NeurIPS 2022 announces winner of the Test of Time Award

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November 23, 2022

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has announced the award-winning papers for NeurIPS 2022. This year “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” by Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, and Geoffrey Hinton, aka “AlexNet paper,” was unanimously selected by the Program Chairs for the Test of Time Award.

In 2012, it was presented as the first CNN trained on the ImageNet Challenge, far surpassing the state-of-the-art at the time, and since then, it has made a huge impact on the machine learning community, according to the blog.

The three categories of awards for NeurIPS 2022 are Outstanding Main Track Papers, Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track papers, and the Test of Time paper.

According to the blog, winning papers in the category of Outstanding Main Track Papers include Is Out-of-distribution Detection Learnable?; Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding; Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models; ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation, and several more.

Winning papers in the category of Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track papers include LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next-generation image-text models and MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge.

AWS launches its second infrastructure region in India

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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November 23, 2022

After Mumbai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces its second infrastructure region in India, Hyderabad. The AWS infrastructure in Hyderabad is assumed to support more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually.

With the Hyderabad infrastructure region, developers, startups, entrepreneurs, enterprises, government, education, and non-profit organizations will have more choices for running their applications and serving users from data centers in India. Customers can access advanced AWS technologies like data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence through the Hyderabad region.

Prasad Kalyanaraman, the vice president of AWS infrastructure services at AWS, stated that the launch of the AWS Hyderabad region supports Indian digital transformation and is a part of the long-term in the country. Customers and partners in India will have an additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with resilience, availability, and lower latency. AWS is glad to be a part of the future of the Indian technology community and is committed to helping organizations across industries to increase agility and drive innovation.

Besides Hyderabad, AWS has also planned to launch five more AWS regions in Australia, Israel, Canada, Thailand, and New Zealand. AWS regions comprise availability zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.

RIL-backed Addverb to open its second manufacturing plant in India

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Sahil Pawar

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November 23, 2022

Addverb second manufacturing plant India

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL)-backed robotics company Addverb Technologies will be opening its second manufacturing plant in India in the next three months.

According to Co-founder Satish Shukla, the new factory will facilitate more than 3,000 jobs, along with additional indirect employment opportunities at project deployment sites, Shukla added. Both facilities are located in Greater Noida.

“Our second manufacturing facility in Greater Noida will be spread across 15 acres. We will manufacture autonomous mobile and shuttle categories of robots. Production at the new facility will begin in the next three months,” Shukla said.

According to Shukla, the factory would be able to produce up to 60,000 robots every year. However, it can be scaled upto 6-8 times if required. Addverb’s current factory in Greater Noida is able to produce up to 50,000 robots annually.

The company also plans to use the new unit to take some pressure off its current facility, which also serves as a software research, R&D, and experience center. The new facility will be dedicated to large-scale manufacturing, while the existing one will focus on specialized manufacturing.

In January, Reliance Industries bought a 54% stake in Addverb for $132 million. It also placed an order worth $1 billion with Addverb.

39th global edition of World AI Show to take place in Mumbai

By

Sahil Pawar

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November 23, 2022

39th global edition of World AI Show Mumbai

Taking the developments and adoption of AI in India, the 39th global edition of the World AI Show is set to take place at The Leela, Mumbai, on November 23, 2022. It will highlight pioneering advancements and endeavors in India’s AI ecosystem.

The event will discuss significant developments in India’s AI, ML, information architecture (IA), and robotics environment, providing insights on various government initiatives aimed at maximizing internet access and promoting services like e-education, e-health, e-governance, and e-banking. The event will host some of the most renowned thinkers in the Indian robotics, AI, ML, and IA landscape.

“With the World AI Show, we aim to draw attention to India’s advantageous atmosphere for the development of global AI,” said Mithun Shetty, CEO of Trescon.

World AI Show is a thought-leadership-driven and business-focused global series of events that are conducted in strategic locations worldwide. As part of the world tour, the Indian edition is gathering pre-qualified CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, Heads of Innovation, International AI experts from the industry, Heads of AI, and Chief Digital Officers.

