A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. We live in a world where facial recognition has become so sophisticated that we're being forced to ask very serious ethical questions about it. In China, it's being used to detect toilet paper theft. But I want to take a step back from the big hairy ethical questions and consider how we started on this road--with typography. Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that came up with computing in general.

The bar for what counts as artificial intelligence is continually rising. Technologies should lose their AI status when they become routine (optical character recognition is no longer recognized as an example of AI for this reason). However, for marketers it's tempting to go in the opposite direction and rebrand all kinds of routine technologies as AI in order to make them sound more exciting and newsworthy. AI was a key theme at this year's Mobile World Congress. One AI-themed announcement was "aia", from telecoms IT giant Amdocs, which claims to enable the "self-driving telco".

In this survey, we conduct an investigation on the robustness of several features and classifiers in automatic authorship attribution. Our corpus consists in 25 different documents written by 5 different American philosophers in English. The different documents pass throw a digital conversion into grey-scaled images and several levels of noise are added to corrupt those image documents. The noise consists in a “Salt & Pepper” type, which is randomly added on the surface of the images with the following noise levels: 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 6% and 7%. Thus, each image goes throw an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition) to extract the text from the image. Then, the obtained text document is kept to be used during the experiments of authorship attribution. Several features and classifiers are employed and evaluated with regards to the classification performances. Results are quite interesting and show that the most robust feature in au-thorship attribution is the character-tetragram, which provides a score of 100% even at a noise level of 7%.

Palo Alto – April 26, 2017: Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced the launch of Infosys Nia, the next-generation Artificial Intelligence Platform building on the success of the Company's first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana, and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge. Together, both these products have amassed 50 clients and 150 engagements across all industry sectors, within a year of operations. Infosys Nia converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management, and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services. As a unified, flexible, and modular platform, Infosys Nia enables a wide set of industry and function-specific solutions and allows customers to build custom experiences to suit their business needs. Infosys' first-generation AI platform was about IT, simplification, efficiency and cost.

IT services provider Infosys on Thursday announced the launch of Infosys Nia, the next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform building on the success of the Company's first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana, and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge. The new platform converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management, and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services. "We have seen tremendous adoption, and indeed, a massive embrace of Mana by our clients, particularly in leveraging Mana to improve service delivery and drive efficiencies and cost performance through automation. But we could clearly see that there was much more potential, an unlimited potential, in bringing AI to our clients' most sophisticated and complex business problems, as they work toward a vision of bringing technology to every aspect of their businesses," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, Chief Executive Officer, Infosys. "Nia, the next generation of our AI platform now takes our purposeful approach to AI, one in which technology serves to amplify people and empowers them to work in new ways, to new heights. When we bring this together with our unmatched ability to educate and train in AI techniques and emerging technologies, we now have the platform, the services and the skills, to deliver new unprecedented value to our clients," he added.

SAN FRANCISCO: Building on the success of its first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge, Infosys on Thursday launched'Infosys Nia', the next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform for businesses. Infosys Nia converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services. "Nia takes our purposeful approach to AI, one in which technology serves to amplify people and empowers them to work in new ways, to new heights," Vishal Sikka, Chief Executive Officer at Infosys, said in a statement. "When we bring this together with our unmatched ability to educate and train in AI techniques and emerging technologies, we now have the platform, the services and the skills, to deliver new unprecedented value to our clients," he added. Infosys Nia, tackles business problems such as forecasting revenues, forecasting what products need to be built, understanding customer behaviour, understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud.

A device that can read people's minds by detecting their brainwaves has been developed in a breakthrough that could eventually enable people with "locked-in syndrome" to communicate. The system was only partially effective with a 90 per cent success rate when trying to recognise numbers from zero to nine and a 61 per cent rate for single syllables in Japanese, the researchers said. But, nonetheless, a statement about the research issued by the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan said it showed that an effective device to read people's thoughts and relay them to others was possible in the "near future". They even suggested an "easily operated" device with a smartphone app could be ready in just five years. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to monitor people's brain waves while they spoke.

If you want to know whether you're at risk of Alzheimer's disease, taking this test could help you. Those unable to tell which character is the odd one out could well be at risk of the devastating illness. Known as Greebles, the little purple characters have been designed by scientists in their ongoing quest for a cure. A study found those at genetic risk of the disease struggle to distinguish a subtle difference in one of the images. But they may be unaware of their likelihood as they are still able to detect minor changes in people's faces, objects and scenes.

James Bedsol interviewed Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism, in his Google office in Mountain View, CA, February 15, 2017. Kurzweil is one of the world's leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is the author of five national best-selling books, including "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind." Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy The Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. After putting in more than 100 hours for research and hands-on testing since 2013, we think the Epson ES-300W is the best portable document scanner for digitizing documents without taking up half of a desktop. It combines scan speeds usually found on full-size scanners with extremely accurate text recognition. And thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi and battery, you can use it almost anywhere--even with a phone or tablet. The reason for buying a portable document scanner is fairly straightforward.