Linux Foundation Implements A Safe Open Standards For AI Voice Assistants

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June 26, 2021

On Tuesday, the Linux Foundation announced an open-source association wholly dedicated to the advancing open standards that supports the promotion of AI-enabled voice assistance systems named open voice network.

The Linux Foundation aims to build a sustainable ecosystem along with open-source projects to speed up technological development and commercial adoptions. The open voice network’s role is to prioritize trust and interoperability in voice-based applications and support fostering AI-enabled voice assistance systems in the digital future.

The artificial intelligence-generated voice assistance systems are primarily based on automatic speech recognition, advanced dialog management, natural language processing, and machine learning. The open voice network has set a few guidelines on them to ensure the voice assistance’s security.

“Having an open network through Open Voice Network for education and global standards is the only way to keep pace with the rate of innovation and demand for influencer marketing,” said Rolf Schumann, the chief digital officer at Schwarz Gruppe(one of the founding members).

They have set three significant guidelines to ensure a secured voice assistance system: to research and recommend global standards that qualify the user choice, inclusivity, and trust. To identify and share conversational AI practices specific and inlined with industries that serve as the source of insight and value for voice assistance systems. And the last one, for the enterprises to work along with the existing industry associations on relevant regulatory and legislative issues.

Xactly Forecasting Wins 2021 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 26, 2021

Xactly Forecasting Wins 2021 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award

Xactly Forecasting recently announced that it was named a “Best Predictive Analytics Solution” in the fourth annual AI Breakthrough Awards program. The award show recognizes top enterprises and products in the global market and is organized every year by an industry-leading artificial intelligence organization, AI Breakthrough.

This year’s program had over 2,850 nominations from 17 different countries across the world. Xactly’s end-to-end artificial intelligence platform provides customers accurate and precise sales forecasting with the help of its artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, coupled with its vast reserves of data gathered for over 16 years.

The platform also enables the customers to access historical data, sentiment and buying patterns to better understand both upsell potential for existing customers and the likelihood of deals closing for new clients, improving revenue predictability.

Arnab Mishra, Chief Product Officer at Xactly, said, “To stay ahead in a competitive market and deliver on high growth targets, more enterprise organizations are optimizing their businesses and embracing intelligent revenue.”

He further added that sales technologies are imperative components of any high-performing company. In recent times, the uncertainty of the global economy has made sales forecasting a challenge for most of the industry leaders.

Xactly’s platform has helped such companies to predict and manage their revenue pipeline to ensure profitability accurately. The platform has also received the title of ‘2021 Product of the Year’ by Business Intelligence Group. Despite advancements in automation and the increasing pressure to succeed, enterprises fall short in forecasting and hitting their numbers as their revenue funnel is missing the ability to understand and store data.

James Johnson, Managing Director of AI Breakthrough, said, “Sellers’ time is valuable, and solutions like Xactly Forecasting that are built on advanced artificial intelligence to provide critical insights and save this precious time are certainly ‘breakthrough’ worthy.”

Volvo To Release Lidar-Based Electric SUV In 2022

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 25, 2021

volvo to release lidar based electric suv

On Thursday, Volvo confirmed the release of an all-electric, lidar-based artificial intelligence-powered successor to the Volvo XC90 in 2022. Volvo’s upcoming flagship SUV will feature new sensors and computers, which would provide a more advanced driver-assistance technology.

A recent press release from Volvo said that the XC90 successor would get Luminar lidar and a higher-performance computer using the Nvidia Drive Orin chip as standard equipment. Volvo previously confirmed plans to integrate roof-mounted lidar sensors from Luminar, which the carmaker has been funding since 2018.

LIDAR is like a radar that uses light waves instead of radio waves to detect objects. This technology is considered to be an inevitable component of self-driving cars by many experts as the majority of the prototypes currently being tested are using similar equipment. However, leading self-driving cars makers like Tesla have shown interest in computer vision technology instead of LIDAR.

Volvo said that this new technology would be coupled with an in-house developed software named ‘Highway Pilot’ to enable customers to use the feature in selected geographical locations and conditions legalized by respective governments. The carmaker confirmed that the lidar sensor would be developed by Luminar along with an industry-leading gaming hardware producer, NVIDIA.

