AI Will Now Judge Artist’s Popularity In Italian Museums

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June 16, 2021

AI Will Now Judge Artist’s Popularity In Italian Museums

New AI technology introduced in Italian museums will judge the popularity of artists through the facial expressions of the visitors. On Thursday, researchers started a trial of a camera system augmented by artificial intelligence in three Italian museums to gauge the visitors’ reactions to different works of art.

Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development invented this technology, which has been on trial in Rome, Parma, and Bologna for the past three weeks.

The AI-powered camera system can read the visitor’s expressions – happy, sad, surprised, angry, neutral- along with their gender, age, and eye movements. Researchers believe this would help the curators plan their exhibitions better by putting on air well-liked pieces of art over those that might not get much attention.

However, this technology has received some criticism from artists as they believe this would lead art into another race for ‘likes.’ Inside the museum, a visitor was spotted smiling at a 12th Century painting, which was reported back to the database.

Silvia Battistini, Bologna civic museum curator, said, “I was surprised at what a great opportunity this was. As a curator, you don’t usually get such relevant information about the general public’s point of view without a mediator of some sort.” Though museums in London and the USA have previously used Artificial Intelligence, this ShareArt experiment is one of its kind.

The technology was initially built to avoid potential Covid contagion after the museums reopen. Ricardo Scipinotti, one of the developers of this system, said that the system had recorded many neutral expressions. He added that the visitors need not worry about privacy, and the data is not stored anywhere.

The Head of curatorial at Design museums in London said while time sensors can help museums understand the visitor’s liking, facial recognition is not a correct way to judge someone’s preference, and expressions are not an exact science.

Telangana Government Launches Mission Revv Up for AI Startups

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 16, 2021

Telangana Government Launches Mission Revv Up for AI Startups

Telangana Government on Monday announced the Telangana AI Mission as a part of the ‘2020 Year of AI’ initiative. The purpose of this AI Mission is to make Telangana a global hub for Artificial Intelligence.

‘Revv Up’ accelerator program was also announced by the government, which will empower AI-based start-ups. Revv UP will start in the month of July with the sole purpose of developing the state into a global destination for AI and various other technologies.

This Accelerator program will enable start-ups to work alongside the government to develop solutions for complex business problems. Selected start-ups will also receive help from the government and industry to set up their business at a larger scale.

Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Government of Telangana, said at the launch, “Government of Telangana is committed to its vision of positioning Telangana as the leader in AI. After becoming the first state in India to launch an actionable policy framework for Artificial Intelligence in June 2020, we are now happy to set in motion the first edition of the Revv Up accelerator program to hone innovative AI ideas under the T-AIM. This accelerator will be a torchbearer for future Artificial Intelligence accelerators in the nation, and we are excited that NASSCOM will execute the envisioned strategy of T-AIM to identify and promote innovative and impactful AI solutions to solve real-world problems”.

This special program is meant for AI-based start-ups in Hyderabad or is willing to set up their office in the city. Telangana AI Mission is encouraging AI start-ups with a good use case to take part in this program, which would boost the growth rate of start-ups, resulting in a higher overall growth rate of the industry.

NASSCOM’s President, Debjani Ghosh, congratulated the entire team of T-AIM for the launch of this program for AI start-ups. She also said that NASSCOM would provide the best support possible to make this program a success.

Why is the world facing a chipset shortage in 2021?

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 16, 2021

Why is the world facing a chipset shortage in 2021

Whenever we think of chipsets, we tend to associate them with smartphones, but that is not the reality. Every electronic device we use has semiconductor chipsets in it. From the rise in smartphone prices, supply shortage of home appliances to delayed delivery of cars are because of this unexpected shortage of semiconductor microchips.

Recently Samsung Electronics has suspended the production of their flagship smartphone because of this shortage. The root cause of the shortage is an amalgamation of many factors as car manufacturers closed their plants last year amidst the coronavirus pandemic. They now are competing against the booming industry of consumer electronics for microchip supplies.

