Mumbai: Leading private sector lenders such as HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank are experimenting with robotics and artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and stand out in a market where banks are becoming more and more standardised in terms of technology and services offered to customers. While HDFC Bank launched its humanoid Ira in January to assist customers at a Mumbai branch, ICICI Bank said in September 2016 that it was using robotics to reduce repetitive work for employees, allowing them to be delegated to duties requiring human interaction and involvement. Developed by Kochi-based Asimov Robotics, the humanoid Ira is currently deployed at HDFC Bank's Kamala Mills branch in Mumbai. In the next two years, the bank aims to introduce about 15-20 such humanoids across branches in India. The humanoids will primarily be stationed at welcome desks and will guide customers to relevant counters.

In this week's episode, Stewart and Travis discover that AI and chatbots are a roller coaster. On the ride to the top, a new bot marketing company promises to close the loop and help chatbots pay their way, while on the rapid drop Facebook is pulling back from chatbots after news of massive failure rates. Our interview this week is with the irrepressible Olga Kay, one of the original YouTube stars and founder of MooshWalks, who teaches us a thing or two about how to find your niche and leverage it for incredible success. It's an interview you won't want to miss. Next week, we interview the one and only Michael Stelzner, the editor of Social Media Examiner and the organizer of Social Media Marketing World, which is later this week in San Diego.

This work introduces my initial experiment to study Artificial Perception in Self-Driving technology. Vehicle Artificial Perception is known as a capability that helps Self-driving cars to understand the surrounding environment through a computer based-system. The system can consist of several different sensors such as Cameras, Lidar, Radar, GPS, IMU...to gather information around the car. An intelligent software then processes the data collected from the sensors to recognize and classify surrounding objects such as cars, humans, road marks, traffic signs.... Based on the understanding of the detected objects, the intelligent software can predict behavior and plan appropriate reactions according to the situations. Creating such an intelligent software has been a challenge for Artificial Intelligence researchers for decades. However, Deep Learning has recently offered a promising solution in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in which Deep Learning software has the ability to learn to create its own Artificial Neural Networks.

The financial services industry has been using artificial intelligence for decades in trading, and as the technology gets smarter it's being tested more often with payments as well. "There's an increasing trend around using AI around financial payments," said Sumeet Vermani, a global marketing leader working for fintech providers such as Red Box Recorders, a company that records communication, in the financial services industry for compliance. Financial institutions and payment providers are looking for ways to utilize AI in a number of areas, including customer interaction and fraud detection. The most popular application of AI in financial services -- and perhaps the most limited -- is the chatbot, a program that converses with customers through text or speech. In financial services, chatbots are usually used to make the first interaction with a customer, answering questions or directing customers to an area of the website.

Andrew Ng, a leading figure in the world of artificial intelligence, is leaving his post as chief scientist at China's Baidu and says he wants to find ways of advancing AI beyond the technology world. Ng is known for playing a leading role in formulating the AI strategy of both Baidu and Google. He says is leaving the Chinese company on good terms and simply wants to find a new challenge. "I've decided to step away from this role while everything is going well and look at some other things," he told MIT Technology Review. "I don't know precisely what I'll do, but I think AI offers a lot of opportunities, not just at big companies like Baidu but for entrepreneurs, and for advancing basic research," Ng added.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Baidu Inc chief scientist Andrew Ng said on Wednesday he will resign from the Chinese search engine company after three years of leading its drive into artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) projects.

The amount of digital data that currently exists is now growing at a rapid pace. The number is doubling every two years and it is completely transforming our basic mode of existence. According to a paper from IBM, about 2.5 billion gigabytes of data had been generated on a daily basis in the year 2012. Another article from Forbes informs us that data is growing at a pace which is faster than ever. The same article suggests that by the year 2020, about 1.7 billion of new information will be developed per second for all the human inhabitants on this planet. As data is growing at a faster pace, new terms associated with processing and handling data are coming up.

"90% of the world's supercomputers run on Intel technology," Diane Bryant tells me at SxSW. "And 95% of artificial intelligence solutions run on Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors." Bryant is an Intel veteran who joined the semiconductor giant right after getting an electrical engineering degree from U.C. Davis. Starting a a microprocessor design engineer, she quickly worked her way up the ranks, spending 4 years as Intel's CIO before moving on to lead their Data Center Group. With recent acquisitions of Nervana and Mobileye, Intel is building a solid position in the A.I. wars. Every major tech company in Silicon Valley, along with every automotive giant from Detroit, is battling to gain ground in self-learning and self-driving technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is simultaneously overhyped, misunderstood, and already hugely impactful, according to Pegasystems CTO Don Schuerman, who said many organisations were already successfully using the technology before it became an industry buzzword. Schuerman told ZDNet that he has been encouraging his clients to take a look at what pragmatic AI technologies they can employ to deliver real benefits to how they interact with customers, rather than succumbing to the hype. The best example is what the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is doing, he said. "They've got Pegasystems' product called the Customer Decision Hub, which uses predictive analytics and adaptive or self-learning analytics to figure out in real time what the best offer or service is, or recommendations are, to put in front of a customer either to improve their satisfaction rate and retention rate, for example," he explained. In implementing the technology, CBA has increased its branch sell rates by 13 percent, which Schuerman said is a significant impact to the business.

The'artificially intelligent' future needs regulation and human creativity, according to tech pioneer Inma Martinez, who will speak at the Inspirefest Salon in London this week. The computers are taking over! With headlines declaring that supercomputers can now beat expert humans in complex strategic games and can even chug through the medical literature to diagnose disease, it's easy to believe we are on the cusp of science-fiction becoming fact as artificial intelligence gets a mind of its own. But for technology pioneer and data scientist Inma Martinez, the precipitous rise of fast and flashy artificial intelligence (AI) comes as no surprise. We are now'almost vertical' in the exponential growth in AI technology, and she stresses the need to regulate the AI industry, but reassures that as the computers get even'smarter' we will still need human creativity.