Heena Sharma Blog

  SoftBank-owned UK chip maker Arm has partnered with Microsoft to create Azure-based tools to enable developers transfer data from Arm-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices to Azure Cloud. The partnership will enable developers to easily target a broad range of Arm-based devices like intelligent computer-vision-enabled cameras, connected vehicles, AI gateways and intelligent appliances. With over 30 billion active IoT devices in the world with 400 per cent growth over the past three years, the industry is moving incredibly fast. "Arm's leading silicon architecture combined with their broad ecosystem and commitment to optimising developer experiences will enable this partnership to accelerate AI innovation for IoT devices, delivering better solutions and a better future for end-users," said Moe Tanabian, Vice President, General Manager-Azure Edge Devices. Read More

On paper, the PLAYGO BH70 is capable of going toe-to-toe with the best-in-class. But even though it tries really hard to pack everything useful in a pair of headphones — and I appreciate the sincere effort — it falls short on some things that an able pair of ears just can’t miss. In the following paragraphs, allow me to explain why you should or shouldn’t buy these headphones, and what you should consider buying instead. This will be especially useful to people who don’t wish to spend more than Rs 15,000 on a pair of all-purpose headphones, ever. The construction At a time when most gadgets have embraced the beauty of vibrant colours, the PLAYGO BH70 comes in two dull, unimaginative SKUs: Graphite Grey and Medallion Brown. At least a bright silver option would have been nice. For a brand called Play, it’s no fun at all. Read More

IMAGE, India's first Centre of Excellence(CoE) for gaming, VFX, computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI) was launched in Hyderabad on Monday. This is also the first incubation centre for companies focused on IP in gaming, VFX, AI, computer vision set up by Software Technology Park of India (STPI). At the launch of the facility, STPI-IMAGE signed MoUs with five partners - Telangana VFX, Animation and Gaming Association(TVAGA), Hyderabad Angels, Hyderabad Software Exporters Association (HYSEA), and IIIT-Hyderabad, with an objective to promote start-ups and budding entrepreneurs by offering mentoring, technology support, infrastructure and funding among others. The 10,000 square feet IMAGE-CoE, located inside the existing STPI facility, plans to incubate up to 25-30 start-ups per year for the next 5 years. A total investment of Rs 19.68 crore would be spent over a period of 5 years for the CoE in addition to existing infrastructure in the STPI facility. Read More ...

By 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies such as virtual personal assistants and chatbots will replace almost 69 per cent of the manager's workload, predicts research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc. Such technologies are rapidly making headway into the workplace, Gartner said. "The role of manager will see a complete overhaul in the next four years," said Helen Poitevin, research vice- president at Gartner, in a statement. "Currently, managers often need to spend time filling in forms, updating information and approving workflows. By using AI to automate these tasks, they can spend less time managing transactions and can invest more time on learning, performance management and goal setting," she said. AI and emerging technologies will undeniably change the role of the manager and will allow employees to extend their degree of responsibility and influence, without taking on management tasks, Gartner said. Read More

After launching a few good smartphones in the mid-range segment, Chinese brand Vivo seems to have shifted its focus to starting range with the Vivo U20 , which features Snapdragon 675 SoC, full-HD+ display, and 5,000mAh battery. Among the best options in the just-above-Rs 10,000 price range at present are Realme's Realme 5, Redmi's Note 8, and a few others. Business Standard takes a look at how the Vivo U20 fares on key smartphone parameters: Design and display Vivo U20 smartphone, Vivo U20 smartphone review, vivo Its 6.53-inch display and 193g weight make the Vivo U20 slightly bulky and a bit difficult to hold for easy use. The plastic panel at the back has a glossy finish and attracts fingerprints. But its curvy frame gives it a sleek look. On the back, there is a triple-camera set-up and fingerprint sensor just above the middle. The power and volume buttons, too, are well within reach. It's a bit surprising that Vivo has gone for a Micro-USB port on the ...

Apple has revealed its " Best of 2019 " apps and games across platforms such as iOS, macOS and tvOS. "Developers around the world inspire us all with innovative apps that have the power to influence culture and change our lives, and this year that is as true as ever. The 2019 App Store Best Apps and Games winners reflect our global desire for connection, creativity and fun," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing said in a statement on Monday. The iPhone app of the year went to Lux Optics' Spectre Camera, an AI-powered photography app. Digital notebook app Flow by Moleskine was the top iPad app, while Serif Labs' Affinity Publisher publishing and design app took top honours for Mac. The Explorers, an app designed to "create a comprehensive 'visual inventory' of the natural world through photo and video," ranked as the year's best Apple TV app. Sky: Children of the Light was named iP...

