The IMD uses different tools like radars, satellite imagery, to issue nowcasts, which gives information on extreme weather events occurring in the next 3-6 hours. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is planning to use artificial intelligence in weather forecasting, especially for issuing nowcasts, which can help improve 3-6 hours prediction of extreme weather events, its Director-General Mrutunjay Mohapatra said on Sunday. He said the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is not as prevalent as it is in other fields and it is relatively new in the area of weather forecasting. The IMD has invited research groups who can study how artificial intelligence (AI) be used for improving weather forecasting and the Ministry of Earth Sciences is evaluating their proposals, Mohapatra said. He said the IMD is also planning to do collaborative studies on this with other institutions.

And I am talking Season 3. Or Amazon's hit, The Handmaid's Tale? Do you just binge and veg out or are you like me, and see how easily we could, and are, slipping into these worlds? After watching shows like this I often find myself reflecting back on George Orwell's 1984. It proves more eerily prophetic with each passing year. This Season, I fear, the writers of Westworld are almost scripting our future lives. You may not have caught it, but it is all in there.

Face masks are one of the best defenses against the spread of COVID-19, but their growing adoption is having a second, unintended effect: breaking facial recognition algorithms. Wearing face masks that adequately cover the mouth and nose causes the error rate of some of the most widely used facial recognition algorithms to spike to between 5 percent and 50 percent, a study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found. Black masks were more likely to cause errors than blue masks, and the more of the nose covered by the mask, the harder the algorithms found it to identify the face. "With the arrival of the pandemic, we need to understand how face recognition technology deals with masked faces," said Mei Ngan, an author of the report and NIST computer scientist. "We have begun by focusing on how an algorithm developed before the pandemic might be affected by subjects wearing face masks. Later this summer, we plan to test the accuracy of algorithms that were intentionally developed with masked faces in mind."

Iran on Saturday said it had detained an Iranian-American leader of a little-known, California-based opposition group for allegedly planning a 2008 attack on a mosque that killed 14 people and wounded over 200 others. Iran's Intelligence Ministry also asserted that the detained man, Jamshid Sharmahd of the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, planned more attacks around the Islamic Republic amid heightened tensions between Tehran and the United States. Mr. Sharmahd's reported arrest comes as relations between the U.S. and Iran remain inflamed in the wake of President Donald Trump's 2018 decision to withdraw America from the 2015 multinational nuclear deal. In January, a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad. Iran responded by launching a ballistic missile attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq that injured dozens.

Finding the best model that describes a high dimensional dataset, is a daunting task. For binary data, we show that this becomes feasible, if the search is restricted to simple models. These models -- that we call Minimally Complex Models (MCMs) -- are simple because they are composed of independent components of minimal complexity, in terms of description length. Simple models are easy to infer and to sample from. In addition, model selection within the MCMs' class is invariant with respect to changes in the representation of the data. They portray the structure of dependencies among variables in a simple way. They provide robust predictions on dependencies and symmetries, as illustrated in several examples. MCMs may contain interactions between variables of any order. So, for example, our approach reveals whether a dataset is appropriately described by a pairwise interaction model.

A new whitepaper coauthored by researchers on the Vector Institute for Synthetic Intelligence examines the ethics of AI in surgery, making the case that surgical procedure and AI carry related expectations however diverge with respect to moral understanding. Surgeons are confronted with ethical and moral dilemmas as a matter in fact, the paper factors out, whereas moral frameworks in AI have arguably solely begun to take form. In surgical procedure, AI purposes are largely confined to machines performing duties managed completely by surgeons. AI may also be utilized in a medical determination help system, and in these circumstances, the burden of accountability falls on the human designers of the machine or AI system, the coauthors argue. Privateness is a foremost moral concern. AI learns to make predictions from giant knowledge units -- particularly affected person knowledge, within the case of surgical programs -- and it's usually described as being at odds with privacy-preserving practices.

Silicon Valley Bank, which has helped fund more than 30,000 startups, yesterday released a report on "The Future of Robotics: An Inside View on Innovation in Robotics." It described trends in production, business models, and the adoption of robotics reflecting the increasing maturity of Industry 4.0. The report also addressed concerns about automation displacing jobs and public-policy reactions. Overall, the free Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) report (download PDF) was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for industrial automation. It cited rising U.S. productivity, maturing technologies and suppliers supporting a variety of applications, and a steady climb for robotics deployments, particularly in Asia.

Government agencies are awash in documents. Many of these documents are paper-based, but even for the electronic documents a human is still often needed to process and understand those documents to make use of them for vital services. Federal agencies are increasingly looking to AI to help improve those document and human-bound processes by applying advanced machine learning, neural network, and natural language processing (NLP) technologies. While for many these technologies might be fairly new in their organization, in some government agencies, they have been using that technology for many years, augmenting and enhancing various workflows and tasks. In the case of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the agency is mandated to conduct a Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses to determine workplace injuries and help guide policy.

Talking is our most essential form of communication. It is useful in day to day operations but it becomes even more critical in high-pressure situations such as those encountered by the army personnel. In light of this, army researchers have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that is capable of carrying on a conversation. Yes! It's a military AI that can speak. The researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, have called their new AI the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, or JUDI for short.

For some time now, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in the public and business sectors. This is part of the Gulf country's economic diversification strategy, aimed at transforming the UAE away from an oil-dependent economy to a knowledge-based one. AI is generally conceived as human intelligence processes which are simulated by computer systems, including learning, reasoning, problem-solving, planning, predictive analytics, and advanced robotics. Like other Arab states, the UAE has advanced a public discourse based on a dominant narrative of nationalism which is meant to solidify its image while reinforcing the Emirati rulers' power and legitimacy. Its foundational theme is made up of different frames such as diversity, tolerance, moderation, international cooperation, humanitarianism, and modernity. State leaders use narratives not only to persuade and influence a national and international audience of its image and self-perception, but also as a means to determine its understanding of its place and purpose in the international system.