As the Narendra Modi government goes bullish on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, blockchain and data analytics, the daunting task ahead is to train millions of government officials so that these disruptive technologies can be optimised for the benefit of over one billion-plus people. Beyond skilling students, young coders and entrepreneurs in emerging technologies, the onus is now on tech giants to train the men in the system -- especially in the information technology (IT) departments -- and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is retail giant Amazon's Cloud arm, is set to embark on this journey. There is already a lot of talk happening within the government agencies about the success they have had after moving to cloud. "This is the right time to skill them, train them in AI-enabled Cloud computing so that India can move faster on embracing new-age technologies. We have had successful meetings with senior government leaders on this subject as AWS is already leading in skilling the students and upskilling the workforce in the country," Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Global Public Sector -- APAC and Japan, told IANS.

Commitment to developing artificial intelligence (AI) as a national research strategy in the United States may have unequivocally defined 2019 as the Year of AI -- particularly at the federal level, more specifically throughout the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratory complex. In February, the White House established the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence (American AI Initiative) to expand the nation's leadership role in AI research. Its goals are to fuel economic growth, enhance national security and improve quality of life. The initiative injects substantial and much-needed research dollars into federal facilities across the United States, promoting technology advances and innovation and enhancing collaboration with nongovernment partners and allies abroad. In response, DOE has made AI -- along with exascale supercomputing and quantum computing -- a major element of its $5.5 billion scientific R&D budget and established the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, which will serve to coordinate AI work being done across the DOE.

Commitment to developing artificial intelligence (AI) as a national research strategy in the United States may have unequivocally defined 2019 as the Year of AI -- particularly at the federal level, more specifically throughout the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratory complex. In February, the White House established the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence (American AI Initiative) to expand the nation's leadership role in AI research. Its goals are to fuel economic growth, enhance national security and improve quality of life. The initiative injects substantial and much-needed research dollars into federal facilities across the United States, promoting technology advances and innovation and enhancing collaboration with nongovernment partners and allies abroad. In response, DOE has made AI -- along with exascale supercomputing and quantum computing -- a major element of its $5.5 billion scientific R&D budget and established the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, which will serve to coordinate AI work being done across the DOE.

NEW DELHI: As the Narendra Modi government goes bullish on emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud computing, Blockchain and data analytics, the daunting task ahead is to train millions of government officials so that these disruptive technologies can be optimised for the benefit of over one billion-plus people. Beyond skilling students, young coders and entrepreneurs in emerging technologies, the onus is now on tech giants to train the men in the system especially in the information technology (IT) departments and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is retail giant Amazon's Cloud arm, is set to embark on this journey. There is already a lot of talk happening within the government agencies about the success they have had after moving to Cloud. "This is the right time to skill them, train them in AI-enabled Cloud computing so that India can move faster on embracing new-age technologies. We have had successful meetings with senior government leaders on this subject as AWS is already leading in skilling the students and upskilling the workforce in the country," Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Global Public Sector -- APAC and Japan, told IANS.

Posting the landscapes of drone strikes to Instagram: Follow Dronestagram (also on Tumblr and Twitter). These are the names of places. They are towns, villages, junctions and roads. They are the names of places where people live and work, where there are families and schools. They are the names of places in Afghanistan and Yemen, which are linked by one thing: they have each been the location of drone strikes in the past couple of months.

China is already home to extensive facial recognition technology, using it to identify criminals, monitor students' attention, and even let citizens purchase train tickets. Now, in an attempt to enrich its surveillance arsenal, reseachers from the country have developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera capable of capturing "thousands of faces at a stadium in perfect detail and generate their facial data for the cloud while locating a particular target in an instant." The AI-based cloud camera service was developed in collaboration between Shanghai-based Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Changchun, according to Global Times. The "super camera" is also said to have the ability to shoot panoramic photos with a clear image of every single human face, something that can be put to use in extremely crowded public spots. The facial recognition system has been designed keeping national defense, military and public security in mind, the report said, adding it could "serve as a watchdog at military bases, satellite launch bases and national borders to prevent suspicious people and objects from entering or exiting."

Today the University of Miami (UM) announced that their new Triton supercomputer is installed and helping their researchers explore new frontiers of science. The new supercomputer will be UM's first GPU-accelerated HPC system, representing a completely new approach to computational and data science for the university's campuses. Built using IBM Power Systems AC922 servers, the new HPC system was designed to maximize data movement between the IBM POWER9 CPU and attached accelerators like GPUs. With advances in artificial intelligence and science, we wanted to advance our research with this new generation of supercomputer and enable more discoveries," said Nicholas Tsinoremas, director of the University of Miami Center for Computational Science and vice provost for data and research computing. "Advances in data science and big data drove us to this new technology." The new high-performance system uses the same AI-optimized architecture as the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the U.S. Department of Energy's Summit and Sierra supercomputers. The $3.7 million system was assembled and validated distally by IBM and the University's Center for Computational Science (CCS) personnel. CCS personnel along with UM investigators have been installing and testing software since its arrival to UM's downtown facility last month. Modern computational science requires a system that can handle the demands of Big Data, classic modeling and simulation, as well as the analytical techniques of artificial intelligence," said David Turek, Vice President of Exascale Systems for IBM Cognitive Systems.

The world's fastest deep learning supercomputer is being used to develop algorithms that can help researchers automatically design neural networks for cancer research, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2025, the number of diagnosed new cases of cancer will reach 21.5 million a year, compared to the current number of roughly 18 million. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Stony Brook University reckon that this means doctors will have to analyse about 200 million biopsy scans per year. Neural networks could help ease their workloads, however, so that they can focus more on patient care. There have been several studies describing how computer vision models can be trained to diagnose cancerous cells in the lung or prostate. Although these systems seem promising they're time consuming and expensive to build.

Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who has announced a new AI startup with USD50 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, Mr. 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 is just the beginning, said Mr. 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," Mr. Sikka told PTI in an exclusive interview. Doing that requires working on multiple dimensions in parallel, he said.

It is often the case that, if you look a little too closely at the next big thing in the technology industry, it may start to resemble the last big thing. Or perhaps even one of the many big things that came before that. When many were congratulating Apple for inventing the tablet market with the release of the iPad in 2010, many more were pointing to the touchscreen devices manufactured over the previous two decades by the likes of Palm, FSC, and Nokia – not to mention Apple itself. When the concept of cloud computing began to go mainstream, there were plenty of onlookers who wondered whether this exciting new concept was really just a synonym for the internet, or virtualisation, or software as a service or, simply, 'someone else's computer'. Artificial intelligence – perhaps the biggest and nextest of the current next big things – is also nothing new, many would argue.