Henrik Green, Chief Technology Officer at Volvo, said, “Standardizing the lidar technology and the computing platform will provide our customers with a new level of safety in all the vehicles that are affected.”

He mentioned that the new hardware would also help improve Volvo’s standard safety features like automatic emergency braking and blindspot detection. The technology developed by Luminar and NVIDIA will enable Volvo’s cars to scrutinize the surroundings and aid them in making accurate decisions about its next move.

This feature has the capability to surpass a human driver’s skills to prevent accidents in a tricky, collision-like situation. The successor of XC90 will be based on Volvo’s new SPA2 architecture, replacing the Scalable Product Architecture platform that is being used in the current generation of XC90 and many other Volvo models.

AWS And Salesforce Announced Partnership For New AI Applications

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 25, 2021

AWS And Salesforce Announced Partnership

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced their partnership to unify developer experiences and launch new artificial intelligence applications. This partnership will make it easy for customers to use all the services of Salesforce and AWS together to quickly develop new business applications that accelerate digital transformation.

Andy Jass, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said, “With this partnership, we are considerably simplifying developers’ efforts and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want, at any scale.”

This collaboration will help developers build and launch custom applications with the help of a unified platform of both companies. This will also aid Salesforce developers in integrating AWS data and workflows into their own applications.

The company also plans to utilize AWS’s expertise in voice, video, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to develop more sales and service-related software to add to their suite.

This new offering will enable customers to purchase Salesforce’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence platforms and then consume the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce said, “This is a remarkable partnership for the technology industry and one that will allow our consumers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360 and achieve a new level of success in their business.” He further added that with a strong, unified platform, their global consumer base could create a single source of truth across sales, marketing, service, and e-commerce, from anywhere in the world.

Earlier, a custom integration code was required for users that wanted to combine AWS and Salesforce platforms for their applications. The new partnership will allow customers to use AWS and Salesforce services together seamlessly through a new unified platform. The enterprises have also collaborated on a new tool to help users innovate and develop applications that connect data in real-time between Salesforce applications and AWS services.

Stack Overflow Introduces Collectives For Enhanced Developer Engagement

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Manisha Kalagara

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June 25, 2021

Stack overflow introduced a new product named Collectives. It is a community for technology enterprises to engage directly with developers who use their products. Enterprises will be able to organize discussions around their topic of interest. They can also interact directly with developers to acquire insights into product usage along with answering common questions.

The question and answer website’s Collectives is its second major product, while the Teams being the first in 2018. Teams was also a similar platform, but it was internal and accessible by colleagues and various sectors in the same firm but didn’t communicate with the developers. Collectives provides the access of multiple professionals in the enterprise to answer developers’ questions directly.

Collectives possess centralized topics around a particular technology that can include many subtopics and long-form content and recommendations from people close to that technology rather than focus on small niche topics like the Stack Overflow platform.

Collectives are pretty similar to the Reddit community, and instead, they are constrained to the topics to which the enterprise is related. The first two Collections are Google Cloud and Go, an open-source programming language by Google. The community is made accessible for everyone, coming at a free-of-cost advantage. At the same time, the paid customers can work closely with the company and will be able to regulate the topics and technologies benefiting the sub-community.

The Collectives homepage is enhanced with a curated list of questions and answers that include various types of content while using the associated tags. One of the features, “recommended answers,” allows companies to find the best answer and assist users in finding solutions quicker. “Articles” is another option that introduces long-form content like how-to guides and announcements. Many other features help bridge the gap between the companies and the developers found on the website.

Google Cloud launched Its Visual Inspection Artificial Intelligence Tool

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 25, 2021

Google launched its Visual Inspection AI tool

Google launched its Virtual Inspection artificial intelligence tool on 22 June 2021. This platform would help manufacturers worldwide to reduce defects and deliver significant operational savings from the manufacturing process.

