Mumbai: As pro vice-chancellor (product and partner development) of the University of Sunderland in the UK, Prof. John MacIntyre's brief includes covering research, innovation, knowledge exchange, employer engagement and regional economy. Since 1996, MacIntyre has also been the editor-in-chief of Neural Computing and Applications--an international scientific peer- reviewed journal published by Springer Verlag. In an interview, he talks about why artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be looked at more positively and how AI can contribute to society. MacIntyre will also address EmTech India 2017--an emerging tech conference organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review--on 9 March in New Delhi. You completed your PhD in applied AI, focussing on the use of neural networks in predictive maintenance.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). It is why Google and Facebook now let you search inside your photos, and it has unlocked new applications for facial recognition. Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. He says there's still progress to be made--and that it could lead to software with common sense.

The Microsoft Azure ML team recently announced the availability of 3 ML templates on the Azure ML Studio – for online fraud detection, retail forecasting and text classification. These templates demonstrate industry best practices and common building blocks used in an ML solution for a specific domain, starting from data preparation, data processing, feature engineering, model training to model deployment (as a web service) . The goal for Azure ML templates is to make data scientists more productive and faster in building and deploying their custom ML solutions on the cloud. Templates include a collection of pre-configured Azure ML modules as well as custom R scripts in the Execute R Script modules to enable an end-to-end solution. We'll walk through these templates in detail in this and future webinars.

I'm proud and excited to share that Kaggle is joining Google Cloud! Seven years ago, we launched our first ever competition, to predict the voting patterns for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was won by Jure Zbontar, who beat 21 teams to win the $1000 prize. Since then, the Kaggle community has used machine learning to grade high school essays, diagnose heart failure and increase the discovery significance of the Higgs Boson. Geoff Hinton and George Dahl showed the power of deep neural networks on a Merck competition and Tianqi Chen used Kaggle Kernels to introduce the community to XGBoost. Kaggle profiles have become a well recognized credential, with community members landing jobs at companies ranging from DeepMind to Walmart.

Alphabet Inc's Google is making progress in taking on cloud computing leaders Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, executives said on March 8, as the search engine company stakes more of its future on the cloud as a new source of growth. At a conference in San Francisco, Google cloud computing chief Diane Greene ticked off a host of new clients, including HSBC, Colgate, Verizon and eBay. The company also announced it had acquired Kaggle, a popular platform for data scientists that could boost Google's edge in the crowded field of artificial intelligence. Despite the announcements, analysts said Google remains a distant third in the market for cloud computing, the increasingly popular practice of using remote internet servers to store, manage and process data.

Hiring one data scientist could cost your organization around $100,000 per year, but with Salesforce Einstein, you may not need to budget for that role just yet. On Tuesday, Salesforce Einstein – the CRM giant's foray into baked-in artificial intelligence – was launched in general availability, months after Salesforce first launched Einstein at Dreamforce in October. This week Salesforce unveiled more specifics around what AI can do for its customers and partners, providing case studies and customer perspectives at an event in its San Francisco office that was live streamed on its website. "Now everyone has a data scientist," a senior engineer at Salesforce told the audience of investors and customers on Tuesday, describing how Salesforce Einstein leverages data from its email, CRM and social that it has collected "from the very beginning." The idea behind Einstein, according to Jim Sinai, VP of Salesforce Einstein Marketing, is that Salesforce is "democratizing artificial intelligence and putting it inside of every single CRM feature so that everyone has a data scientist in their day."

"Kaggle is going to maintain independent brand for a while... what Kaggle has contributed to the community is democratisation of data, developer community... partnership with Kaggle is going to be very positive for us," said Chief Scientist Google Cloud (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Fei Fei Li here. Founded in 2010, Kaggle is home to the world's largest community of data scientists and machine-learning enthusiasts. More than 8 lakh data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyse and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics. "We are providing them best technology to take advantage of Google Cloud, libraries etc," she said. "We must lower the barriers of entry to AI (artificial intelligence) and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises so that they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission," she pointed out.

There has been a lot of activity recently around revenue attribution - marketers want to develop a better understanding of their customer acquisition funnel and be able to measure progress against it. Most of this attention has been focused on the B2C space. However, less work has been done measuring the performance of B2B marketing activities. While Salesforce is an excellent platform for managing leads and campaigns, their business model is founded on developing a sales and marketing ecosystem comprising partnerships with specialist vendors that can provide more focused solutions to specific sales and marketing issues. As a result, companies such as Full Circle Insights, Bright Funnel and Bizable have emerged to fill the void in B2B marketing attribution by leveraging the Salesforce platform.

The Cloud Video Intelligence API is now in a private beta, meaning companies will get their hands on it long before you can use it to hunt down esoterica on YouTube. At this point, it is an enterprise solution, a deep-learning tool built on frameworks like TensorFlow that companies can use to parse through their stored videos and extract metadata. If you wanted to hunt through your vast media collection to hunt down "tiger," for example, you'd get a result like this: The API searches for "entities" like nouns found in videos and indicates when that object appears. It can even detect when scenes change. Companies have must store their media on Google Cloud Storage to run the annotating software, but getting onboard with their cloud suite would be a decent idea, given that Apple, Evernote and Spotify started using the search giant's Cloud platform this year.

Leafsnap is an electronic field guide app available in North Eastern America, Canada and the UK developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution. The app uses visual recognition algorithms, derived from machine learning facial recognition techniques and allows users to identify species of trees from pictures of their leaves. The imaging system takes into consideration other signifiers such as flowers, fruits, and bark. The datasets available with Leafsnap includes 185 tree species, 23,147 lab images, and 7,719 field images, which are set to grow as the app develops. As stated on their website, Leafsnap aims to'build an ever-greater awareness of and appreciation for biodiversity.'