US and India engage in talks about AI in Military

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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

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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

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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.

Elon Musk offers $43 billion to Buy 100% share of Twitter

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 15, 2022

CEO of Tesla and the world’s richest man Elon Musk offers $43 billion to acquire a 100% share of the popular microblogging platform Twitter.

I made an offer https://t.co/VvreuPMeLu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022

According to Musk, the platform is in need of a complete transformation as he believes that Twitter can play a vital role in promoting and supporting free speech, which is an integral part of any democratic society.

In a recently held TED Talk event, Musk said that the platform has become kind of the de facto town square. Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share is a 38 percent premium over Twitter’s stock closing price on 1st April. Prior to Musk’s proposal, the social networking platform’s stock had dropped by about a third in value during the previous year.

How would Elon Musk change Twitter if he were to buy it? First, he’d make it open source. Watch @ElonMusk’s wide ranging live #TED2022 interview with @TEDChris on @YouTube here: https://t.co/dFFUxNqLZe pic.twitter.com/Okm3y5HpEy
— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 14, 2022

Recently, the billionaire technology entrepreneur spent $3 billion to a c quire a 9.2% stake in Twitter, becoming the largest single shareholder of the company.

“One of the things I believe Twitter should do is open-source the algorithm and make any changes to people’s tweets – if they are emphasized or de-emphasized, that action should be made apparent. So anyone can see that action has been taken,” mentioned Musk during the event.

However, Musk does not plan to join the board of directors of Twitter despite receiving support from Twitter’s CEO Parag Agarwal and outgoing board member Jack Dorsey. Musk mentioned that Twitter has enormous potential, which he will unleash, and he has made a “best and last” offer to purchase Twitter.

“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” added Musk.

Uniphore acquires AI-based Knowledge Automation company Colabo

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 15, 2022

Artificial Intelligence-powered customer service platform provider Uniphore acquires AI knowledge automation company Colabo.

Either of the companies did not provide any information regarding the valuation of this acquisition deal. According to Uniphone, this acquisition will allow the company to expand its platform’s capabilities using Colabo’s knowledge extraction and automation expertise.

The integration will allow organizations to extract knowledge entities and graphs from structured and unstructured data.

Clients of Uniphore will drastically benefit from this integration as this will allow IVAs and live agents to receive the most relevant content and next-best-action, resulting in improved customer experiences.

Colabo’s cutting-edge AI technology supports consumer interaction solutions by combining data from any digital and physical source into a smooth, customized omnichannel experience.

Co-founder and CEO of Uniphore, Umesh Sachdev, said, “Simply put, consumers today expect access to up-to-date information to solve their problems and contact centers can provide better experiences with the latest technologies that do exactly that.”

He further added that this acquisition brings together distinct capabilities to provide organizations with new tools that enable them to quickly respond to customer inquiries and provide agents with $400 million in its latest Series E funding round.

United States-based data extraction and utilization solution providing company Colabo was founded by Asaf Wexler, Naama Halperin, and Yoav Dembak in 2011. The firm specializes in offering an artificial intelligence-powered knowledge automation solution that extracts and utilizes information from structured and unstructured documents in real-time.

To date, the company has raised more than $10 million from multiple investors like Marker, Kaedan Capital, RedSeal, and others over three funding rounds.

Co-founder and CEO of Colabo Yoav Dembak said, “Today, I am proud to say we have achieved that and will be taking our vision even further by integrating into Uniphore’s conversational AI and automation platform, bringing rigor and best-of-breed agility and accuracy to every contact center inquiry.”

Deep Learning Enables AI to see in visible spectrum in ‘Dark’

By

Preetipadma K

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April 15, 2022

University of California, Irvine, ai night vision system

We have seen documentaries or news clips of Night-vision systems being used to see things in dark or low light conditions. Night vision cameras are amazing equipment, but the lack of detail in the acquired images can hamper decision-making. Some night vision systems employ infrared light – invisible to humans, and then convert the pictures to a digital display – which displays a monochrome image in the visible range. However, they also inhibit the interpretation of video footage since the display is monochromatic, with little difference between objects and poor shading.

Recently, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, used a deep learning system to rebuild night vision images in color. The system employs infrared pictures, which are undetectable to the naked eye. Humans can only perceive light wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers (violet to red), but infrared light exists beyond 700 nanometers. The scientists then merged the infrared data with an AI color prediction system to produce images, in the same manner, they would appear if the light was in the visible spectrum.

According to the team, image enhancement and deep learning have been used in computer vision jobs with low illuminance imaging to help in object recognition and characterization from the infrared spectrum, but not with appropriate interpretation of the same picture in the visible spectrum. The researchers explained that each dye and pigment that gives an item a visible color reflects a set of visible wavelengths as well as a set of infrared wavelengths in the current study. They could show visuals employing the visible hues associated with each dye and pigment if they could train a night-vision system to recognize the infrared fingerprint of each dye and pigment.