During the pandemic, the electronic industry experienced a huge demand as consumers stocked up mobile phones and laptops. The automobile industry also experienced a higher demand of cars than expected, which further tightened the supply.

Automobiles being the first affected industry, the shortage has now spread across many other electronic sectors like smartphones, air conditioners, microwaves etc. This shortage caused manufacturers to stock up their supplies, which has resulted in a price hike of even the cheapest components of chipsets leading to an increased price of final products. The demand for 5G phones increased rapidly and the manufacturers struggled to increase the production.

Tech giants like Qualcomm and Foxconn have warned their clients about microchip shortage, which has affected their supply line. Majority of the chipset manufacturing is done in Asia by companies like Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.

Companies that produce chipsets are extremely expensive to build. Expanding their existing production capacity is equally hard as it includes induction of many complex hardware, which is very time consuming.. Experts say that it could take more than a year to successfully expand the chipset manufacturing industry. Joe Biden, the President of the US has announced $37 billion to fund the execution of expanding microchip manufacturing in the country. China is also offering subsidies to local companies to develop machineries in order to reduce its dependence on western technologies.

Hugging Face Launches Their Free NLP Course

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 15, 2021

Hugging Face Launches Their Free NLP Course

Hugging Face launches a free Natural Language Processing (NLP) Course on their website. The course will give in-depth knowledge and understanding about NLP using libraries from the Hugging Face ecosystem and Hugging Face Hub. The course is meticulously designed by Hugging Face’s industry-leading Machine Learning engineers like Mathew Carrigan and Sylvian Gugger.

The course is divided into three sections that progressively get more advanced. As of now, the first section of the course has been released. The second section is to be released in the mid of 2021, followed by the third section, which is expected to release in early 2022.

The first section will give knowledge about Transformer models and its usage. Transformer model is an architecture for transforming one sequence into another. Many giant organizations like Google AI and Facebook AI use the Hugging Face Transformer model and contribute to the community by sharing their models.

The first chapter of the course doesn’t require any prior technical knowledge. The chapter talks about what transformer models can do and how one can use them in practice. The following three chapters require previous knowledge of Python and some basics of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. The next set of 4 chapters will teach the very fundamentals of datasets and Tokenizers.

After basics, the course dives into classic NLP tasks. On completion of chapter eight, one will be able to deal with basic NLP problems independently. The next set of four chapters gives even more profound knowledge about architecture, including memory efficiency, long sequences, and lots more. By the end of the first section of the course, one can handle complex NLP problems and solve them.

In this world of technology, Machine Learning is growing at a meteoric pace. This course by Hugging Face will impart valuable and useful knowledge to someone willing to enter the Machine Learning industry.

Google’s New AI Can Design Chips Faster Than Humans

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 15, 2021

Google’s New AI Can Design Chips Faster Than Humans

Google recently announced that they had developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can design micro chipsets faster than humans. The company on Wednesday said to the journal Nature that a chip made by humans would take months to design, can be made in less than 6 hours by its new AI software.

Google said that this AI has already been used to develop Google’s tensor processing unit chips, which are used to run AI-based tasks. Google’s co-head of machine learning, Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, said, “Our method has been used in production to design the next generation of Google TPU.”

In other words, Google is using its AI software to create even more complex AI systems. Precisely, this AI software of Google can draw the blueprint of a chip, which includes plotting where components like CPUs, GPUs, and memory are placed on the silicon die in relation to one another.

The positioning of their micro components is of huge importance as it affects the chipset’s processing speed and power consumption. Humans would take months to design these blueprints accurately, but Google’s deep reinforcement learning system can do the job with minimum effort.

This AI software is trained to determine which component combination works best to make the chipset most efficient. The software was fed more than 10,000 chip blueprints for it to learn what works best. Human chip designers generally layout components in neat lines. On the contrary, Google’s AI uses a more scattered method to design chipsets.

