SK Telecom has completed the development of the smart braille educating system running on its Nugu voice-activated artificial intelligence (AI) speaker to help the visually impaired learn braille much more easily, the company said Monday. The nation's top mobile carrier has cooperated with Ohfa Tech, a developer of the braille teaching device, Taptilo. The telecom company will offer 110 devices to schools for the blind and households within the month and verify the effectiveness of the system in cooperation with Kangnam University. The number of people who are visually impaired is estimated at about 300,000 in Korea, and 95 percent of these people are not able to read braille due to the shortage of specialist teachers, according to SK Telecom. The development of the braille educating system utilizing the AI speaker is expected to lower barriers to education for the visually impaired through innovative technology, it said.

Chinese technology giant Huawei has launched its data center AI chip, the Ascend 910, to step up its challenge to US-based chipmakers, according to CNBC. The company first announced the new product alongside another chipset, the Ascend 310, in October 2018, as it sought to build up its enterprise services business. But as it faces further pressure from the US on a number of fronts, Huawei's new endeavors could transform the company from a phone manufacturer and networking supplier into an even wider tech provider. Here's what it means: Huawei's Ascend 910 is the company's first challenge to the likes of Qualcomm and Nvidia as it seeks to get its chip designs into data centers. AI is in high demand across the enterprise space, and companies are setting up private server racks to perform these operations, along with using public cloud systems.

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, DEWA, held a strategic summit with Huawei to increase cooperation on investments and to exchange the best global solutions, experiences, and practices in innovation, disruptive technologies, smart grids, digital transformation, automation, cloud platforms, and Artificial Intelligence, AI. The summit was attended by Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, Managing Director and CEO of DEWA, and Charles Yang, President of the Middle East Region at Huawei Technologies. The summit witnessed the launch of a joint AI laboratory, through which DEWA and Huawei will develop and implement AI digital services for the Middle East. The two sides also launched a training and development programme for DEWA staff in different areas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and disruptive technologies. "DEWA supports the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, who instructed the Dubai Government to deliver services that are 10 years ahead of other cities, and to work under the leadership of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of Dubai Executive Council, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation, and H.H. Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai. These directives have guided DEWA's strategy to shape the future and enhance its role in serving the community to become a leading global, sustainable, and innovative corporation," said Al Tayer.

Due to the popularity of context-awareness in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the recent advanced features in the most popular IoT device, i.e., smartphone, modeling and predicting personalized usage behavior based on relevant contexts can be highly useful in assisting them to carry out daily routines and activities. Usage patterns of different categories smartphone apps such as social networking, communication, entertainment, or daily life services related apps usually vary greatly between individuals. People use these apps differently in different contexts, such as temporal context, spatial context, individual mood and preference, work status, Internet connectivity like Wifi? status, or device related status like phone profile, battery level etc. Thus, we consider individuals' apps usage as a multi-class context-aware problem for personalized modeling and prediction. Random Forest learning is one of the most popular machine learning techniques to build a multi-class prediction model. Therefore, in this paper, we present an effective context-aware smartphone apps prediction model, and name it "AppsPred" using random forest machine learning technique that takes into account optimal number of trees based on such multi-dimensional contexts to build the resultant forest. The effectiveness of this model is examined by conducting experiments on smartphone apps usage datasets collected from individual users. The experimental results show that our AppsPred significantly outperforms other popular machine learning classification approaches like ZeroR, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression while predicting smartphone apps in various context-aware test cases.

Huawei said on Friday it expects to lose $10 billion (£8bn) in revenues this year to sanctions imposed by the US in May, lower than an earlier estimate of $30bn. The company made the remarks as it unveiled a new AI chip and computing framework as part of broader efforts to phase out its reliance on technology made in the US. Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu said the company was doing "much better" than initially feared, but that a sales "reduction of more than $10bn could happen". The company's revenues gained a boost from domestic sales, which surged by nearly one-third year-on-year in the June quarter. In May the US placed Huawei on a national security "entity list" that prevents US firms from trading with it, and while it has thus far imposed a series of delays that have prevented the sanctions from taking place, the uncertainty has led to a steep drop in Huawei's global sales.

Huawei announced the commercial availability of an artificial intelligence (AI) chip Friday, pitting it against major American giants like Qualcomm and Nvidia, as it looks to defy continued U.S. pressure and prove it can still bring out core technology. The chip, called the Ascend 910, was first unveiled in October last year and is aimed at data centers. Companies using AI applications require huge amounts of data to train smart algorithms, which can take several days or weeks. Huawei claims that its chip can process more data in a faster amount of time than its competitors and help train networks in a matter of minutes. "We have been making steady progress since we announced our AI strategy in October last year," Eric Xu, one of Huawei's rotating chairmen, said in a press release.

After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine learning framework MindSpore. Huawei says the Ascend 910 is the world's fastest AI processor, packing twice the performance of rival Nvidia's Tesla v100. Billed as the single chip with the greatest computing density, Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W. In comparison, the GPU Tesla V100 delivers up to 125 teraFLOPS with a max power consumption of 300W, while Google's TPU 2.0 with four ASICs can reach 180 teraFLOPS. Ascend 910 is designed for deep learning training, and targets users such data scientists, researchers and engineers.

Huawei released a new white paper earlier this month, detailing its tech predictions for the upcoming years. Notably, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is believed by the firm to undergo several advancements in the next five years, with a massive increase in the usage of AI, particularly in the enterprise sector. The Shenzhen giant has introduced AI-based products in the past as well, conforming to its vision for the future. Today, the Chinese firm reached a major milestone in its AI roadmap, announcing Ascend 910, the "world's most powerful AI processor", and MindSpore, an AI computing framework. With this launch, the firm has unveiled all the key components of its full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio.

China is currently testing self-driving and connected vehicles in a mountain highway in eastern Shandong province, South China Morning Post reported. The local Qilu Transportation Development Group earmarked a 26-kilometer-long highway for autonomous driving and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, in cooperation with partners including Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies and China Mobile, one of the country's largest mobile operators. The test section is a mountain highway with three tunnels, a bridge and three toll stations, providing different testing scenarios, according to the report. Equipment such as road sensors, laser and microwave radars, panoramic video surveillance, were tested. Tests also include weather monitoring and traffic signs that can communicate with vehicles.

One industry that's always been at the cutting edge of technology is telecommunications. If we consider some of the breakthroughs made in human achievements, the most significant involve communication technology – from wired telegraph relays crossing vast continents to the invention of the telephone, to the world-crossing internet and the ubiquitous mobile phone. The need to communicate being at the heart of human behavior means that modern communications service providers (CSPs) operate in a highly competitive market; everyone needs to connect. Unless companies can find differentiation from one another, the technology that underpins the many services (like landlines, internet and mobile) is interchangeable, for businesses and consumers alike. After all, changing one's cellphone provider can be as simple as flicking a software toggle switch in a phone's settings to use SIM B, not SIM A. Retaining profitability is essential for CSPs as it is in every other vertical, of course, and with a saturated market that's based on technology, the challenges in the sector are very specific.