Yourstore launches Free AI-powered eCommerce Website Creation

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April 19, 2022

Leading Software as a Service providing company Yourstore announces the launch of its new free artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform called Yourstore Genie, which allows users to create impeccable eCommerce storefronts automatically.

The service drastically reduces the workload involved in creating a website as it leverages artificial intelligence to eliminate the need for designing stunning-looking websites automatically for businesses.

Over the last few years, the global market has witnessed a shift towards digitization, thanks to rapidly evolving technology and the COVID-19 pandemic.

As businesses have started to understand the importance of having an online presence, the newly launched free AI-enabled tool will help innumerable small to medium-sized companies to create their online stores and increase their reach on the web.

The process involved in building a website through Yourstore Genie is also very simple, as users just need to enter their name, email, and mobile number to create an account, and the tool will enable users to go online in as little time as 30 seconds.

Yourstore automatically suggests themes for websites based on the logo and name of the business uploaded by users, making the website building process a breeze. The powerful AI engine takes care of everything by creating a fully customizable eCommerce website based on the brand.

An additional benefit of Yourstore Genie is that all the AI-generated text and images are SEO optimized, helping business owners in increasing their online visibility without worrying about technicalities.

“We at Yourstore believe building a website should be simple and fast for everyone – no coding required,” said Co-founder of Yourstore Ashwant Krishna.

Chennai-based startup Yourstore helps in the digital transformation of the biggest labels in India and the UAE. Brands can sell, manage, and interact with their customers from a single interface, using Yourstore.

Yourstore has grown a substantial number of users in a short period of time, with a customer base that spans both domestically and internationally, including customers from the US, Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

CEO of Yourstore, Rian Ozal, said, “We expect to reach a hundred thousand users by the end of the fiscal year, Yourstore has been a game-changer for small business owners, creators, and freelancers.”

NOOR, the World’s Largest Arabic Language Processing Model unveiled in Abu Dhabi

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 19, 2022

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi unveils the world’s largest Arabic natural language processing model named NOOR.

This is a remarkable development in the global NLP industry as languages like English and Chinese dominate the global market of chatbots, market intelligence, and machine translation. With the launch of NOOR, the Arab world will also have a fresh edge in the quest for digitization.

Natural language processing is a critical component of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry as it assists computers in decoding spoken and written language to accelerate the development of language translation software, smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and many more.

TII researchers created an end-to-end pipeline for collecting high-quality data at scale, which included crawling, filtering, and curation for developing the new NLP model. Moreover, they also created optimized services for large-scale distributed training and serving.

Developers have built NOOR to allow businesses and universities to develop new tools like sentiment analysis on social media or new Arabic virtual assistants.

Director of AI Cross-center Unit at TII, Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, said, “Large language models have taken the world of natural language processing by storm, and we are proud to introduce this cutting-edge model with 10 billion parameters – the world’s largest Arabic NLP model. The uniquely large Arabic dataset collected to train the model is the result of months of work that included curating, scrapping, and filtering of varied sources.”

He further thanked the entire team for their efforts in developing NOOR and making it a go-to exploration model in Arabic for academics and businesses everywhere.

“With this development, we are on track to boost our research capabilities and credentials in AI, as well as elevating the status of Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a serious research ecosystem,” said CEO of TII and ASPIRE, Dr. Ray O. Johnson.

Advanced Navigation launches AI-powered Undersea Drone Hydrus

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 18, 2022

Advanced Navigation AI Undersea Drone Hydrus

Navigation technologies and robotics company Advanced Navigation announces the launch of its new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered undersea autonomous drone called Hydrus.

The novel technology will drastically improve underwater research capabilities by simplifying the data collection process than traditional methods.

Hydrus is specifically designed for applications that require high-resolution photos and video and exact geo-referenced data.

Users of all grades will now have access to an all-in-one underwater inspection robot that is ready to use right out of the box.

I mage Source

The most significant advantage of Hydrus is that it eliminates the need for costly ROVs/AUVs, survey vessels, highly trained operators, and divers for undersea data collection.