After a failed $7 billion acquisition of Nokia's smartphone business five years back, Microsoft has announced a strategic collaboration with the Finnish company to accelerate transformation and innovation across industries with Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). The new partnership brings together Microsoft cloud solutions and Nokia's expertise in mission-critical networking, to help enterprises and communications service providers (CSPs) transform their businesses. "Bringing together Microsoft's expertise in intelligent cloud solutions and Nokia's strength in building business and mission-critical networks will unlock new connectivity and automation scenarios," Jason Zander, executive vice president, Microsoft Azure, said in a statement on Tuesday. BT is the first global communications service provider to offer its enterprise customers a managed service that integrates Microsoft Azure cloud and Nokia SD-WAN solutions...

China's Huawei Consumer Business Group on Tuesday announced that it will bring its flagship Kirin 990 system-on- chip (SoC) in India soon. The Kirin 990, world's first 5G-integrated mobile chipset, is the first mobile SoC to come with 10.3 billion transistors, thus making it incredibly fast and efficient. According to the company, the 5G version of the chip will be available in India with the upcoming line up of Huawei smartphones. "As one of Huawei's key markets, customer-centric innovation is at the heart of everything we do in India. We have always believed in bringing the very best to our consumers by continuously focusing on innovation and making the experience better, every single time. "The Kirin 990 is the very pinnacle of smartphone technology today and will leapfrog consumers into a new era of 5G. We are glad to announce a chipset that will revolutionise the way people use their smartphones," Tornado Pan, Country Manager (Huawei Brand), ...

Jack Ma believes artificial intelligence poses no threat to humanity, but Elon Musk called that "famous last words" as the billionaire tech tycoons faced off Thursday in an occasionally animated debate on futurism in Shanghai. The Chinese co-founder of Alibaba and the maverick industrialist behind Tesla and SpaceX frequently pulled pained expressions and raised eyebrows as they kicked off an AI conference with a dialogue that challenged attendees to keep up, veering from technology to Mars, death, and jobs. However, the hot topic in the hour-long talk was AI, which has provoked increasing concern among scientists such as late British cosmologist Stephen Hawking who warned that it will eventually turn on and "annihilate" humanity. "Computers may be clever, but human beings are much smarter," Ma said. "We invented the computer -- I've never seen a computer invent a human being." While insisting that he is "not a tech guy,...

Today, it’s not just humans competing for work in banking. Machines are becoming a threat to warm-blooded number crunchers worldwide. Indeed, almost one-third of financial-services jobs could be displaced by automation by the mid-2030s, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP last year. Despite those stark forecasts, some optimists argue that the rise of machines at banks isn’t simply taking away jobs, but rather changing their definition and adding some roles. Job seekers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science are among the most in-demand candidates in finance, according to hiring sites Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Hired, and ZipRecruiter. It’s not only disrupters such as Square Inc or Stripe Inc hiring this talent; legacy financial companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Morgan Stanley are scooping these people up as well. In the US financial sector alone, job postings that list these big data skills as requirements incr...

On a recent afternoon at the Lao Thai Kitchen restaurant, the telephone rang and the caller ID read “ Google Assistant .” Jimmy Tran, a waiter, answered the phone. The caller was a man with an Irish accent hoping to book a dinner reservation for two on the weekend. This was no ordinary booking. It came through Google Duplex, a free service that uses artificial intelligence to call restaurants and — mimicking a human voice — speak on our behalf to book a table. The feature, which had a limited release about a year ago, recently became available to a larger number of Android devices and iPhones. The voice of the Irish man sounded eerily human. When asked whether he was a robot, the caller immediately replied, “No, I’m not a robot,” and laughed. “ It sounded very real,” Tran said in an interview after hanging up the call with Google. “It was perfectly human.” Google later confirmed, to our disappointment, that the caller had been telling the truth: He was a person working in a ...

Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has announced that it will no longer recommend videos that "come close to" violating its community guidelines, such as conspiracy or medically inaccurate videos. The video sharing platform will no longer recommend videos "claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11", NBC News reported on Monday. The original blog post from YouTube, published on January 25, said videos the site recommends, usually after a user has viewed one, would no longer lead to similar videos and instead would "pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics". YouTube said in the post that the action is meant to "reduce the spread of content that comes close to - but doesn't quite cross the line of - violating" its community policies. The change will not affect the videos' availability. And if users have subscribed to a channel that, for instance, produces c...