In today’s manufacturing sector, quality-related expenses account for 20% of the sales revenue. This artificial intelligence tool will aid the companies in delivering standard quality products to the customers every time.

The platform uses Google Cloud’s computer vision technology, Visual Inspection artificial intelligence tool automates the quality control process, allowing manufacturers to quickly and accurately identify defects before products are shipped.

This platform can generate accurate models with up to 300 times fewer human-labeled images than other machine learning platforms. Google’s Visual Inspection tool provides –

No special expertise is required: Quality, test, and manufacturing engineers can use this platform without any computer vision or artificial intelligence expertise. The built-in user interface guides employees through all of the necessary steps.

Engineers can build more accurate models. Machine learning models can be trained using as few as ten labeled images and will keep on increasing their accuracy over time as they are exposed to more products.

Full edge-to-cloud capability: Inspection models can be downloaded to machines and run autonomously at the edge to improve latency. At the same time, Visual Inspection artificial intelligence is fully integrated into Google Cloud’s portfolio of analytics solutions. This allows manufacturers to combine insights from Visual Inspection with other data sources on the shop floor and beyond, for instance, to identify root causes of quality problems or to cross-reference with supplier and customer data.

Problems can be resolved faster. Not only does the solution flag defects, but Visual Inspection artificial intelligence can locate and identify the specific defect within each part, which reduces the time spent by engineers to diagnose problems, rework parts, and implement process improvements.

Kevin Prouty, Vice President at IDC, said, “Google is one of those companies that have the potential to bring together IT, OT, and an ecosystem of partners that manufacturers need to deploy artificial intelligence on the shop floor at scale.”

AWS Hosts Its Second Online Summit In India With 90+ Sessions

By

Manisha Kalagara

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June 25, 2021

The AWS online summit 2021-India is being held for two days, i.e., 29th and 30th of June, from 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM IST. It will offer over 90 educational sessions, technical demonstrations, and networking opportunities for technology leaders, business executives, IT professionals, and cloud developers by experts and professionals in various domains.

Cloud services are making a new shift in the tech field; irrespective of the size of the enterprise, everyone is tending to reach out to their customers digitally. But the pandemic has laid a massive dent for the startups and emerging businesses that do not have effective digital presence for all of their business operations. To help them build better cloud infrastructure, AWS is hosting the online summit.

The summit will focus on key concepts of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, DevOps, security, application modernization, financial services, and digitizing India. The sessions are concentrated on maximizing cloud technology, emerging technologies, and about how AWS can be used to make tech operations more efficient.

The summit is spread across four levels: introductory (100) , intermediate (200) , advanced (300) and expert (400). Every level has customized sessions for each expertise. Like, building intelligent marketing kiosks using AWS AI/ML services for coming up with better-targeted ads. Building cloud migration roadmap on AWS to help carry office online smoothly. Solving business problems with AI/ML that aids with understanding leverage the AI/ML technology in various business functions to obtain better productivity.

There are many more sessions that focus on improving profits and productivity. The summit is free for anyone who registers, the registrations are yet to be opened on the AWS website, but you will be notified once they start accepting registrations. And also, one can attend sessions of any level regardless of one’s expertise in that field. The first two levels are held on day 1 and the next on day 2; the website provides a detailed event agenda.

IBM & Indian Institute Of Science Launch Innovation Lab In India

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 25, 2021

IBM and Indian Institute of Science launch Innovation lab in India

IBM and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), recently announced the launch of the IBM-IISc hybrid cloud lab to advance hybrid cloud research in India. Students and faculty members of IISc will work together with IBM scientists to conduct groundbreaking research that can help organizations utilize the capabilities of the hybrid cloud by enabling faster, seamless, and secure adoption of artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud.

The lab will be led by an associate professor at IISc, Prof. Yogesh Simmhan, and Dr. Amith Singhee from IBM India. This IBM-IISc venture will allow passionate individuals to conduct research on the most common but important challenges enterprises face in today’s world and propose possible solutions that would help amplify the adoption rate of hybrid cloud computing in the industry.

Initially, the research team would include faculty and students of data science, automation, and computer science from IISc and researchers from IBM India.