The company claims that Hydrus can uncover the causes of some of the ocean’s most significant climate change phenomena, such as CO2 absorption, reef bleaching, new diseases, loss of marine life and biodiversity, coastal erosion, fishery decline, etc.

Some of the critical features of Hydrus include an advanced sonar for better navigation and communication, easy to use interface, a cinema-grade 4k 60fps camera with an added AI engine for better image processing, and many more.

Australia-based robotics firm Advanced Navigation was founded by Chris Shaw and Xavier Orr in 2010. The talented team of Advanced Navigation specializes in several fields such as sensors, GNSS, inertial navigation, RF technologies, acoustics, robotics, AI, and algorithms.

CEO and Co-founder of Advanced Navigation, Xavier Orr, said, “We’ve developed Hydrus to ensure professional-grade underwater imagery and data is accessible to everyone, enabling greater opportunities across the ocean, whether it’s inspecting offshore wind farms, capturing undersea cinematography or monitoring coral reefs.”

He further added that they had witnessed a transformation in the aerial drone sector over the last decade as drones are now simple and dependable enough to be used by anyone, which is why the technology is being used in so many industries.

Meta to launch Horizon Worlds social metaverse platform on web

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 18, 2022

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, reveals its plans to launch Horizon Worlds social metaverse platform on the web.

This will be a significant development towards making metaverse more accessible to users across the globe, as the Horizon Worlds social metaverse platform is currently available only for Meta’s Quest VR Headset users.

We’re making good on our goal to ensure that developers have a path to real financial success on our platform. It’s early days, there is still a lot of work to be done and we continue to partner closely with our creators and developers to enable them to earn meaningful revenue.
— Boz (@boztank) April 14, 2022

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth indicated through a tweet that when Horizon’s web version launches, the platform fee will be only 25%, which is a far lower rate than other similar world-building platforms.

According to him, the platform’s web version was part of a larger thread justifying Meta’s 47.5 percent cut (including a platform fee of 30% for purchases made through Meta’s Quest Store) of Horizon Worlds purchases.

Horizon Worlds was released to Oculus Quest VR headset users in the United States and Canada in early December, and it quickly grew to 300,000 monthly users.

Bosworth tweeted, “In its early days, there is still a lot of work to be done, and we continue to partner closely with our creators and developers to enable them to earn meaningful revenue.” He further added that they are reaching their goal of ensuring that developers on their platform can achieve true financial success.

Apart from this development, Meta has also announced that it is developing new tools that would help creators experiment with different ways to monetize what they are building in Horizon Worlds.

“While we’re launching this today as a test with a handful of creators to get their feedback, these types of tools are steps toward our long-term vision for the metaverse where creators can earn a living and people can purchase digital goods, services, and experiences,” mentioned Meta.

NASA is using AI to optimize new Hypersonic Engine

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 18, 2022

Researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have developed a novel hypersonic computational fluid dynamics code dubbed VULCAN-CFD and are using AI to optimize the tech.

The highly capable model named after the Roman god of fire can accurately simulate the behavior of combustion in turbulent airflows in engines operating at subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic speeds.

A hypersonic missile travels at Mach 5 or higher, which is five times faster than the speed of sound (3836 mph), or about 1 mile per second. Such missiles are extremely destructive in nature as most of the currently available air defense systems, and anti-ballistic systems can not bring them down.

The major challenge that researchers face while developing hypersonic missiles is to make them travel at hypersonic speed without compromising the missile’s maneuvering capabilities. Developers need to analyze the air flows around the aircraft or weapon and its behavior as it passes through the engines and reacts with fuel, which is quite a tedious task. That is where NASA’s new tool comes into play.

NASA says that its new software stores a single, one-dimensional image of flame called a “flamelet” in each entry of a large, multidimensional table representing burning fuel. However, the massive amounts of data that needs to be processed create a challenge for researchers as it requires a lot of computer memory.

