AI is the digital distillation of a technological revolution that is facilitating the long-overdue evolution of the human mind. AI, as fear-inducing as anything disruptive and new is, can galvanise, turbo-charge, and trigger new avenues of intelligence in human minds. These new avenues can enable us to understand and attack society's greatest challenges today. What a layman does not know is that AI can traditionally be divided into AGI and ANI. Theorists and AI experts call this Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). AGI is designed to be capable of performing a wide variety of intellectual tasks, while ANI is designed to perform a single or a narrow set of related tasks.

Earlier this week, the team behind Google's advanced DeepMind neural network unveiled a new ability dubbed Transframer, which allows AI to generate 30-second videos from a single image input. It's a nifty little trick at first glance, but the implications are much larger than an interesting .GIF file. Transframer is a general-purpose generative framework that can handle many image and video tasks in a probabilistic setting. New work shows it excels in video prediction and view synthesis, and can generate 30s videos from a single image: https://t.co/wX3nrrYEEa "Transframer is state-of-the-art on a variety of video generation benchmarks, and… can generate coherent 30 second videos from a single image without any explicit geometric information," the DeepMind research team explains.

Black holes could be harnessed for energy, scientists have said. The claim comes after researchers produced an experiment they claim verified a decades-old theory that such black holes could create energy as a result of "extremely odd physics". Scientists at the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy set out to validate Roger Penrose's 1969 work. They used sound waves in an attempt to endorse the "extremely odd physics a half-century after the theory was first proposed". British physicist Mr Penrose theorised that energy could be created by dropping objects such as a rocket into a black hole and splitting the object in two.

Electricity was possibly humanity's greatest invention to date and changed life as we knew it. Fast forward to 125 years in the present and, we find ourselves at the cusp of another similar technological singularity, courtesy of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While the concept of AI has been around at least since the 1950s, there are a number of reasons to believe that AI's time to shine is now. Technological advancements and the evolution of technology's entire ecosystem have led to the rise of key trends that form the foundation on which AI can thrive. Digital business transformation Business models are transforming to include new avenues of creating value and revenue streams.

Applying just a bit of strain to a piece of semiconductor or other crystalline material can deform the orderly arrangement of atoms in its structure enough to cause dramatic changes in its properties, such as the way it conducts electricity, transmits light, or conducts heat. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in Russia and Singapore have found ways to use artificial intelligence to help predict and control these changes, potentially opening up new avenues of research on advanced materials for future high-tech devices. The findings appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper authored by MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and of materials science and engineering Ju Li, MIT Principal Research Scientist Ming Dao, and MIT graduate student Zhe Shi, with Evgeni Tsymbalov and Alexander Shapeev at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia, and Subra Suresh, the Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus and former dean of engineering at MIT and current president of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Already, based on earlier work at MIT, some degree of elastic strain has been incorporated in some silicon processor chips. Even a 1 percent change in the structure can in some cases improve the speed of the device by 50 percent, by allowing electrons to move through the material faster.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has opened up new avenues for human advancement. AI technology has enabled automation which has powered up efficiency. AI has helped bring the possibility of self-driving cars, client-servicing chatbots, assistant technology like Siri, Alexa and Cortana, to reality. While the evolution of AI has opened up new avenues, the ethics of surrounding the technology still remain in muddy waters. The debate was stirred up again when Google launched Duplex, a chatbot so smart that it can carry out conversations on your behalf.

While there is much speculation that artificial intelligence (AI) will put many people out of work, the real story may be more nuanced. For the insurance business, this may actually mean more instances of humans and machines working together, augmenting each other's skills and insights. This means more strategic roles for humans, the optimists say. In their new book, Human Machine, Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, both with Accenture, state that we are entering an era in which machines are taking over much of the grunt work associated with tasks, elevating the roles of humans to adopt more strategic roles. "AI technology will do what it does best – sifting through and processing copious data to recommend certain actions; and humans doing what they do best – exercising their judgment and social skills to help customers purchase products that better fit their needs. "In the front office, AI is poised to help companies improve the experiences and outcomes for every critical customer interaction, including interactions in three key functions: sales, marketing and customer service," Daugherty and Wilson say. "In those areas, AI has been both automating employee tasks and augmenting workers' own capabilities." One thing is clear -- AI means much more than simply automating existing processes. If anything, AI has become an important tool to developing processes that were not even conceivable just a couple of years ago. Insurance companies have been taking the lead with AI in areas such as telematics, which has opened up to new ways of doing business. Daugherty and Wilson cite the example of State Farm, which "combines skills scores with drivers' biometric data, including emotional states, captured from a variety of sensors and cameras.

Dr. Das further explained how with the help of complex virtual learning techniques, a wide range of physical and cognitive tasks are being managed today with a high level of efficiency and accuracy. And as artificial intelligence or AI systems advance through machine learning these will continue to impact not just business but our lives as well. But, if indeed machines continue to improve their performance beyond human levels, a natural question to ask is whether machines will put humans' jobs at risk and reduce employment. According to Mr. Vijay Sethi, CIO and Head CSR at Hero MotoCorp Ltd., "Such a concern is not new and in fact dates back to the 1940s when AI and automation started developing." Time and again these concerns have been raised by the citizens of the world.

Because of their high precision and speed, Delta robots are deployed in many industrial processes, including pick-and-place assemblies, machining, welding and food packaging. Starting with the first version developed by Reymond Clavel for a chocolate factory to quickly place chocolate pralines in their packages, Delta robots use three individually controlled and lightweight arms that guide a platform to move fast and accurately in three directions. The platform is either used as a stage, similar to the ones being used in flight simulators, or coupled to a manipulating device that can, for example, grasp, move, and release objects in prescribed patterns. Over time, roboticists have designed smaller and smaller Delta robots for tasks in limited workspaces, yet shrinking them further to the millimeter scale with conventional manufacturing techniques and components has proven fruitless. Reported in Science Robotics, a new design, the milliDelta robot, developed by Robert Wood's team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) overcomes this miniaturization challenge.

NEW DELHI: Citing the incident where Facebook had to abandon an experiment undertaken last year where two artificially intelligent programs or chat bots appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language which they developed on their own and only they understood, Dr. Jitendra K. Das set the tone of the conclave on "The Confluence of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics" held recently at the FORE School of Management, New Delhi, in association with BRICS Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Dr. Das further explained how with the help of complex virtual learning techniques, a wide range of physical and cognitive tasks are being managed today with a high level of efficiency and accuracy. And as artificial intelligence or AI systems advance through machine learning these will continue to impact not just business but our lives as well. But, if indeed machines continue to improve their performance beyond human levels, a natural question to ask is whether machines will put humans' jobs at risk and reduce employment. According to Mr. Vijay Sethi, CIO and Head CSR at Hero MotoCorp Ltd., "Such a concern is not new and in fact dates back to the 1940s when AI and automation started developing."