Anyone can make predictions about what the future holds. Last year we produced our third annual Social trends report. This labor of love (and research--a lot of research) took a look at five big trends we predicted would take off in 2018, and what these meant for businesses around the globe. As we start looking towards 2019, we thought it would be a great time to check-in on how our predictions from last year panned out. Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence. As we looked towards 2018, our research indicated a sharp focus on social ROI.

KOLKATA: The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) at IIT Madras is collaborating with the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency for enhancing data-driven governance in the state. This will be carried out by working closely with various official branches and entities within the government of Tamil Nadu. These collaborations are expected to contribute towards various aspects of governance, including education, healthcare, and agriculture. Santhosh K. Misra I.A.S, CEO, Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency, and professor Ravindra Gettu, dean (industrial consultancy and sponsored research), IIT Madras, signed the MoU on behalf of their respective institutions. "Societal impact through AI is a central objective of RBC-DSAI at IIT Madras. We believe that by teaming up with the TNeGA we can contribute towards multiple pillars of the government, covering areas such as education, health-care, and agriculture," said Dr. Nandan Sudarsanam, assistant professor, Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras, in a release.

The government is considering allowing blue-collar foreign workers with certain skills to live permanently in the country with their families, as Japan struggles with a serious labor shortage amid a declining population, sources said Thursday. In what would represent a turning point for the country's immigration policy, which more or less sanctions only the entry of highly skilled professionals, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is seeking to open the door to blue-collar foreign workers by introducing a new system next April. The government is studying two new types of residence status for foreign workers, who must have Japanese language proficiency as well as knowledge and experience in one of more than 10 fields. Those sectors include nursing care, agriculture and construction, according to the sources. Those who qualify for the first type of residence status will be issued a visa valid up to five years but will not be allowed to bring their family members. Those who qualify for the second type -- namely, highly skilled laborers -- will be offered permanent residence status and allowed to bring their family members to Japan.

Last month marked the 17th anniversary of 9/11. With it came a new milestone: we've been in Afghanistan for so long that someone born after the attacks is now old enough to go fight there. They can also serve in the six other places where we're officially at war, not to mention the 133 countries where special operations forces have conducted missions in just the first half of 2018. The wars of 9/11 continue, with no end in sight. Now, the Pentagon is investing heavily in technologies that will intensify them.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California –SES is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore ways to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify operation of its communications satellite fleet. "We have a very large fleet and tens of thousands of telemetry signals on each of our satellites," Valvanera Moreno, SES system architecture and innovation manager, said Oct. 10 at Satellite Innovation 2018 here."The That's why we think this area has a lot of value." Like SES, government agencies and space companies are applying artificial intelligence to various problems they face. Orbital Insight, a geospatial analytics company, relies on artificial intelligence to help answer questions its customers ask.

As businesses struggle to combat increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks, the severity of which is exacerbated by both the vanishing IT perimeters in today's mobile and IoT era, coupled with an acute shortage of skilled security professionals, IT security teams need both a new approach and powerful new tools to protect data and other high-value assets. Increasingly, they are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) as a key weapon to win the battle against stealthy threats inside their IT infrastructures, according to a new global research study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. The Ponemon Institute study, entitled "Closing the IT Security Gap with Automation & AI in the Era of IoT," surveyed 4,000 security and IT professionals across the Americas, Europe and Asia to understand what makes security deficiencies so hard to fix, and what types of technologies and processes are needed to stay a step ahead of bad actors within the new threat landscape. The research revealed that in the quest to protect data and other high-value assets, security systems incorporating machine learning and other AI-based technologies are essential for detecting and stopping attacks that target users and IoT devices. Twenty four percent of Indian respondents said they currently use some form of machine-learning or other AI-based security solution, with another 29 percent stating they plan on deploying these types of products within the next 12 months.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path? It's been a rather circuitous route to get to where I am today, but in some ways moving to Asia in 2012 was a sort of homecoming for me because I had spent much of my youth in Singapore. I was asked to head up a small operation in Macau because my former company had closed a limited training deal with the Venetian Macao. I arrived here, oversaw that project and then teamed up with SAS, our main software partner at the time, and helped close deals with other casinos in Macau, a cruise line in Hong Kong, the Resorts World group in the US, as well as a sports book in Australia. After about 18 months, I had overseen work in Macau, the Philippines, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the US.

Example of a recorded highway including bounding boxes and labels of detected vehicles. The color of the bounding boxes indicates the class of the detected object (car: yellow, truck: green). Every vehicle is assigned a unique id for tracking and its speed is estimated over time. Abstract-- Scenario-based testing for the safety validation of highly automated vehicles is a promising approach that is being examined in research and industry. This approach heavily relies on data from real-world scenarios to derive the necessary scenario information for testing. Measurement data should be collected at a reasonable effort, contain naturalistic behavior of road users and include all data relevant for a description of the identified scenarios in sufficient quality. However, the current measurement methods fail to meet at least one of the requirements. Thus, we propose a novel method to measure data from an aerial perspective for scenario-based validation fulfilling the mentioned requirements. Furthermore, we provide a large-scale naturalistic vehicle trajectory dataset from German highways called highD. We evaluate the data in terms of quantity, variety and contained scenarios. Our dataset consists of 16.5 hours of measurements from six locations with 110 000 vehicles, a total driven distance of 45 000 km and 5600 recorded complete lane changes. A technical proof of concept for highly automated driving (HAD) has already been shown in many demonstrations and test drives.

Last week saw the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act become law, and the new legislation has quite a few implications for people who fly small drones or model aircraft as a hobby. Before diving into the latest changes, it's worth reviewing how the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has regulated such things in the past. Way back in 1981, the FAA issued an "Advisory Circular" that provided guidance for people flying model aircraft. Most modelers considered those guidelines reasonable enough, but if you didn't conform to them, it was no big deal--they weren't rules, just recommendations. So, for example, if you flew a model sailplane and caught a thermal that took it more than 400 feet off the ground, the FAA really couldn't object that you were in violation of its advice to keep lower.

The Pentagon didn't mince words in March when introducing the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, or JEDI Cloud program: "This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department and providing the best resources to our men and women in uniform," the Defense Department's chief management officer, John H. Gibson II, told industry leaders and academics at a public event. JEDI aims to bring DOD's computing systems into the 21st century by moving them into the cloud. The Pentagon says that will help it inject artificial intelligence into its data analysis and equip soldiers with real-time data during missions, among other benefits. For the winning bidder, the contract will be lucrative: Bloomberg Government estimates it will be worth $10 billion over the next decade. Or at least that's how it should have worked.