Therefore NASA is using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to reduce the computational requirements for processing such vast amounts of data. The neural network discovered shortcuts to understand how combustion happens within super and supersonic engines by training it on a flamelet table.
NASA has partnered with Dr. Som and his colleagues at Argonne to develop this advanced technology. “Working with NASA gave us the opportunity to integrate our novel developments in a state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics code,” said a team member of Argonne.

US and India engage in talks about AI in Military

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 18, 2022

The US and India have agreed to engage in talks related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Military to strengthen both countries’ armies.

This new development was revealed after India’s Minister of Defense Rajnath Singh and Minister of External Affairs Dr. S. Jaishankar met their US counterparts Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and announced the first Defense Artificial Intelligence Dialogue.

The upcoming talks are a “very significant event,” according to Jack Shanahan, the first director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. They are “a logical extension” of the flagship US-India Artificial Intelligence Initiative, or USIAI, which was launched last year.

“As the Indian military emerges as a more jointly integrated force, the 2+2 Ministerial advanced initiatives that will allow the US and Indian militaries to work more seamlessly together across all domains of potential conflict—from the seas to cyberspace,” mentioned Pentagon in a release.

During their meetings, leaders from both countries developed new and deeper cooperation across the US-India partnership, including defense, science and technology, commerce, climate, public health, and people-to-people ties. To support high-end, integrated operations, the US and India approved key bilateral initiatives on information sharing, liaison exchanges, and joint service engagements.

“It has all the elements already in place: an incredibly talented workforce, it’s got a remarkable research community, it’s got a technology ecosystem. It just has not really moved as fast as, say, the United States or China or the UK, or other countries. But I think that explosion’s coming,” said Shanahan regarding the status of AI growth in India.

In addition to talks related to AI in the Military, the leaders also said that they would maintain constant monitoring and consultation over the ongoing Ukraine crisis.

UrbanDenoiser, an AI tool that can detect Earthquakes by Canceling City Noise

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 18, 2022

Researchers from Stanford University have come up with a unique artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool called UrbanDenoiser that can cancel out city noise to better detect earthquakes.

Traditionally, earthquakes are monitored using seismometers that have seismic sensors to determine waves and vibrations coming from the earth.

The newly developed algorithm can drastically improve the monitoring capabilities of earthquake detection systems in densely populated cities and towns.

UrbanDenoiser effectively suppresses noise relative to the signals as the model was trained using waveform datasets containing rich noise sources from the urban Long Beach dense array and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) seismic signals from the rural San Jacinto dense array.

The research paper describing UrbanDenoiser has been published in Science Advances. “Application to the dense array data and an earthquake sequence in an urban area shows that UrbanDenoiser can increase signal quality and recover signals at an SNR level down to ~0 dB,” mentioned the developers.

It can improve overall signal quality and recover signals that were earlier might have been unregistrable by filtering out background seismic noise. The neural network’s architecture is based on the DeepDenoiser algorithm (Materials and Methods).

To train, validate, and test the deep neural network, almost 80,000 samples of urban noise and 33,751 samples of earthquake signals were used in various configurations. The abovementioned samples were collected from California’s busy Long Beach and rural San Jacinto.

“We tested the performance of the newly trained UrbanDenoiser on both the constructed waveforms from the test set and real Long Beach waveform data that were not included in the training process and compared it with the original DeepDenoiser,” said the researchers.

In addition, Stanford researchers had also developed models for phase picking or estimating the arrival periods of seismic waves within an earthquake signal.

Google’s AI tool, CookieEnforcer, can Automatically Disable Cookies

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 17, 2022

Technology giant Google and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have collaborated to develop a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool called CookieEnforcer that automatically disables unnecessary cookies.

The new AI tool can considerably help users browse the internet, eliminating the distraction caused by cookie consent pop-ups.

CookieEnforcer examines cookie alerts and predicts the steps necessary to remove all unneeded cookies. The AI tool has been developed to prevent cookies from persuading consumers to make website-friendly decisions that jeopardize their privacy.

