New Delhi – April 04, 2016: Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Infosys, today announced that it will provide a corpus grant worth INR 24 crore over the next three years to the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi to establish the Infosys Center for Artificial Intelligence in its Okhla campus. The center will initially be headed by Dr. Srikanth Saripalli, an expert in robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), currently spending his sabbatical at IIIT-Delhi. The center will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and focus on areas such as, robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics, etc. Several faculty members of IIIT-Delhi will be associated with the center, and research will be conducted by PhD scholars, post-docs, students, and visiting researchers. Sudha Murty, Chairperson, Infosys Foundation "Research is the backbone of our national scientific advancements – our collective aspiration.

The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

A version of Windows 10 is now the operating system of choice--or maybe, not by choice--for Steam users. According to Valve's Steam hardware and software survey for March 2016, Windows 10 (64-bit) is installed on 36.97 percent of all devices running Steam. That's a gain of 2.96 percent from February, and it pushes the OS past Windows 7 (64-bit), which fell to 32.99 percent last month. Overall, Windows 7 still has a slight edge if you factor in both 64-bit and 32-bit installations. Combined, Windows 7 accounts for 39.96 percent of Steam installs, compared to 38.28 percent for Windows 10.

In a span of two and a half hours, Microsoft packed a lot into the opening keynote of its Build 2016 conference. But it was the last video shown that seem to have the biggest impact on many of the viewers at home: the introduction of an AI that helps one of its blind developers "see." At the very end of its keynote, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reiterated that he wants technology to enhance the ways humans communicate. Though the many chat bots he introduced earlier seems technologically "smart," the framework behind it still needs the help of developers to continue improving on what has already been built. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet!

Deep neural networks (DNN), like Google's DeepMind or the IBM Watson, are amazing machines. They can be taught to do many mental tasks like a human, and they represent our best shot to actual artificial intelligence. The challenge has always been training and teaching these machines. For most of the tasks they have to do, the machines tie up big-ticket supercomputers or data centers for days at a time. But scientists from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center are poised to change all that.

Cloud application vendor Apttus is launching a new version of its quote-to-cash suite of applications that applies artificial intelligence from the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning service to help guide sales people to achieve higher performance. Launched today at the Microsoft Envision conference, the full suite of products is also notable for being available native on Azure as well as on the Salesforce platform. There are many customers, especially in Europe, that have no Salesforce presence and that really need quote-to-cash. Called the Apttus Intelligent Cloud, the new product applies artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies to discover and dynamically recommend actions that will help sales people increase the size and speed of deals. Apttus currently has six customers live with the new capabilities.

The Amazon Echo product line grew recently with the launch of the Amazon Tap and Echo Dot. This expands Alexa into a full platform with solutions to appeal to a range of prospective buyers. The more interesting of the two, the Amazon Tap crams a fully functioning Echo into a portable Bluetooth speaker. The more I use the Tap the better I like it, although it's not as satisfying an experience as that of the Amazon Echo. The Echo is still the most-used gadget in my home so the Tap has some big shoes to fill.

According to documents seen by AP, the committee has divided drones into four separate categories for flights over people. The first includes drones under a half-pound with no flight restrictions. However, the manufacturer would have to certify that there would be no more than one percent chance of a person being hurt if it fell on them. The second category is for the most common type of recreational and commercial models by the likes of DJI (above), 3D Robotics and others. Those range from four to five pounds in size, though there would be no set weight limit, according to the AP.

Today, Kinema Systems, a robotics startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., is coming out of stealth mode to announce Kinema Pick, which is "the world's first self-training, self-calibrating software solution for robotic depalletizing." I know, it sounds a little dry, but they have a convincingly cool demo, and we have lots of details on how the system works (and why it's important) from Kinema co-founder and CEO Sachin Chitta. Depalletizing is the task of picking up boxes of stuff off of shipping pallets and doing something with them. If this sounds like a task that should be easy and useful to automate with an industrial robot arm, that's because it is, with the caveat that it's only easy if you get the same pallets with the same boxes on them over and over again. E-commerce companies are getting pallets with all kinds of random boxes tightly jammed on there however they'll fit, which is too much variability for most robots to handle.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display