The global scientific community has come a long way since the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a concept to its modern-day appeal as a field with near-limitless potential in turning around the way activities are performed in society. The ultimate frontier for AI systems continues to be achieving a level of sophistication that matches that of the human mind. There appears to be a lot of optimism around the potential of AI in enhancing government initiatives such as Make in India, Skill India, and Digital India which have put India on the path of a technological revolution. Since the effectiveness of AI, machine learning, robotics and cognitive automation increases with a rise in the quality and quantity of training data that the systems are exposed to, conditions are ripe for India to leverage Big Data for intelligent decisions and emerge as a leader in AI. AI techniques can be applied in large-scale public initiatives ranging from crop insurance schemes to tax fraud detection to enhancing our security strategy.

Some of the world's best-known brands have invested millions of dollars in information security. But malicious actors are counting on the fact that your defenses are operated mostly by humans and tend to be the same across the board. When you moved into your neighborhood, did you change your locks or do you have the exact same ones as all your neighbors? Think about what could happen if a thief compromised just one of those shared locks? For some reason, the world of information security has a same-lock mentality.

Brexit is well and truly happening and ever since the EU Referendum vote was passed, UK financial services have been predicting and estimating how much of an impact leaving the European Union will have on traditional banking and to what extent they will ...

WASHINGTON – House Republican Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy says veterans need more educational opportunities that meet the demands of the fast-paced technology industry. The California lawmaker is introducing legislation Thursday giving the Department of Veterans Affairs $75 million to start a pilot program to provide accelerated computer courses in everything from robotics and basic programming to artificial intelligence and virtual reality. McCarthy, who is second-in-command to the House speaker, said the GI bill doesn't cover many such courses and the VA approval process for changing curriculums or course offerings creates bureaucratic delays that are not conducive to the quickly changing technology fields. Under his proposal, veterans, instead of going to a traditional college -- or in addition to a traditional degree -- could get a shorter-term nano degree or micro credential. "And they could be in the work force right away and be a major asset," McCarthy told USA TODAY.

First IBM's Watson supercomputer took on Jeopardy and now it's ready to do your taxes. Or, so the TV ads running in heavy rotation these days would have you believe. Fact is, folks walking into their local tax preparer's office will not be handing over their W-2s to R2-D2 anytime soon. However, H&R Block's much-hyped partnership with IBM has shed some light on what the real role of artificial intelligence will be in the business world. In a nutshell, H&R Block has installed computer screens on its preparers' desks that are powered by IBM Watson.

LONDON • Machines or software may eventually replace a third of graduate-level jobs worldwide, with legal frameworks for regulating employment and safety becoming rapidly outdated, says a new report by the International Bar Association (IBA), a global forum for the legal profession set up in 1947. The innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics could force governments to order quotas of human workers, upend traditional working practices and pose new dilemmas for insuring driverless cars, says the report, released this week. The IBA's survey found that the previous manufacturing model of poorer, emerging economies having a competitive advantage due to cheaper workforces will soon be eroded by robot production lines and intelligent computer systems. To illustrate, a German car worker costs more than £40 (S$70) an hour, but a robot costs only between £5 and £8 an hour. "A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China," the report notes.

The Gibbs sampler is a particularly popular Markov chain used for learning and inference problems in Graphical Models (GMs). These tasks are computationally intractable in general, and the Gibbs sampler often suffers from slow mixing. In this paper, we study the Swendsen-Wang dynamics which is a more sophisticated Markov chain designed to overcome bottlenecks that impede the Gibbs sampler. We prove O(\log n) mixing time for attractive binary pairwise GMs (i.e., ferromagnetic Ising models) on stochastic partitioned graphs having n vertices, under some mild conditions, including low temperature regions where the Gibbs sampler provably mixes exponentially slow. Our experiments also confirm that the Swendsen-Wang sampler significantly outperforms the Gibbs sampler when they are used for learning parameters of attractive GMs.

Classical stochastic gradient methods for optimization rely on noisy gradient approximations that become progressively less accurate as iterates approach a solution. The large noise and small signal in the resulting gradients makes it difficult to use them for adaptive stepsize selection and automatic stopping. We propose alternative "big batch" SGD schemes that adaptively grow the batch size over time to maintain a nearly constant signal-to-noise ratio in the gradient approximation. The resulting methods have similar convergence rates to classical SGD, and do not require convexity of the objective. The high fidelity gradients enable automated learning rate selection and do not require stepsize decay. Big batch methods are thus easily automated and can run with little or no oversight.

Tucked into a state budget bill approved by lawmakers this week is a measure allowing autonomous vehicles on New York's highways, but it's limited to testing or demonstrations. A decades-old state law requiring drivers to keep at least one hand on the wheel has kept self-driving cars off of the state's roadways, despite Google and major automakers like Toyota and Volkswagen lobbying for a change in recent years. The budget measure changes that for autonomous car testing, while requiring all tests happen under the "direct supervision of the New York State Police." Related:Daimler's Mercedes, Bosch to deliver self-driving car by 2021 Related:Automakers seek relief on states' self-driving car laws A licensed driver must be in the car when it's on the road. The state Department of Motor Vehicles, meanwhile, has to approve any entity that wants to test the vehicles.

On this week's Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics discuss the mysterious new podcast S-Town, from the creators of Serial and This American Life, centered around a brilliant clock repairer stranded in an Alabama town. The podcast improves upon the Serial format--but is it satisfying? Next, Aisha Harris joins the show to talk about Ghost in the Shell, an adaptation of the 1995 anime movie of the same name. The film has drawn criticism for casting Scarlett Johansson as an originally Japanese character, but are the movie's problems the result of whitewashing, or is it just plain bad? Finally, the gabbers cover the controversy of Mike Pence's refusal to eat alone with any woman who is not his wife.