The developers of CookieEnforcer said that the tool was determined to be 91 percent effective at automatically deactivating non-essential cookies when tested on the top 500 websites in the Tranco ranking list.

“We describe CookieEnforcer, a cookie enforcement controller system, which automatically finds cookie notices, locates the fine-grained options within these notices, understands the semantics of the cookies, and automatically disables non-essential cookies,” mentioned the researchers.

CookieEnforcer scans the domain and uses a machine-learning classifier to identify the cookie notice based on its textual and graphical features. It then interacts with every UI element on the notice to simulate user activity. Lastly, the researchers developed a decision model that uses the text associated with all cookie settings and their current state (selected or not-selected) to decide the actions needed to disable the unwanted cookies.

“This is done by modeling the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, where the input is a machine-readable cookie notice, and the output is the set of clicks to make,” added the researchers.

As of now, CookieEnforcer has not been launched officially for public use, but the team plans to integrate the tool as a browser extension soon.

Zoom launches ZoomIQ, an AI-powered solution focused at Sales teams

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 16, 2022

Communication platform providing company Zoom announces the launch of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution named ZoomIQ, focused on aiding sales teams of organizations.

The AI-enabled tool can be used to analyze sales meanings and leads to generate actionable insights, helping sales teams to make better data-driven decisions.

ZoomIQ comes with multiple utility features, such as backstage and webinar session branding for Zoom meetings and webinars.

The launch of ZoomIQ also marks the company’s first attempt to enter the sales automation domain as, to date, Zoom has primarily provided only video, audio, and chat communication services.

Companies can accelerate the new sales representative onboarding process, establish a modern sales methodology, and improve their sales teams by using actionable insights based on proven sales methods and a wealth of data provided by ZoomIQ.

“Zoom IQ for Sales is a conversation intelligence add-on for Zoom Meetings that turns customer interactions into meaningful and actionable insights, helping teams across marketing, sales, and competitive intelligence improve crucial interactions with customers,” mentioned Zoom in a blog.

It also added that companies could boost seller productivity with the use of conversation intelligence, which includes automation, risk assessments, and easy search functionality.

Additional features of ZoomIQ include a personalized feedback system that offers a visual solution to aid sales teams in identifying areas of improvement, an option to review conversational analytics that can be used to make decisions based on real insights, and numerous others that can drastically increase the productivity of sales teams while also providing a better customer experience.

Interested users can visit the official website of Zoom to get a demo of the newly launched ZoomIQ solution.

DRDO Chairman announces AI implementation across all labs

By

Osheen Jain

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April 15, 2022

On International Women’s Day 2022, G. Satheesh Reddy, Chairman of DRDO and Secretary, Department of Defence Research and Development, told the media that women have been making substantial strides in the defense research spearheaded by DRDO. Currently, there are three women directors generals, three serving as corporate directors at agency headquarters, and three others as directors of major defense laboratories. During the event, he also announced various new technologies and DRDO’s implementation of AI across labs and systems.

Various other women scientists have been leading critical projects involving missiles and bombs. Around 250 women scientists contributed and attended Shakti, the program organized by DRDO on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2022. The event included discussions about how women contribute to augmenting defense technology and designing a better working environment in R&D.

Mr. Reddy announced that DRDO is working on various new AI technologies, including Helina, an anti-tank guided missile. He also announced that Rustom-2, the indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle is going through the final trials.

He also added that AI has been introduced in all DRDO system labs it will be part of every system. India is one of the few nations that have developed and successfully demonstrated anti-drone technology. The anti-drone technology has been transferred to Bharat Electronics Ltd and a few private agencies from where The armed forces and security agencies are now placing orders.

Shoba Koshy, former Chairperson of the KSC for Protection of Child Rights and Former Chief Postmaster General (Kerala), congratulated the DRDO women scientists and other delegates on their endeavors and achievements in helping the country achieve self-reliance in defense.

She called for steps to sensitize people about the violence and bias women and children face, both at home and at work. “Working women are often worried about their children’s safety and well-being and balancing household chores with the profession,” she said.