The show features exciting panel discussions, tech talks, keynotes, enterprise use-case presentations, and product showcases to discuss some of the latest challenges for the sector due to the pandemic. One can witness next-gen AI solutions from global leaders and explore their relevance and impact on their organization.

Peter Weckesser says that India is the AI Hub for Schneider Electric

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Disha Chopra

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November 23, 2022

Peter Weckesser, the executive vice president of Scheider Digital and chief digital officer at Schneider Electric, said that India is the company’s most significant “AI Hub.” The company has its AI hubs at 4 central locations, including France and the USA.

With over 40% of its workforce team in India, Schneider Electric has accelerated its AI operations in the country. The company will build data centers, infrastructure, and other necessary elements required for digitization using the EcoStruxure architecture. As a prominent AI Hub, India will become a center of excellence in innovation and human capabilities to enhance the consumer experience.

Read More: AI Code Generator Kite Shuts Down

The company experienced significant growth in its AI team over the last year, approximately 30%. The team focuses on developing cutting-edge technologies while minimizing carbon emissions to transform industries to be sustainable potentially.

With extensive R&D centers and software engineers working for the company, Schneider aims to drive digital transformation by combining world-class processes and energy-focused technologies for businesses. It develops and provides end-to-point cloud solutions for products, software, and other IT-related services.

Meta Introduces CICERO, the First AI That Plays Diplomacy at a Human Level

By

Disha Chopra

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November 23, 2022

Meta has created CICERO, the first AI that plays Diplomacy, a strategy board game, at a human level. CICERO demonstrated its human-level competence by playing the online version on webDiplomacy.net and achieving an average score of more than double what human players do.

Diplomacy is a strategic board game involving seven players. The game takes on other games like Risk, Poker, and even the TV show Survivor. It is a team-playing game, as the only way to win is via working with other players to conquer as much territory as possible. Team playing is achieved using natural language negotiation before every move.

Meta selected Diplomacy as the subject game because researchers have already been developing simplified variants of the game but without natural language capabilities. To incorporate this technology, Meta attempted to build an agent that could negotiate in the game.

CICERO combines two major artificial intelligence areas: strategic reasoning and natural language processing. When these technologies are integrated, CICERO can reason and strategize players’ moves and then communicate accordingly via natural language to achieve shared objectives.

Meta has provided the code, methods, and models behind the AI agent on their GitHub page for developers to gain more insights on the advancement.

IIT Madras Offering 12-week Free Online Course on Machine Learning

By

Preetipadma K

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November 23, 2022

Introduction to Machine learning IIT Madras

IIT Madras is offering a free online course on machine learning called ‘Introduction to Machine learning’ for students and interested professionals.

The Introduction to Machine learning course by IIT Madras aims to equip students with the skills they need to use machine learning and data analytics to understand the growing availability of data from various sources. The course will be held from 23 January 2023 to 14 April 2023.

Professor Balaraman Ravindran, a Mindtree Faculty Fellow and currently a member of the IIT Madras Computer Science Department, will teach the course. The professor has almost two decades of machine learning research expertise, particularly in reinforcement learning. His research interests also include data mining, and social network analysis.

Applications are being accepted for the course that will address the fundamental concepts of machine learning from a mathematical perspective. The course will also cover the various learning paradigms as well as some of the more common algorithms and structures employed in each of these paradigms.

Probability theory, linear algebra, and convex optimization.
Linear regression, multivariate regression, subset selection, shrinkage methods, principal component regression, and partial least squares.
Linear classification, logistic regression, and linear discriminant analysis.
Learning theory, introduction to reinforcement learning, and optional videos.
Neural networks, Statistical Decision Theory, and Gaussian Mixture Models among other topics.

IIT Madras is also inviting enrollment for a course on Reinforcement Learning by Professor Balaraman Ravindran. Enrollment for both courses ends on 30 January 2023.

Kenya on Fast-track to Pass Bill on Crypto Taxation

By

Preetipadma K

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November 22, 2022

Kenya has lately revealed its intention to regulate the cryptocurrency industry by emphasizing taxing digital currency transactions as the sector grows.

