Skilling the workforce has become important today. With changing times, the workforce needs to be updated with the relevant skills to perform the job better. Industries need to plan programmes to skill the workforce with modern technology, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and so on. On similar lines, the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT) has planned to formulate new courses to train people in technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. NIELIT is part of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Since its latest edition, the Google Translate application now supports over 100 languages and serves a worldwide community of over 500 million users virtually. But over 6,000 languages are actually spoken, with around 360 languages spoken by a million people or more. To combat this disparity in translation technology, the USC Information Sciences Institute is working on a universal language translation system. Supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the program involves ISI Director of Natural Language Technologies Kevin Knight and a small team of full-time researchers and doctoral students. Knight has worked with ISI in natural language processing for 25 years, and the system is one of many projects he's working on in the field.

Ranked #20 on the 2017 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, SparkCognition has established itself as an AI technology leader. The company has business-critical cognitive enterprise solutions in place for customers in energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, finance, aerospace, defense, telecommunications, and security. "We live in an era of constant competition, in a security environment that is constantly evolving and is increasingly complex, dynamic and unstable. To be successful, it is essential the British Army continues to be forward-looking and technologically advanced, ready for the challenges of the future, both at home and overseas," said Colonel James Cook, Assistant Head of Strategic Concepts for the British Army." SparkCognition is a leader in the field of artificial intelligence and this collaboration will help ensure that the British Army continues to stay at the cutting edge of evolving technologies."

In a recent cautioning about Artificial Intelligence, a UN research institute has said that machine intelligence and robots could destabilize the world, according to reports in the Guardian. The unnerving as-hellfire warning from the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) comes in prior to the opening of Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in The Hague – UN's first center focused on Artificial Intelligence and the conceivable dangers that could emerge from such advances. Featuring the requirement for the workplace in a meeting with Dutch daily paper de Telegraaf, Irakli Beridze, senior key counsel at UNICRI, stated, Artificial Intelligence advancements were related with awesome dangers that need tending to. "In the event that social orders don't adjust rapidly enough, this can cause instability". Be that as it may, a similar innovation has likewise raised plenty of legitimate, moral and societal concerns, some of which may even prove perilous for the prosperity and wellbeing of people – for example, mass unemployment or the ascent of autonomous'killer robots'.

As we hand over more of our lives to artificial intelligence systems, keeping a firm grip on their ethical and societal impact is crucial. For DeepMind, whose stated mission is to "solve intelligence", that task will be the work of a new initiative tackling one of the most fundamental challenges of the digital age: technology is not neutral. DeepMind Ethics & Society (DMES), a unit comprised of both full-time DeepMind employees and external fellows, is the company's latest attempt to scrutinise the societal impacts of the technologies it creates. In development for the past 18 months, the unit is currently made up of around eight DeepMind staffers and six external, unpaid fellows. The full-time team within DeepMind will swell to around 25 people within the next 12 months.

During the height of summer, an open letter to the United Nations warning of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, signed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and more than 100 other entrepreneurs, caused quite a stir in the media and the scientific community. The letter gave rise to a heated digitized debate between the Tesla CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The letter's signatories were alerting the international community about the possible defence applications of AI, and in particular about the threat of lethal autonomous weapons or "killer robots". It is within this context that I wish to address the theme of Artificial Intelligence here at the Women's forum for the Economy & Society Global Meeting in Paris (#WFGM17). The scope of the subject is constantly evolving and we at Thales owe the most recent advances in this domain to a woman at the CNRS / THALES research center in Palaiseau (Researchers unveil the world's first artificial nano-neuron with voice recognition capabilities). To claim that AI could "spell the end of the human race" may grab headlines, but the underlying debate over moral and political limitations on the use of intelligent weapons is legitimate, provided the discussions are clear-headed and dispassionate.

Hot-air balloon pilot Richard Varney typically spends his weekends transporting tourists around central Massachusetts in a huge, multicolored balloon. But on a recent Sunday, Varney drove to a local community college and learned to fly a different type of aerial vehicle. "I want to try something new," he said as he watched an instructor demonstrate how to steer a $2,000 drone equipped with a camera. "This could help me launch a side business taking aerial photos of local towns." At least 15 community colleges across the country now have courses that teach people how to pilot drones, according to research conducted by MIT Technology Review.

Elon Musk, founder, CEO and lead designer at SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla, speaks at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, U.S., July 19, 2017. A revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried. The world's top artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies have used a conference in Melbourne to collectively urge the United Nations to ban killer robots or lethal autonomous weapons. An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world's biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race.

Inferring predictive maps between multiple input and multiple output variables or tasks has innumerable applications in data science. Multi-task learning attempts to learn the maps to several output tasks simultaneously with information sharing between them. We propose a novel multi-task learning framework for sparse linear regression, where a full task hierarchy is automatically inferred from the data, with the assumption that the task parameters follow a hierarchical tree structure. The leaves of the tree are the parameters for individual tasks, and the root is the global model that approximates all the tasks. We apply the proposed approach to develop and evaluate: (a) predictive models of plant traits using large-scale and automated remote sensing data, and (b) GWAS methodologies mapping such derived phenotypes in lieu of hand-measured traits. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to other methods, as well as the usefulness of discovering hierarchical groupings between tasks. Our results suggest that richer genetic mapping can indeed be obtained from the remote sensing data. In addition, our discovered groupings reveal interesting insights from a plant science perspective.

Europe, while making progress, is behind the US and China in capturing the opportunities of artificial intelligence and automation. Digitization is everywhere, but adoption is uneven across companies, sectors, and economies, and the leaders are capturing most of the benefits. Accelerating progress in AI and automation now bring further opportunities for users, businesses, and the economy. Europe, while making progress, is behind the United States and China. This briefing looks at how Europe could capture the digital opportunity and, at the same time, prepare for the future of work. Digital technologies have been evolving and disrupting the way we live, work, and organize for years.