Chip shortages are forcing fabs and OSATs to maximize capacity and assess how much benefit AI and machine learning can provide. This is particularly important in light of the growth projections by market analysts. The chip manufacturing industry is expected to double in size over the next five years, and collective improvements in factories, AI databases, and tools will be essential for doubling down on productivity. "We're not going to fail on this digital transformation, because there's no option," said John Behnke, general manager in charge of smart manufacturing at Inficon. "All the fabs are collectively going to make 20% to 40% more product, but they can't get a new tool right now for 18 to 36 months. To leverage all this potential, we're going to overcome the historical human fear of change."

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. To deploy successful AI, organizations need data to train models. That said, high-quality data isn't always easy to access – creating a major hurdle for organizations in launching AI initiatives. This is where synthetic data can be so useful. As opposed to data that is collected from and measured in the real world, synthetic data is generated in the digital world by computer simulations, algorithms, simple rules, statistical modeling, simulation, and other techniques.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Rahul Singhal, who led IBM Watson products and now serves as chief product officer at Innodata, has a few strong beliefs about AI. One is that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is right: AI will have more impact on society than electricity. The other is a saying you've probably heard before: "garbage in, garbage out." Managing an AI pipeline is all about the data, he believes.

The number of companies with AI budgets in the $500,000 to $5 million range rose 55% year over year, according to Appen's State of AI and Machine Learning report released Tuesday. The survey was conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Appen and consulted 501 business leaders and data specialists. Scaling AI technology is a bigger priority for enterprise businesses when compared to their smaller counterparts. By contrast, diversity of the data powering AI is a higher priority for small and medium companies than for enterprises. Regardless of size, businesses with annual AI budgets of $1 million or more were more likely to bring their projects closer to deployment.

Smart toothbrushes have been around for a few years now, but they haven't quite caught on. Sure, they promise better habits via connected sensors, but they also tend to be very expensive ($100 and up). Colgate, however, has come up with a potential alternative. Called "hum by Colgate," it's a smart toothbrush that's more affordable. The rechargeable model is $69.99, while the one with replaceable batteries is only $49.99, which isn't that much more than a non-smart electric toothbrush.

BENGALURU: When food tech company, Zomato, let go of around 540 of its support staff last week, it said that improvement in its after-sales technology had forced its hand. The automation made almost 10% of the workforce in certain support roles across Zomato's customer, merchant, and delivery partner teams, redundant. While routine jobs will continue to give way to automation, food tech firms like Swiggy and Zomato are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) and automation to drive their businesses, using years of data accumulated from food orders and user-level consumption patterns. And each customer order is now being influenced by the customer's own previous history of order preferences. Swiggy boasts of more than 130,000 restaurant partners on its platform, while Zomato claims to have added around 150,000 restaurants. With such a large supply base in place, both the food tech apps are now solving for demand, mainly using data.

Bengaluru: When food-tech company Zomato let go of around 540 of its support staff last week, it said improvement in its after-sales technology forced its hand. The automation made up for almost 10% of the workforce in certain support roles across Zomato's customer, merchant, and delivery partner teams, redundant. While routine jobs will continue to give way to automation, food-tech companies such as Swiggy and Zomato are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) and automation to drive their businesses, using years of data accumulated from food orders and user-level consumption patterns. And each customer order is now being influenced by the customer's own previous history of order preferences. Swiggy boasts of more than 1.3 lakh restaurant partners on its platform, while Zomato claims to have added around 1.5 lakh restaurants. With such a large supply base in place, both food-tech apps are now primarily using data to tap demand.

IFI CLAIMS Patent Services has a global patent database with more than 110 million records from about 100 countries that the company has painstakingly assembled over the years. "We take information from different data sources and we standardize it and put it in a usable format that companies can either access directly or they can build a user interface on top of it," Director of Marketing Catherine Suski said. Could the company have acquired this comprehensive dataset instead? There is nothing like it in the world, she said. Furthermore the company is continually adding to it and monitoring it for quality.

An Uber Technologies Inc. executive who worked on the ride-hailing company's self-driving vehicle program has left the firm. He is the third executive to exit Uber in two months. The San Francisco company confirmed the departure of Sherif Marakby, Uber's vice president of global vehicle programs, who joined the company a year ago and left Monday. Uber did not say why he left. The company said in a statement that Marakby's "deep experience and knowledge of the automotive industry" helped Uber "tremendously in working to make self-driving cars a reality."

After a spate of turbulence, ride-hailing giant Uber made a point Tuesday of reaffirming its loyalty to Chief Executive Travis Kalanick and its commitment to having an inclusive workplace. "It's clear both Uber and the whole ride-sharing industry would not be where we are today without Travis," Uber board member Arianna Huffington told reporters during a conference call. She was responding to a question about whether Uber's board of directors would consider asking Kalanick to step down from his post, given the bumpy road down which he has led the San Francisco-based company. "The board has complete confidence in Travis. He started as a scrappy entrepreneur and now he has to bring about changes in himself," she said.