The main focus of the research would be in the following areas:

Building autonomous computing systems that will use artificial intelligence to predict possible issues, diagnose and provide solutions while maximizing availability and minimizing the operational costs.
Adopting microservices and optimization of cloud-native platforms that utilize cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and serverless. This will allow enterprises to bring substantial agility into their IT services.
Creating artificial intelligence-based Information Management that enables enterprises to analyze, consume, and create value from data across .
Developing artificial intelligence systems that can scrutinize human and machine languages, with advances in artificial intelligence for Code, to optimize computing systems. This will play a vital role in the adoption of automation and cloud computing in the industry.

Navakanta Bhat, Dean of IISc Bengaluru, said, “We are excited about making the joint research findings open-source and accessible to a worldwide community which will significantly accelerate innovation in the emerging areas of AI and hybrid cloud.”

She further added that they are incredibly proud to partner with IBM as such industry-academia collaborations are essential to conduct advanced research.

Expert.ai Announces The Release Of Hybrid Natural Language Platform

By

Manisha Kalagara

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June 24, 2021

Expert.ai announced on Tuesday regarding the general availability of the hybrid natural language launched in March for various natural language solutions such as designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring.

This cloud-based platform aids enterprises to accelerate, augment and expand their firms for any activity that includes language. It assists by turning any text-based document into structured data. Expert.ai’s Platform supports knowledge discovery, process automation and decision-making, and the shared advantage of flexible designing of language models.

By switching from tactical to the strategic use of natural language for designing artificial intelligence models, enterprises will build greater portability of language assets and models. Natural language solutions also aid with solving business challenges and deliver natural-language-enabled enterprises when used as a whole.

The Expert.ai Platform uses an exclusive hybrid AI approach honed from hundreds of real-world implementations. Comprehensive and easy to use, it combines symbolic AI and machine learning techniques to ensure the best possible accuracy for each use case with explainable AI.

“Language powers business, so unlocking the value of data embedded in your everyday language is critical to success. With the launch of our platform, we enable, for the first time, the combination of different AI techniques to design and deploy practical applications,” said Luca Scagliarini, expert.ai CPO.

The natural language processing uses a unique hybrid artificial intelligence approach that has been sharpened using hundreds of real-world implementations, making the platform easy and comprehensive. The combination of symbolic AI and machine learning techniques ensures that every individual user gets the best possible accuracy while being transparent about the explainable AI. A live demo for it can also be obtained from the website.

NVIDIA Canvas Uses Artificial Intelligence To Turn Your Doodles Into Images

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 24, 2021

NVIDIA Canvas Uses Artificial Intelligence To Turn Your Doodles Into Images

NVIDIA recently announced the launch of its artificial intelligence-powered application, ‘Canvas.’ The application will be available to every NVIDIA RTX GPU user at no additional cost. This application can convert simple doodle images into stunning photographs with the use of artificial intelligence.

The developers had surprised the audience in 2019 by using deep learning models to turn rudimentary sketches into photorealistic scenes. Canvas is appearing to be the publicly available version showcased by the developers earlier. The app is a part of NVIDIA Studio, which is a platform that provides artists and creators with both hardware and software tools to aid them in bringing creative visions to life.

Artists can start sketching shapes and lines using a palette of 15 tools like grass, mountains, clouds, and weather effects. The artificial intelligence-powered software will convert those into a photorealistic scene in real-time.

NVIDIA officials said, “The tool allows artists to use style filters, changing a generated image to adopt the style of a particular painter.” They also mentioned that the app doesn’t just stitch pieces of images together but it creates new images the way artists do. The creative applications of the tool are endless, and it can help artists create paintings faster than before.

The application uses a type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs consist of a generator and a discriminator that work simultaneously. The generator converts material maps into images, and the discriminator analyses certain aspects of what is generated. The GAN system used to develop Canvas has been trained on an NVIDIA DGX system and has been fed with over five million images.

The beta version of the application is available for download on NVIDIA’s official website. The minimum system requirements to run the application are a GPU of NVIDIA’s RTX segment with 460.89 or a newer driver.