Data sets and benchmarks have been some of the most effective tools to speed progress in AI. Our current renaissance in deep learning has been fueled in part by the ImageNet benchmark. Recent advances in natural language processing have been hastened by the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. "Deepfake" techniques, which present realistic AI-generated videos of real people doing and saying fictional things, have significant implications for determining the legitimacy of information presented online. Yet the industry doesn't have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them.

Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive's speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company's insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world's first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists. The managing director of a British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders one Friday afternoon in March to wire more than $240,000 to an account in Hungary, said representatives from the French insurance giant Euler Hermes, which declined to name the company. The request was "rather strange," the director noted later in an email, but the voice was so lifelike that he felt he had no choice but to comply. The insurer, whose case was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, provided new details on the theft to The Washington Post on Wednesday, including an email from the employee tricked by what the insurer is referring to internally as "the false Johannes." Now being developed by a wide range of Silicon Valley titans and AI start-ups, such voice-synthesis software can copy the rhythms and intonations of a person's voice and be used to produce convincing speech.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has partnered with technology giant Microsoft India to train 1,000 teachers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools. The capacity building programme, according to a CBSE circular, will include aspects of Artificial Intelligence, gamification through Minecraft, collaborative tools such as Teams, Flipgrid, OneNote. Each selected school is asked to nominate two teachers for the programme for which registrations will close on September 9. The programme will train teachers from CBSE-affiliated schools across India. It will begin on September 11 and will conclude on September 28.

Today's highlighted deal comes via our Online Courses section of the Neowin Deals store, where for only a limited time you can save 99% off this AI & Machine Learning Mastery Bundle. From Tesla's self-driving cars to Apple's Siri, AI is powering the future of tech, and it's in your best interest to keep pace if you want to stay relevant in your field. Covering the building blocks of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotics through the applied topic of building a self-driving car, this 27-hour bundle is the perfect starting point. Jump in, and you'll learn from HD videos served in short bight-sized pieces plus hands-on lab video tutorials. You'll have access to Python files and datasets to practice concepts on your own, and you'll receive a certificate of completion that you can print and share on LinkedIn!

SqwidNet, in partnership with Sigfox, has concluded the second round of its Internet of Things (IoT) SA University Challenge with ten university teams competing in the final pitch presentation day this week. The programme is designed to challenge students to develop and create innovative projects focused on building solutions that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals using SqwidNet/Sigfox technology. "We were astounded by the creative thinking displayed by the ten teams that presented their solutions to the judges this week," says Phathizwe Malinga, managing director of SqwidNet. "The solutions presented ranged from agricultural solutions for early pest detection to avoid crop losses, to generating electricity from plants by collecting electrons from roots in an anode and converting that into electricity. We also saw an IoT water monitoring solution, an early fire detection for rural communities and a two-way learning solution using artificial intelligence."

Are you ready to take that next big step in your machine learning journey? Working on toy datasets and using popular data science libraries and frameworks is a good start. But if you truly want to stand out from the competition, you need to take a leap and differentiate yourself. A brilliant way to do this is to do a project on the latest breakthroughs in data science. Want to become a Computer Vision expert?

Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed artificial intelligence software able to tell the difference between individual chimpanzees in the wild. As an endangered species, keeping track of the movement, social lives and behaviour of chimpanzees is important for researchers and conservationists. Dan Schofield, researcher and DPhil student at Oxford University's Primate Models Lab, School of Anthropology explains why this is key for research: "For species like chimpanzees, which have complex social lives and live for many years, getting snapshots of their behaviour from short-term field research can only tell us so much. By harnessing the power of machine learning to unlock large video archives, it makes it feasible to measure behaviour over the long term, for example observing how the social interactions of a group change over several generations." This novel use of facial recognition saw the software trained using more than 10 million images from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute.

"The most beautiful part of the whole thing is when we started the project we didn't really know each other, but slowly we've grown up together." It's a remark that you might expect to hear in a scene from one of your favourite movies, or perhaps in a confession from a colleague on a team-building day. But it's actually how AI tech startup Aiir Innovation's CEO Bart Vredebregt explains how five AI students and an AI professor came together to launch a business that could revolutionise the maintenance industry. It all started in 2015, when Dutch airline KLM invited students on the University of Amsterdam AI master's degree programme to work on a project to automate the inspection of their jet engines. When done manually, this inspection requires an engineer to put a camera called a borescope into the engine after removing the aircraft's wing.

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." In the 2018-19 Union Budget, Niti Aayog was mandated to establish a National Program on AI. This highlighted the urgency and importance the Indian Government is placing on the need to strategise the approach on AI and recognise its potential in transforming economies and providing social benefits. A study by EY and NASSCOM – Future of Jobs in India: A 2022 Perspective 2017 found that by 2022, 46% of the workforce will be engaged in entirely new jobs that do not exist today, or will be deployed in jobs requiring radically different skill-sets. These potential transformation leaders are to be created today.

A team of PG students along with their faculty members from IIT Guwahati are developing an AI-based chatbot - ALBELA - which will aid in teaching to the first-year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE) at the institute. The researchers are from the department of EEE. The chatbot will also be able to handle the queries and doubts of the students. According to the statement from IIT Guwahati, the chatbot will help the students in finding their class schedule, tutorial schedule, examination queries and more through a simple AI-based chat window. "We have been working on its development since last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the Chabot, and started using from this academic session onwards," Prof. Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said.