A US software firm which chose Singapore for the world's first public trial of driverless taxis hopes to be operating in 10 Asian and US cities by 2020, an executive said Monday. Doug Parker, nuTonomy's chief operating officer, said the firm is eyeing tests by early next year in three other Asian countries which he declined to name. He said an announcement of the test venues would be made within the next month or so. The company last week kicked off the world's first driverless taxi service in a limited trial for invited people in a Singapore research campus. Parker, 41, said nuTonomy was also considering trials in the Middle East, the United States and Britain.

NEW DELHI: While artificial intelligence is making waves globally, Cognitive Business Intelligence (BI) is the next stage of machine learning to design and analyse unstructured data, video, images and human language, say experts. According to them, we are generating data but is this data being analysed to create insights which could help in running businesses more effectively is the real concern for businesses. "This potential can be leveraged using Business Intelligence. Using BI, we can understand what really the data means," said Nikhilesh Tiwari, Co-Founder, Helical Insight, the world's first open source Business Intelligence (BI) framework. At the moment, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analysed and used globally.

An Indian bank is planning to get a robot to greet its walk-in customers. Call it giving your service, um, a robotic touch. The robot, which is being piloted by India's second largest private bank by assets, HDFC Bank, will assist customers with common tasks like withdrawing or transferring money or just finding the relevant department to get their task done. The robot is reportedly a part of the bank's "Project AI" program. The unnamed humanoid will come equipped with a touchscreen display which customers could use to input their query.

In an effort to deepen and advance its knowledge in artificial intelligence, Denso has entered into a technical advisory contract with one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Dr Takeo Kanade. Through this contract, Denso is looking to advance its artificial intelligence technology and expand its engineering expertise in the areas of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous drive, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Dr Kanade, a UA and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Robotics and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, will provide technical guidance to Denso engineers on image recognition and machine learning, and will also speak at lectures and seminars organized by Denso for a variety of purposes, such as recruiting, relationship building, and so on. These activities will be held mostly in Japan. Dr Kanade and Denso have worked together from 2002-2009 on a joint research of image recognition technology.

It's not a breaking news that robots are slowing overtaking most of the human jobs. But, it surely is a news that a robot is now soon going to start greeting you at the HDFC Bank. Following the footsteps of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, HDFC is now going to use a robot to enhance user experience as well as to ease a lot of their work. The name of the robot is finalized by the bank but isn't announced yet. Also, the bank is planning to introduce these robots in their Mumbai branches first for testing.

New Delhi, Aug 29 (IANS) While artificial intelligence is making waves globally, Cognitive Business Intelligence (BI) is the next stage of machine learning to design and analyse unstructured data, video, images and human language, say experts. According to them, we are generating data but is this data being analysed to create insights which could help in running businesses more effectively is the real concern for businesses. "This potential can be leveraged using Business Intelligence. Using BI, we can understand what really the data means," said Nikhilesh Tiwari, Co-Founder, Helical Insight, the world's first open source Business Intelligence (BI) framework. At the moment, less than 0.5 per cent of all data is ever analysed and used globally.

MUMBAI: In order to understand its effects on the finance and accounting industry, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, (CIMA) the world's leading and largest UK based professional body, conducted a global survey across select European, African and Asian countries. A majority of financial leaders are of the opinion that artificial intelligence helps enhance efficiency and accuracy of the business. This recent global study reveals that more than two-thirds (64%) of finance professionals from India encourage increasing automation as it saves time, money and helps ease the indecision process in their organisations. At a global level, Zimbabwe tops the chart with (75%) professionals supporting automation, followed by China with a 67% of acceptance. This indicates that accountants regard the impact of new technologies as an opportunity rather than a threat.

A new technique using artificial intelligence to read satellite images could aid efforts to eradicate global poverty by indicating where help is needed most, a team of U.S. researchers say. The method would assist governments and charities trying to fight poverty but lacking precise and reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, the researchers based at Stanford University in California said. Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than 1.25 a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals adopted by United Nations member states last year. A team of computer scientists and satellite experts created a self-updating world map to locate poverty, said Marshall Burke, assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Earth System Science. It uses a computer algorithm that recognizes signs of poverty through a process called machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, he said.

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China's biggest search engine, Baidu, announced it will use Intel's Xeon Phi processor when the processor's release plan was disclosed on August 17 at Intel's annual developer forum in San Francisco. "When it comes to AI (artificial intelligence), Intel's Xeon Phi is a great fit," said Jing Wang, a senior vice president of Baidu, who joined Diane Bryant, executive vice president in charge of Intel's data center group, at the forum. Intel said Xeon Phi will help accelerate deep learning, a computerized technique increasingly used for tasks such as interpreting speech, identifying objects in photos and piloting autonomous vehicles. Baidu, having researched the application of artificial intelligence for years, is considering using the new chip to support its voice recognition system, called Deep Speech. Deep Speech is based on the collection of 7,000 hours of voice clips created by 9,600 people.