The scientists used a monochromatic camera sensitive to visible and near-infrared light to collect an image dataset of printed images of faces under multispectral illumination that included visible red (604 nm), green (529 nm), and blue (447 nm) wavelengths as well as infrared wavelengths to achieve their goal (718, 777, and 807 nm). They then used solely the near-infrared data to train a convolutional neural network to predict visible spectrum images. The training procedure yielded three architectures: a baseline linear regression, a U-Net inspired CNN (UNet), and an enhanced U-Net (UNet-GAN), all of which could generate three images per second.

Once the neural network had generated color pictures, the scientists presented them to graders, who chose which outputs looked nearly similar to the ground truth image. This information aided the researchers in determining the most effective neural network architecture. They discovered that a deep U-Net-based architecture could convert three infrared photos into a full-color photo that looked nearly identical to a normal photo of the same image.

Read More: Top 8 Deep Learning Libraries

According to the University of California scientists, the system requires two significant upgrades before it can be employed in medical applications. The first option is to increase the existing data capture rate beyond the present three frames per second in order to enable video imaging. The second is to modify the system so that it may be utilized with biologically relevant specimens like retinal tissues, which have different infrared reflectance spectra than the pictures used in this research. Aside from that, the scientists believe the discovery may be useful in security and military activities, as well as animal monitoring.

The scientist team at the University of California, Irvine published their findings on April 6th, in the journal PLOS ONE titled “Deep learning to enable color vision in the dark.”

Bharat Petroleum partners with Microsoft to accelerate Digital Transformation

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 14, 2022

Indian government-owned oil marketing company Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited has partnered with global technology giant Microsoft to further accelerate its journey of digital transformation.

The partnership aims to take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud to meet the oil and gas industry’s particular issues.

BPCL will leverage the expertise of Microsoft in the cloud and artificial intelligence-powered technologies to modernize its tech architecture and help provide a better experience to its customers.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS), platform-as-a-service (PAAS), network, and security services on the cloud, including Azure native services on Azure data factory, application programming interface (API), internet of things (IoT), and analytics, are among the services Microsoft will provide to Bharat Petroleum.

Moreover, Microsoft and Bharat Petroleum have also collaborated to deliver a secure communication experience for BPCL’s employee ecosystem across the country using Microsoft Teams and Workplace Productivity Suite.

Chief General Manager of BPCL, Rahul Tandon, said, “Microsoft has been one of the undisputed global leaders in technology for decades altogether, and BPCL is proud of taking this partnership forward now in the cloud domain.”

He further added that they want to help the company unlock value by providing world-class scalable infrastructure, reducing time to market, and reinventing how customers interact with BPCL.

As a part of the partnership, Bharat Petroleum will provide a digital customer experience using an innovative fueling solution powered by Microsoft Azure, build brand value by digitizing backend operations, and introduce, IoT-powered supply chains, along with developing a conversational AI platform named Urja to offer unmatched customer support to its customers.

“BPCL is one of the most respected public sector companies in the country, and we are honored to work together to define the next frontiers of data-driven innovation and customer engagement in the oil and gas industry,” said President of Microsoft India, Anant Maheshwari.

He also mentioned that this partnership, which combines BPCL’s operational knowledge with Microsoft’s cloud and AI capabilities, will help strengthen BPCL’s business operations by focusing on trust and security.

MNNIT to launch MTech Course in AI and Data Science

By

Dipayan Mitra

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April 14, 2022

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT)-Allahabad announces the launch of its new MTech course in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science.

Over the last decade, the data science and AI industry have witnessed an all-time growth because of the potential it brings. However, the industry still faces the challenge of pooling in trained professionals.

MNNIT has considered the growing demand for skilled professionals in this booming industry of data science to launch its new course.

Learners of this course will acquire critical skills and knowledge that the industry currently demands them to kick start their careers.

Artificial intelligence and data analytics is the ability to study and learn about enormous amounts of data from a variety of sources, along with identifying trends and making future source predictions. MNNIT says that its newly announced course named MTech in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science will start its first batch from the 2022-2023 academic session.

“This new MTech course is being started in place of the eight-year-old MTech in Software Engineering course that has been discontinued for lack of interest among both students and industry representatives arriving on the campus for placements,” said Sarvesh Tiwari from MNNIT.

He further added that this new MTech course had been meticulously designed to cater to all the industry requirements.

Admissions will be taken based on the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) 2022 scores for a total of 25 seats.

Prof DS Kushwaha, Head of the Department of Computer Science at MNNIT, said, “Now, on the basis of the GATE scorecard, admissions for MNNIT’s MTech in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science will be done in the institute in July-August 2022. The new MTech course will make technical students proficient in artificial intelligence and data analytics.”