant and accurate information to inform their disaster response plans -- in real time and at scale. What if there was a better way for the emergency responders to stay informed of breaking events? During a disaster, those impacted often turn to their mobile phones for information and as a lifeline to the outside world. In addition to using social media to request help, victims also share updates, pictures and videos of live developments at their locations.

Sometime last fall, a man walked into the Nike store in Pasadena, California. He was a runner, it was a running-centric store, and he was there to buy a pair of running shoes just like the ones he had worn in the past. The clerk asked him if he'd be willing to have his feet measured a new way. "I'm a 9," the runner said. "I've always been a 9. Just give me a 9." Still, he relented.