Yan LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, wrote about this research on Twitter, “very nice work, this is exactly the type of setting in which RL shines.” Nature editorial on Wednesday hailed this research as an “important achievement” that would be very helpful in speeding up the supply chain.

AI Can Now Predict Viral Infections In Humans Using Gene Expression

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 15, 2021

AI Can Now Predict Viral Infections In Humans

In New York, a massive team of researchers has used Artificial Intelligence (AI) based algorithms to find similarities in the gene expression data of past pandemic infected individuals, which includes infections like Swine Flu and SARC. Pradipta Ghosh, one of the researchers from the University of California, indicated two telltale signatures. The first is a sum total of 166 genes, which shows the immune reaction of human beings against viral infection. The second set of 20 gene signatures show the severity of the infection in patients. This AI algorithm can predict the need for ventilator support and hospitalization for a patient.

Pradipta Ghosh said, “These viral pandemic-associated signatures tell us how a person’s immune system responds to a viral infection and how severe it might get, and that gives us a map for this and future pandemics.” Also she added that the AI algorithm has been developed with publicly available gene expression data.

The study states that our body releases a protein called cytokine in the blood when infected with a virus. These proteins aid the immune cells to find the infection, but sometimes, our body releases an excess amount of the protein, which leads the immune system to attack its own healthy tissues.

This condition in the body, known as the Cytokine storm, is one of the main reasons for some and not all people catching a viral infection, which also includes common flu. The research team found a similar gene expression pattern in each set of data they tested of Covid-19 patients. After a thorough examination of the data, the researchers said the cells lining the lung airway and macrophages, which are also known as white blood cells, are the reason behind the initiation of cytokine storms in the human body.

The researchers claim that this AI algorithm can help doctors in treatment by providing cellular level information of the patient’s condition and also by showing benchmarks to measure improvement in the infected.

Microsoft Announces The End Of Support For Windows 10 In 2025

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 15, 2021

Microsoft announces end of windows 10 support

The updated windows lifecycle fact sheet mentions that Microsoft will end support for various versions of Windows 10 which includes Home, Pro, Pro for Workstation and Pro for Education on October 14, 2025. US-based tech giant, Microsoft, will no longer push updates and security patches beyond that date.

Microsoft released Windows 10 in July 2015 describing it as an “operating system as a service” that would regularly receive updates and security fixes. During the launch, Microsoft also claimed that Windows 10 would be their last version of their operating system. But recently the company’s website teased about the launch of the all-new Windows 11 that has been confirmed to release by the end of June 2021.

A new event has been posted on the company’s website which will be held on 24^th of June. At the event, Microsoft will throw light on this development and also highlight the key features which the new Windows will have. The company confirmed about the event through their twitter handle and mentioned that the event will begin at 8:30PM IST.

Satya Nadela, CEO of Microsoft at the Microsoft build 2021 event said that the next windows update will be the greatest one of the past decade. Windows 11 is being rumored to have a major UI update.

Nadela said “Soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. I’ve been self-hosting it over the past several months, and I’m incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows.” As the past suggests, it took a long time for users to shift from Windows 7 to Windows 10, it can be expected that complete retirement of Windows 10 would take quite longer than 2025.

Apple Hires EX-BMW Employee To Boost Its Electric Car Project

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 14, 2021

Apple has hired ex BMW AG’s electric car division’s former employee named Ulrich Kranz to head its automobile department, confirms an Apple spokesperson. Krans was senior VP of the team for 30 years who developed cars like i3 and i8 at BMW. He then cofounded Canoo Inc that develops self-driven electric vehicles.

A month before he stepped down as the CEO of Canoo, he was approached by Apple Inc. This bold move by Apple shows that the smartphone giant wants to get a good grip on the electric car segment and aims to rival Tesla and others.

Kranz will be working with Doug Fields, who is an ex-employee of Tesla. By selling iPhones and Macs, Apple has become the most valuable company globally with a net worth of over $2trillion.

