Recently, a human evaluation study of Referring Expression Generation (REG) models had an unexpected conclusion: on \textsc{webnlg}, Referring Expressions (REs) generated by the state-of-the-art neural models were not only indistinguishable from the REs in \textsc{webnlg} but also from the REs generated by a simple rule-based system. Here, we argue that this limitation could stem from the use of a purely ratings-based human evaluation (which is a common practice in Natural Language Generation). To investigate these issues, we propose an intrinsic task-based evaluation for REG models, in which, in addition to rating the quality of REs, participants were asked to accomplish two meta-level tasks. One of these tasks concerns the referential success of each RE; the other task asks participants to suggest a better alternative for each RE. The outcomes suggest that, in comparison to previous evaluations, the new evaluation protocol assesses the performance of each REG model more comprehensively and makes the participants' ratings more reliable and discriminable.

This story was originally published by Slate's Future Tense partnership and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country's 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, so Raghavan entered all the details of the crime--location, witnesses, names of the accused, items seized, and section of the forest--in a mobile application. Just like that, the case was officially registered in the app-based system, which signaled that it needed to be taken to court. The app Raghavan used is called HAWK, or Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, and it appears to be the first such digital intelligence gathering system for wildlife crime in India.

In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country's 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, so Raghavan entered all the details of the crime--location, witnesses, names of the accused, items seized, and section of the forest--in a mobile application. Just like that, the case was officially registered in the app-based system, which signaled that it needed to be taken to court. The app Raghavan used is called HAWK, or Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, and it appears to be the first such digital intelligence gathering system for wildlife crime in India. It helps officers like Raghavan centralize and share information on forest and wildlife crimes in real time.

The Government of Kerala had increased the frequency of supply of free food kits owing to the pandemic, however, these items were static and not indicative of the personal preferences of the consumers. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of various clustering techniques on a scaled-down version of a real-world dataset obtained through a conjoint analysis-based survey. Clustering carried out by centroid-based methods such as k means is analyzed and the results are plotted along with SVD, and finally, a conclusion is reached as to which among the two is better. Once the clusters have been formulated, commodities are also decided upon for each cluster. Also, clustering is further enhanced by reassignment, based on a specific cluster loss threshold. Thus, the most efficacious clustering technique for designing a food kit tailored to the needs of individuals is finally obtained.

Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems use deep learning to synthesize speech increasingly approaching human quality, but they require a database of high quality audio-text sentence pairs for training. Malayalam, the official language of the Indian state of Kerala and spoken by 35+ million people, is a low resource language in terms of available corpora for TTS systems. In this paper, we present IMaSC, a Malayalam text and speech corpora containing approximately 50 hours of recorded speech. With 8 speakers and a total of 34,473 text-audio pairs, IMaSC is larger than every other publicly available alternative. We evaluated the database by using it to train TTS models for each speaker based on a modern deep learning architecture. Via subjective evaluation, we show that our models perform significantly better in terms of naturalness compared to previous studies and publicly available models, with an average mean opinion score of 4.50, indicating that the synthesized speech is close to human quality.

IPSR is reaching another milestone, its 20th year of operations On this occassion we have launched a big placement initiative. Having placement tie-up with 1500 companies, we are conducting a recruitment marathon – Jobathon ( a Job a Day) to recruit professionals through IPSR. This non-stop recruitment days has started with the mass recruitment of World's first Digital Hub of Nissan Motor corporation, Japan – "Nissan Digital Hub Trivandrum", and will continue throughout the 20th anniversary year celebrations of IPSR. Newer vacancies are listed on every day and various companies are expected to fill the vacancies in Software technologies, Python, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Red Hat Linux, Cloud, AWS, DevOps, Security, Storage, Networking as well as Digital Marketing.

It's 2022 and the digital world is wrapping itself around us…literally. At least the Metaverse which is upon us is doing that. 'Digital' is now inseparable from our daily lives. So, the'digital' is absolutely indispensable for marketing at present. It seems like something new pops up every night.

KOCHI: Kerala could claim the title of being the first state where IT coding was first introduced into the curriculum of one of its schools, right from Class I onwards. Dayapuram Residential School in Kattangal, Kozhikode, was the first school that started coding sessions and classes on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for kids at a very young age. The firm behind the achievement is a Kerala-based startup Cyber Square, now based out of London. Founded by NIT alumni N P Haris, Cyber Square introduced the coding concept from Grade 1 and Artificial Intelligence from Grade 2 in India. It also focuses on teaching other skills like data science, 3D printing, etc., starting from Grade 1.

IBM Software Labs is set to establish a state-of-the-art product engineering, design and development centre in Kochi to advance hybrid cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The move comes in the wake of a virtual meeting Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had with Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India, and Gaurav Sharma, Vice President, IBM India Software Labs, in which the role of technology in accelerating the State's digital mission was discussed. Mr. Vijayan shared his vision of making Kerala a digital-knowledge economy, the changes introduced in the IT policy and the role of technology in helping various sectors reset and recover from the pandemic. The significance of collaboration between industries, the government and the academia to drive growth opportunities within the State was also discussed. Mr. Vijayan observed that Kerala was a talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs, while expressing satisfaction about IBM's proposed expansion in the State.

The first Thermal and Optical Imaging camera with Artificial Intelligence-powered face detection technology for fever screening has been procured for the state capital by former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor. Following a discussion, his team had with district collector K Gopalakrishnan, Congress leader Tharoor said it was brought to his notice that a Thermal imaging camera with face detection technology was urgently needed in the district to scan from a safe distance and isolate those potentially having fever. Using his MPLADS fund, Tharoor, who represents, Thiruvananthapuram in the Lok Sabha, procured the equipment. Bahrain and Dubai before finally reaching Bengaluru, from where it was shipped to Kerala, Tharoor said in a Facebook Post. "The installation will be done at our Airport, Railway Station, MCH. Since all MPLADS funds have been exhausted, we are approaching other corporate groups to partner with us and the district administration to procure more of this highly sophisticated technological device prior to the huge influx of expatriates from the middle east and other areas overseas,"