Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Digital twins (DTs) are virtual replicas of components, assets, systems, or processes, linked to their real-world counterparts, continuously updating their states and simulating their behavior in real-time, as illustrated in Figure 1 . They are adopted for monitoring, predicting, and optimizing the performance of diverse systems, bridging the gap between design, testing and deployment. Significant efforts are being devoted across Arab R&D institutions to export technology tackling challenges that are not only pertinent to the region, but also of global importance, e.g., energy, sustainability, disaster management, healthcare, and urbanization, among many others. For instance, Khalifa University, UAE, is pioneering research into optical wireless communication using DTs.

European software major SAP and startup accelerator Techstars will invest in at least 10 artificial intelligence (AI) startups every year through its SAP.iO Foundry in Berlin. SAP.iO is an initiative of the tech giant to create an ecosystem of products and software by working with entrepreneurs. In 2017, five Indian startups were among 10 companies selected by SAP.iO's AI accelerator's first batch. "We are looking at enterprise applications from startups that are founded around a year ago," Alexa Gorman, global vice-president of SAP.iO Fund, told VCCircle over a telephone call from Berlin. "By restricting our focus, we can add value in terms of marketing assistance and mentorship for these startups."

Each day we read about amazing technology breakthroughs, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). But if AI is so great, why are these breathtaking technological achievements not matched with soaring productivity and economic growth? Or, to paraphrase an old jibe: If the economy is so smart, why aren't we all rich? After all, we live among astonishing examples of potentially transformative new technologies that could greatly increase productivity and economic welfare. As noted in the 2014 book, "The Second Machine Age," leaps in AI, machine learning and, more recently in areas such as image recognition, abound.

"Scientia potentia est" is a Latin adage that means "knowledge is power". This phrase is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon and its most common modern interpretation is'information is power'. There has never been a time in human history when this phrase was more relevant, as each day humanity creates over 2 Quintillion bytes of data. This reality has manufactured the big data boom that the world is currently experiencing. All of this data has to be processed, analyzed and stored in some way.

The Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems (AIPS-96) was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, from 29 to 31 May 1996. The main gathering of researchers in AI and planning and scheduling, the conference promoted the practical applications of planning technologies. Details of the conference papers and sessions are provided as well as information on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative. Previous conferences were held at the University of Maryland in June 1992 (AIPS-92), organized by Jim Hendler and Drew McDermott, and the University of Chicago in June 1994 (AIPS-94), organized by Kristian Hammond. The generation of plans and related fields, such as scheduling, resource allocation, and reasoning about action, have a long research tradition in AI.

Mixed-initiative systems are a popular approach to building intelligent systems that can collaborate naturally and effectively with people. But true collaborative behavior requires an agent to possess a number of capabilities, including reasoning, communication, planning, execution, and learning. We describe an integrated approach to the design and implementation of a collaborative problem-solving assistant based on a formal theory of joint activity and a declarative representation of tasks. This approach builds on prior work by us and by others on mixed-initiative dialogue and planning systems. We've all had the bad experience of working with someone who had to be told everything he or she needed to do (or worse, we had to do it for them).

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1997 Spring Symposium Series on 24 to 26 March at Stanford University in Stanford, California. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management; (2) Computational Models for Mixed-Initiative Interaction; (3) Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval; (4) Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video, and Audio Corpora; (5) Natural Language Processing for the World Wide Web; (6) Ontological Engineering; and (7) Qualitative Preferences in Deliberation and Practical Reasoning. Those attending represented a wide range of industries and areas relevant to AI research and application. The symposium began with keynote addresses on industrial requirements for KM by Vince Barabba of General Motors and Rob van der Spek of CIBIT. The remainder of the meeting was devoted to intensive group discussion of the role of AI in KM, including a joint session with the Symposium on Ontological Engineering.

Amazon yesterday announced its ONNX-MXNet package to import Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) deep learning models into Apache MXNet, signifying the company is on-board with Facebook and Microsoft in efforts to open-source AI. With the ONNX-MXNet Python package, developers running models based on open-source ONNX will be able to run them on Apache MXNet. Basically, this allows AI developers to keep models but switch networks, as opposed to starting from scratch. If you can imagine a thousand start ups and another thousand universities all creating at the bleeding edge of machine learning technology, but unable to share work due to'format' issues, you won't be very far off from the state of things without initiatives like ONNX. With Facebook and Microsoft all-in on the idea of open-source AI platforms, and now Amazon joining them, it's looking like ONNX is the path forward.

Expectations for artificial intelligence (AI) are sky-high, but what are businesses actually doing now? The goal of this report is to present a realistic baseline that allows companies to compare their AI ambitions and efforts. Building on data rather than conjecture, the research is based on a global survey of more than 3,000 executives, managers, and analysts across industries and in-depth interviews with more than 30 technology experts and executives. The gap between ambition and execution is large at most companies. Three-quarters of executives believe AI will enable their companies to move into new businesses.

Google's recent acquisition of Halli Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup started by an IIT-Delhi alumni Pankaj Gupta, has fuelled Bengaluru's ambition of becoming the hub of AI and ML product startups. Halli, which means a village in Kannada, was born five months ago in Bengaluru for developing solutions to traditional problems using AI, ML, deep learning and natural language processing technologies. The company says it is focused on building deep learning and ML systems to address'old problems'. Besides IBM's Watson, which the company describes as a "cognitive" system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technologies mostly in healthcare and education and IPsoft's Amelia, Microsoft Corporation's AI and Research Group, Amazon AI Services, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and OpenAI, a non-profit lab partly funded by Elon Musk of Tesla are doing enormous work around in this area.