Now to diversify their product array, Apple has targeted AR headsets and Self-driven electric cars. Apple got into the automobile industry in the year 2014. In time, Apple has hired several Tesla employees who now develop self-driving software and other engineering tasks. Though Apple is working rigorously towards developing a self-driven electric car, the developments still are at early stages, the launch is expected no earlier than 2026.

Apple recently lost a few key auto employees like Dave Scott, Benjamin Lyon, and Jaime Waydo, who worked in several important departments. It is suspected that the hiring of Kranz is to make up for this loss.

In 2008, Kranz and his team developed an all battery-powered vehicle that yielded the i8 sports car and the all battery i3 compact. Kranz parted ways with BMW in 2016, after which he joined an electric vehicle startup called Faraday Future.

After a few months, he founded his own startup Canoo. The company struggles to produce a vehicle and was also planning to sell itself to Apple. Apple has a good history with BMW. From integrating BMW’s infotainment system with Apple’s iPod back in 2004 to making iPhone work as a key for BMW cars recently, they have collaborated a lot of time.

In 2014, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, was found checking out a BMW i8 in front of Apple’s office in California, USA.

NVIDIA Will Acquire DeepMap For Advancing The Autonomous Vehicle Industry

By

Kenny Manuel

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June 13, 2021

NVIDIA has agreed to acquire DeepMap, a five-year-old startup founded by the former employees of Google, Apple, and Baidu, for an undisclosed amount. DeepMap focuses on high-definition mapping to support self-driving cars’ requirements.

The need for guiding autonomous vehicles is crucial for democratizing self-driving cars. However, the shortage of labeled datasets about precise real-world maps is slackening the development of cars. What makes its worse is that localization is critical for having safer self-driving cars. A dataset built on an American road would not work effectively on an Indian road.

In addition, to diverse roads, there is a need for continuously updating the dataset to map the recent changes across the roads. To mitigate this, DeepMap strives to map the road and keep the latest information for autonomous cars to perform in the real world better.

And since NVIDIA is going big on autonomous vehicles by offering solutions like NVIDIA DRIVE, a software-defined, end-to-end platform for high-seed compute in the vehicle, Omnivers, which was announced at NVIDIA GTC 2021, the acquisition will advance NVIDIA’s capabilities to better serve self-driving vehicles developers.

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people,” said Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at NVIDIA. “DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

“NVIDIA is an amazing, world-changing company that shares our vision to accelerate safe autonomy,” said James Wu, co-founder and CEO of DeepMap. “Joining forces with NVIDIA will allow our technology to scale more quickly and benefit more people sooner. We look forward to continuing our journey as part of the NVIDIA team.”

IIT Kanpur To Setup Center Of Excellence For Artificial Intelligence In Noida

By

Kenny Manuel

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June 10, 2021

IIT Kanpur Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence

As a part of UP Startup Policy, 2020, the Uttar Pradesh government approved the setting up of a center of excellence in Noida. IIT Kanpur and FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) will set up a center of excellence for artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship.

The center of excellence will support startups and will provide the necessary exposer to get funding from investors. The UP government wants to create an ecosystem for innovative startups as it has set a target of being in the top 3 states in the “States’ Startup Ranking” introduced by the Government of India.

Delighted to share that @UPGovt has approved setting up Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence & Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship (AIIDE) at the Noida outreach campus of @IITKanpur in collaboration with Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry @ficci_india pic.twitter.com/JSs7K6HJUi
— Abhay Karandikar (@karandi65) June 9, 2021

Also Read: ISRO Is Offering A Free Machine Learning Course On Remote Sensing

In the coming years, the state government wants to achieve its target of creating an ecosystem for at least 10,000 startups in the state. For the next five years, the center of excellence will support 250 startups — 50 in a year — mainly from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and augmented reality.

“While IIT-Kanpur will give the technological expertise and incubation support, FICCI India will provide industry tie-ups and business connect. Also under the Start-up Policy 2020, financial assistance will be given to startups,” said Abhay Karandikar, Director of IIT Kanpur.