Pakistan's military said on Thursday morning that the country's air defence system had brought down 25 Indian drones overnight over some of the country's chief cities, including Lahore and Karachi. At least one civilian has died, and five people were wounded, it said. India's Defence Ministry confirmed hours later that it had targeted Pakistan's air defence radars and claimed that it was able to "neutralize" one defence system in Lahore. It said Pakistan had attempted to attack India and Indian-administered Kashmir with drones and missiles overnight, but that these had been shot down. The drone attacks represent the latest escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbours, a day after India launched deadly missile strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing at least 31 people, according to Islamabad.

In recent months, the Internet has been set ablaze with the introduction for the public beta of ChatGPT. People across the world shared their thoughts on such an incredible development. ChatGPT relies on a subsection of machine learning, called large language models, that have already shown to be both immensely useful and potentially dangerous. I have sat down with an artificial intelligence and machine learning expert, Martynas Juravičius, from Oxylabs, a premium proxy and public web data-acquisition solution provider, and members of the company's AI advisory board, Adi Andrei and Ali Chaudhry, to discuss the importance of such models and how they may shape our future. Gary Drenik: What is a "large language model" and why are they so important going forward?

The recently signed customer experience executive order will help agencies refocus efforts to deploy artificial intelligence across critical services, the director of federal AI implementations said Wednesday. Within 120 days, the Office of Management and Budget must coordinate guidance on improving data sharing among agencies with interagency councils like the Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers councils. Speaking Wednesday at an AFFIRM webinar, Anil Chaudhry said the order is expected to support the AI Center of Excellence at the General Services Administration with its work helping agencies to implement technologies such as bots and interactive voice response systems. "That is really about focusing data and analytics efforts in a very structured way to make sure that the high-impact federal services are the ones being addressed first," Chaudhry said, during and AFFIRM webinar. "And the second aspect of that is: How do we reduce the cognitive burden on the federal workforce?"

Advancing trustworthy AI and machine learning to mitigate agency risk is a priority for the US Department of Energy (DOE), and identifying best practices for implementing AI at scale is a priority for the US General Services Administration (GSA). That's what attendees learned in two sessions at the AI World Government live and virtual event held in Alexandria, Va. last week. Pamela Isom, Director of the AI and Technology Office at the DOE, who spoke on Advancing Trustworthy AI and ML Techniques for Mitigating Agency Risks, has been involved in proliferating the use of AI across the agency for several years. With an emphasis on applied AI and data science, she oversees risk mitigation policies and standards and has been involved with applying AI to save lives, fight fraud, and strengthen the cybersecurity infrastructure. She emphasized the need for the AI project effort to be part of a strategic portfolio.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Minister of Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry on Friday lauded the United Arab Emirates' plans to launch the world's first university of artificial intelligence, expressing Islamabad's interest in collaborating on the project. Earlier this month, Abu Dhabi announced the opening of the first dedicated AI university. The Mohammad Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) will open its doors on September 2020. Chaudhary said Pakistan also had a center of excellence on artificial intelligence and "would like to join hands with the UAE university to enhance the capabilities of our people in the field". "UAE was the first country which established a proper ministry for artificial intelligence in 2017," the minister told Arab News in a phone interview from China where he is on a six-day official visit.

When it comes to adopting the shiniest, newest technologies, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Regulatory Audit Systems and Innovation can't always be on the "bleeding edge of things," its Director Anil Chaudhry says. "At least until we know the market has proven the technologies and that the government has the capacity to absorb that model in a secure manner," he says. Chaudhry's organization is in the "post-entry space," meaning a container has already cleared the port and products have already been sold and distributed before his division gets involved. So, they look at the internal controls and regulatory compliance programs of all the companies, and Chaudhry says some of those companies are using artificial intelligence, but face causation correlation problems where they're building their biases into that AI. Considering the scope of what CBP does, correlating people with places with things and instruments, "you draw the wrong correlations, people's' lives are impacted," Chaudhry says.

Artificial Intelligence is set to change the dimensions of anything and everything in the coming days. Machine learning techniques are going to handle a lot of things with far better excellence and accuracy than the humans. Media industry was buzzing when US-based The New York Times and China-based Southern Metropolis publications made use of the robots to run pilot programs. However, an India-based company NewsBytes has worked on a bot called Yantra which by using the machine learning technology will deliver contextual news and reports to the users. The AI-engine of the company termed as'Brahmastra', their in-house engine uses natural language processing techniques and has an inverted'Question-Answering' system developed by the company which has dedicated questions and different sets of answers.

I like to keep up with how cognitive computing is doing in the marketplace and came across a TedMedLive Talk by Basit Chaudhry, an MD specializing in the design of clinical service delivery systems for chronic disease care. His talk is a little dated, 2013, but what he had to say then applies very much to the state of today's healthcare industry. "It's not possible [anymore] to try to keep up with everything that's going on, ... for one person to fit everything known in medicine inside of their head, regardless of how talented they are," Chaudhry said. The "breathtaking growth of medical knowledge," he said, has forced clinicians to specialize so they can cope with their own cognitive limits and focus on a subset of all things medical. As a result, the quality of clinical care has suffered, according to Chaudhry, who is the founder of Tuple Health and a former IBM medical scientist.

WASHINGTON – As bad as President Donald Trump describes U.S.-Pakistani ties today, they can get far worse. Over 16 years that included hundreds of deadly U.S. drone strikes, Osama bin Laden's killing on Pakistani soil and accusations Pakistan helps insurgents that kill Americans, the reluctant allies never reached one point of no return: Pakistan closing the air routes to Afghanistan. It could also be tantamount to Pakistan going to war with the United States. Even if such a step is seen as unlikely by most officials and observers, Pakistan's ability to shape the destiny of America's longest war is a reminder of how much leverage the country maintains at a time Trump is suspending hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance. "There's some suggestion that we have all of the cards in our hands," said Richard Olson, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.