Do Taliban's drone attacks expose a chink in Pakistan's armour? On the evening of March 13, drones struck three locations across Pakistan. Two children were wounded in Quetta. Civilians were also injured in Kohat and in Rawalpindi, the garrison city that houses the headquarters of Pakistan's armed forces and neighbours the capital, Islamabad. Pakistan's military said the drones were intercepted before reaching their targets.

Tensions continue to mount as India and Pakistan traded accusations and attacks across their frontier in Kashmir overnight. New Delhi and Islamabad accused one another on Friday of launching drone attacks as well as "numerous ceasefire violations" over the Line of Control (LoC) in the disputed territory. The ongoing hostilities have provoked further calls for restraint as the risk of an escalation between the two nuclear powers grows. Pakistan launched "multiple attacks" using drones and other munitions along India's western border on Thursday night and early Friday, the Indian army said, claiming it had repelled the attacks and responded forcefully, although it did not provide details. Islamabad has denied any cross-border attacks and instead accused Indian forces of sending drones into Pakistani territory, killing at least two civilians.

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.

Pakistan's economy is ranked 26th in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) and 40th in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Pakistan has a population of approximately 190 million people, making it the world's sixth-largest country, with a nominal GDP per capita of $1,427, ranking 133rd globally. The key sectors of the Pakistani economy are agriculture, mining, industry, automotive, construction, defence, services, and transportation. The IT/ITeS sector is one of Pakistan's fastest-growing industries, accounting for around 1% of the country's GDP ($3.5 billion USD). It has doubled in the last four years, and experts predict a further 100% increase to $7 billion in the next two to four years.

Modern aircraft are designed with redundant control effectors to cater for fault tolerance and maneuverability requirements. This leads to an over-actuated aircraft which requires a control allocation scheme to distribute the control commands among effectors. Traditionally, optimization based control allocation schemes are used; however, for nonlinear allocation problems these methods require large computational resources. In this work, a novel ANN based nonlinear control allocation scheme is proposed. To start, a general nonlinear control allocation problem is posed in a different perspective to seek a function which maps desired moments to control effectors. Few important results on stability and performance of nonlinear allocation schemes in general and this ANN based allocation scheme, in particular, are presented. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme, it is compared with standard quadratic programming based method for control allocation.

Wheat is the main agricultural crop of Pakistan and is a staple food requirement of almost every Pakistani household making it the main strategic commodity of the country whose availability and affordability is the government's main priority. Wheat food availability can be vastly affected by multiple factors included but not limited to the production, consumption, financial crisis, inflation, or volatile market. The government ensures food security by particular policy and monitory arrangements, which keeps up purchase parity for the poor. Such arrangements can be made more effective if a dynamic analysis is carried out to estimate the future yield based on certain current factors. Future planning of commodity pricing is achievable by forecasting their future price anticipated by the current circumstances. This paper presents a wheat price forecasting methodology, which uses the price, weather, production, and consumption trends for wheat prices taken over the past few years and analyzes them with the help of advance neural networks architecture Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed methodology presented significantly improved results versus other conventional machine learning and statistical time series analysis methods.

The use of Deep Learning and Machine Learning is becoming pervasive day by day which is opening doors to new opportunities in every aspect of technology. Its application Ranges from Health-care to Self-driving Cars, Home Automation to Smart-agriculture, and Industry 4.0. Traditionally the majority of the processing for IoT applications is being done on a central cloud but that has its issues; which include latency, security, bandwidth, and privacy, etc. It is estimated that there will be around 20 Million IoT devices by 2020 which will increase problems with sending data to the cloud and doing the processing there. A new trend of processing the data on the edge of the network is emerging. The idea is to do processing as near the point of data production as possible. Doing processing on the nodes generating the data is called Edge Computing and doing processing on a layer between the cloud and the point of data production is called Fog computing. There are no standard definitions for any of these, hence they are usually used interchangeably. In this paper, we have reviewed the development boards available for running Artificial Intelligence algorithms on the Edge

Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan inaugurated Center of Artificial Intelligence and Computing in Islamabad on Thursday. Addressing the inaugural ceremony, the Air Chief said this institution will help improve operational capacity of Pakistan Air Force. He said the objective to establish this center is to promote research in artificial intelligence sector as the technology in 21st century has completely changed the war strategy.

Chatbot is a technology that is used to mimic human behavior using natural language. There are different types of Chatbot that can be used as conversational agent in various business domains in order to increase the customer service and satisfaction. For any business domain, it requires a knowledge base to be built for that domain and design an information retrieval based system that can respond the user with a piece of documentation or generated sentences. The core component of a Chatbot is Natural Language Understanding (NLU) which has been impressively improved by deep learning methods. But we often lack such properly built NLU modules and requires more time to build it from scratch for high quality conversations. This may encourage fresh learners to build a Chatbot from scratch with simple architecture and using small dataset, although it may have reduced functionality, rather than building high quality data driven methods. This research focuses on Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Intent Classification models which can be integrated into NLU service of a Chatbot. Named entities will be inserted manually in the knowledge base and automatically detected in a given sentence. The NER model in the proposed architecture is based on artificial neural network which is trained on manually created entities and evaluated using CoNLL-2003 dataset.

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.