By Debjani Ghosh According to the August 2020 National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)- McKinsey report, 'Unlocking Value From Data and AI: The India Opportunity', artificial intelligence (AI) deployments, if done right, could add about ₹500 billion to India's GDP in the next five years. Nearly 45% of this value is expected to be driven by the consumer and retail, agriculture, and banking and insurance sectors. Execution will be the key imperative for success. What is needed is an India AI playbook that can help GoI not just build deployment plans but also figure out how to scale them for maximum impact. Such a playbook requires strategy, data, talent, technology, policy framework, execution and the right culture to come together. India unveiled its AI strategy in 2018.

At the Four Seasons hotel in South Korea, AlphaGO stunned grandmaster Lee Sodol at the complex and highly intuitive game of Go. Google's artificially intelligent system defeated the 18-time world champion in a string of games earlier this year. Backed by the company's superior machine-learning techniques, AlphaGo had processed thousands and thousands of Go moves from previous human-to-human games to develop its own ability to think strategically. The AlphaGo games, watched by millions of viewers on YouTube, revealed the ever-increasing power and progress of AI. This contest between man and machine was not the first of its kind.

The three men who anchored the massively successful "Top Gear" automotive TV show will bring their large personalities back to the small screen Nov. 18, when Amazon Prime debuts the new series "The Grand Tour." Starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the first season will include 12 one-hour episodes, shot in exotic locations, where the three men drive, discuss and destroy various motor vehicles to comic effect. As in "Top Gear," which ended a 12-year syndicated run when the BBC declined to renew Clarkson's contract following a series of friction-causing incidents involving the outspoken former auto journalist, "The Grand Tour" features globe-trotting hi-jinks laced with boyish jibes. It will be different from "Top Gear," the men said during a visit to The Times -- but not much. "Well, it has us three hosting it," Clarkson said. "(May) is slow and lost and (Hammond) is short and I am bombastic and tall, and fat," Clarkson concluded.

It was Halloween 1936 when seven young men convened in the San Gabriel Mountains to turn the idea of a working rocket from fantasy to reality. That effort helped usher in the Space Age and marked the founding of one of the world's leading centers for robotic exploration of the solar system, NASA's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Caltech-managed exploration hub in La Cañada Flintridge. Monday was the 80th anniversary of that first exhilarating trek into the nearby foothills to light a liquid rocket engine. It was much like any other workday at JPL-- the sprawling campus leans casual, with scientists dressed in jeans and running sneakers or Halloween costumes ranging from a pirate to "Star Trek's" Captain Kirk-- but on this day many also remembered highlights from the past. The laboratory has seen major successes, including the first orbiting spacecraft in 1968, the successful launches of Voyager I and II in 1977 and the landing of the Mars rover Pathfinder in 1997.