It would be possible to tax cryptocurrency exchanges, digital wallets, and transactions under the Capital Markets (Amendment) Bill, 2022. This tax will be similar to a 20% excise charge levied by banks on all commissions and fees on cryptocurrency trading.

If authorized by Parliament, Kenyan crypto investors would be required to pay capital gains tax to the Kenya Revenue Authority whenever they sell or use their crypto in a transaction. If cryptocurrency is held for less than a year, it will be subject to income tax (10% to 30%), and if it is held for more than a year, capital gains tax will be applied. The bill would also mandate that investors disclose key information about their cryptocurrency ownership to the Capital Markets Authority, the government’s financial regulator.

The proposed bill would designate digital currencies as securities, allow for the registration of individual cryptocurrency traders, and create a centralized computerized registry of all digital currency transactions. A fund would be established to safeguard investors from financial loss originating from the collapse of a licensed broker or dealer, and privacy guarantees would be implemented as additional consumer protection measures.

Kenya, whose central bank has warned residents against cryptocurrency usage and trading, will follow in the footsteps of Ethiopia, which banned cryptocurrency before regulating it.

Many Kenyan crypto traders are outraged by the government’s latest move. After witnessing a loss in cryptocurrency earlier this year and being unable to withdraw their balances following the recent FTX collapse, most Kenyan crypto pundits did not find the news welcoming.

Kenya has the largest proportion of crypto-owning citizens in Africa. Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela, and Singapore are the only four nations, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whose residents hold more cryptocurrency than Kenya. However, the nation’s crypto community may begin to dwindle in the coming months due to eroding investor confidence in the sector, which has seen over US$2 trillion wiped off the market globally this year.

AI Code Generator Kite Shuts Down

By

Manjiri Gaikwad

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November 22, 2022

On November 16, Kite, an AI assisting tool that helped developers to write code, will no longer be in use. The founder of Kite has announced on its official website that it has stopped working on Kite and will no longer support the Kite software.

Adam Smith founded Kite in 2014, and since June 2021, Kite has been temporarily unavailable. As per Adam Smith, Kite failed because of two main reasons-Kite fell short of being tech-ready, and they could not build a business around Kite. Falling short in the technology means Kite could not project the 10x improvement needed to break through the market, stating state-of-the-art for ML on code was not good enough. This is because the state-of-the-art models require help understanding the code’s structure, like the non-local context.

Kite started working on building better models for code, but building models was very engineering intensive and required about $100 million. As per Adam Smith, Kite could not generate more revenue as their 500k developers and engineering managers using the product preferred not to pay for it.

Teams at Kite also thought of turning their business towards code searching using AI technology and a bottom-up development strategy. However, this new strategy could not help Kite and eventually led to the shutdown of Kite. Most of Kite’s code, including the Python type inference engine, Python public package analyzer, desktop software, editor integrations, and GitHub Crawler, are open-source on Github.

India, EU sign agreement on cooperation in climate modeling and quantum tech

By

Sahil Pawar

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November 22, 2022

India EU agreement in climate modeling and quantum tech

On Monday, the European Union (EU) and India signed an agreement on cooperation in hi-tech fields, such as climate modeling and quantum technologies, as a part of the Trade and Technology Council initiated by the two parties earlier this year.

The ‘Intent of Cooperation on High-Performance Computing, Weather Extremes, Climate Modelling and Quantum Technologies’ was officially signed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology and the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) during a virtual ceremony.

The agreement builds on commitments by both parties for deepening technological cooperation on high-performance and quantum computing during the EU-India leaders meeting on May 8. “The signing of the agreement is significant in the context of the earlier decision to set up the EU-India Trade and Technology Council,” the EU said.

The agreement aims to facilitate partnership on high-performance computing applications using European and Indian supercomputers in Covid-19 therapeutics, mitigating climate change, bio-molecular medicines, predicting natural disasters, and quantum computing.

The EU initiated the proposal for setting up the council. India agreed to the proposal as it will allow the two parties to work on issues such as quantum computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, climate modeling, and health-related technology.