HYDERABAD: At a time when most of the startups are focusing on solving fairly shallow problems, Avishkar, the start-up accelerator programme of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) on Friday took three companies under its wings to encourage entrepreneurs who are into solving deep-tech problems. Screened from about 140 applications across the world, the top three companies are all set to form the first batch of the six-month long programme. The selected startups will now work closely with the Avishkar team and the faculty members of IIIT-H labs and other partners over the next six months to get to a level of investment-readiness that will launch them to the next stage of their journey. "We are a four-month-old company trying to build a virtual personal stylist for women. Through our app, we want to offer all the services that a stylist offers to women. In other words, we want to create artificial intelligence (AI) of a personal stylist. The best part about Avishkar is that unlike many accelerators, the programmes here are personalised for each and every startup and would be helpful for us to grow faster," Komal Prajapati, founder, Fabulyst, said.

Intel is transforming from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices. These devices will use the power of Intel technology to process data being generated from "things," connect to and learn from data being analyzed in the cloud, and deliver amazing new experiences. One of the amazing Internet of Things (IoT) experiences Intel is gearing up to deliver is autonomous driving. Americans spend some 75 billion hours a year driving. Morgan Stanley estimates that self-driving vehicles could deliver 507 billion in annual productivity gains – to cite just one compelling benefit.

As someone on Twitter said, if "bots" was on your Build 2016 drinking game card, you'd be long dead. But while Microsoft is all about getting developers to create intelligent app companions to make our lives easier, is there any impressive machine learning the Redmond firm is ready to show off right now? The answer, surprise, is yes. Besides ordering Domino's pizzas, Microsoft has been tinkering with its Azure-based tools to recognize age, gender, emotion and individuals by name. Remember the great/awful How Old Do I Look? website introduced at last year's Build? The Windows 10 maker has been building off this ego-buster since, and what it's cooked up is far more intelligent – and more flattering – than its earlier iteration.

PAPIs '15, the 2nd International Conference on Predictive APIs and Applications, took place in Sydney, Australia and featured 4 research presentations. The corresponding papers were compiled into proceedings that were published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (Volume 50 of the Workshop & Conference Proceedings series; you can also download the whole proceedings in a single pdf here). The first paper of these proceedings gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Microsoft Azure ML, an MLaaS environment for authoring predictive models, experimenting with them, running them on a cloud infrastructure and publishing them as web APIs. The Azure ML team presents design principles, challenges encountered and lessons learnt while building the platform. While it is common for ML practitioners to measure models' performance via predictions' accuracy, the second paper of these proceedings by Brian Gawalt of Upwork focuses on concerns of software engineers who are in charge of deploying in production and scalability: models' throughput and response time.

A team of CMU researchers led by Associate Professor Anupam Datta have developed new measurement methods that provide important insight into how machine-learning algorithms make decisions about things like credit applications, job opportunities and medical diagnoses. Machine-learning algorithms increasingly make decisions about credit, medical diagnoses, personalized recommendations, advertising and job opportunities, among other things, but exactly how usually remains a mystery. Now, new measurement methods developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers could provide important insights to this process. Was it a person's age, gender or education level that had the most influence on a decision? Was it a particular combination of factors?

If you're one of the 38 million American travelers this Memorial Day weekend, or enjoying one of the 800 hot dogs consumed per second during this holiday, then take a step back, relax and enjoy the week's top technology news! The question of human sustainability and sufficient resources on our planet has served as the basis for many science fiction movies. But unlike Hollywood's'Interstellar' film, our answer might be right here on Earth. AI is showing potential to completely revolutionize farming, and with it keep humanity's food supply coming. What if we could go past what we know as binary computing?

AI & deep learning are powering interactive messaging services known as chatbots & virtual assistants, which use conversational interfaces to create deeper, more personalised one-to-one customer experiences. The Chatbot Track will explore the technical advancements in deep learning, NLP & predictive intelligence to create conversational self-learning bots for messaging platforms, healthcare, personalised services & more.

On May 10, the world-class admin behind John Chambers's success was honored with one of the top awards in her field: Debbie Gross received the Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence. Clearly, Debbie is a force. This CNBC story gives us a peek into her life keeping John at the top of his game. People are rightly saying she's a role model for next-generation administrators. But what people aren't saying is that some next-gen admins are made not of flesh and blood like Debbie but of compute cycles.

May 27--As technologists race to invent the next big thing after the smartphone, many have overlooked what is starting to seem obvious: That the human voice is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, mechanism for controlling the world around us. And, more importantly, speaking is a behavior that doesn't require a user manual. Now, Amazon, Google and Apple are speeding toward a not-too distant future when your voice will dictate commands to a personal assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, and ultimately supplant your PC and phone for most quotidian computing purposes. In other words, your voice -- not a screen -- will become the primary interface for accessing the Internet, and even controlling your home or car. "The entire Silicon Valley startup community was more enamored over virtual reality and augmented reality, and in the process completely overlooked the transformative nature of voice-first technology," said Brian Roemmele, a Temecula-based researcher and consultant in voice-based technologies and online commerce.

Magic Leap is apparently working on a virtual reality technology that's so revolutionary it justifies valuing the company at 4.5 billion, even though almost no one has seen this mysterious tech, or knows exactly what it will do. But according to a lawsuit filed by Magic Leap on May 26 and first uncovered by MIT Technology Review, the company isn't satisfied with working on one of the most talked-about technologies of the year; it also appears to be working on some sort of robot. Magic Leap filed the suit against two former employees, including its head of computer vision and AI work, Gary Bradski, for starting a competing company while still employed by Magic Leap. The suit alleges that the two employees used company time to work on a separate venture for at least a year. The lawsuit contains three references to robotics, and specifically Magic Leap's feelings that whatever Bradski and vice president of special projects Adrian Kaehler were up to competed with Magic Leap's own robotics work: Magic Leap's Proprietary Technologies are not limited to its head-mounted virtual retinal display and extend to many different applications and devices, including, but not limited to, robotics.