The rise of automation has so far had a negligible impact on jobs at a global scale, the World Bank chief economist said, despite common gloomy predictions that humans are set to be replaced by machines. While advanced economies have shed industrial jobs over the last two decades, the rise of the same sector in East Asia has more than compensated for the loss, according to an annual report published by the Washington-based international financial institution. “This fear that robots have eliminated jobs -- this fear is not supported by the evidence so far,” the World Bank’s Chief Economist Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg said in an interview.The World Development Report 2019 is the latest in a series of efforts by academics, consultancies and governments to assess the impact of new technologies on employment. Past studies have often forecast automation will destroy more jobs than it creates. In its report, the World Bank instead stresses that the nature of work in the fut...

The Consumer Electronics Show 2019 (CES 2019), a five-day yearly technology-centric event, is set to start from January 8 in Las Vegas, US. Like its earlier iterations, this year’s event would see technology majors, start-ups and technology enthusiasts coming together to unveil, announce and showcase innovations that would dominate the technology space for the rest of the year. Business Standard lists five major themes that are expected to dominate the mecca of technology this year. Since its inception, AI has come a long way. At CES 2019, technology enthusiasts are expected to showcase innovations in this machine-based self-learning technology, which will be a new milestone and see its deployment in areas that are currently not under its purview. As a result, the said technology is expected to become mainstream this year and reach consumers in more ways than at present. IoT is about connected devices that communicate, interact and work in tandem to deliver experience t...

In a bid to improve understanding of neurological disorders , researchers have created a fast and energy-efficient simulation of part of a rat brain by using computer chip manufacturer NVIDIA's Artificial Intelligence (AI) compute platform. Developing faster and more efficient simulators could increase the level of understanding the brain function and identify how damage to a particular structure in neurons can lead to deficits in brain function. For creating the simulator, the researchers used computer hardware designed for 3D games, according to the study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. The study showed that a single Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was able to achieve processing speeds up to 10 per cent faster than is currently possible using either a supercomputer or the SpiNNaker neuromorphic system, a custom-built machine. The team was also able to achieve energy savings of 10 times compared to either the SpiNNaker or supercomputer simul...

AI became the new buzzword in the smartphone space. Smartphone makers adopted the new technology to enhance the operating system, optimise battery life, improve imaging and reduce unnecessary resource consumption. Of many use cases, the technology made a huge impact on the imaging capabilities of the current generation smartphones. From automatic scene detection to customising settings based on frame, the AI has proved to be a valuable addition. From iPhone X-inspired wide notch to dewdrop shaped small one, 2018 would be marked as the year of notch-screen smartphones. The Asus Zenfone 5z (review), unveiled at the MWC 2018, marked the beginning of the notch-screen trend in the Android ecosystem. The trend spread like wildfire and smartphones -- budget or premium – did not shy starring the notch on their foreheads. Since its inception, the fingerprint sensor is one of the phone’s components that never really got a space of its own. It has moved from front to back, right t...

Science will be one of the focal points at the upcoming Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) with a line-up of sessions on topics like artificial intelligence, genetics, post-human future, cli-fi (climate change fiction). As the curtains on the 12th edition of JLF went up Monday evening, co-director Namita Gokhale told PTI that this year the literary extravaganza would lay greater emphasis on "science", something they would "want to develop even further in future years". "Our world is changing so fast... this year we have sessions on artificial intelligence, genetics and what the future holds for our planet. There is a new term now -- cli-fi. We have a beautiful session on cli-fi, on what would happen if bees disappear. "I feel at this moment in our country it is very very important to give impetus to empirical thinking," the author of "Paro: Dreams of Passion" said. Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan will speak on the ...

This is Zora . It may not look like much — more cute toy than futuristic marvel — but this robot is at the center of an experiment in France to change care for elderly patients. When Zora arrived at this nursing facility an hour outside Paris, a strange thing began happening: Many patients developed an emotional attachment, treating it like a baby, holding and cooing, giving it kisses on the head. Zora, which can cost up to $18,000, offered companionship in a place where life can be lonely. Families can visit only so much, and staff members are stretched. Patients at the hospital, called Jouarre, have dementia and other conditions that require round-the-clock care. The nurse at Jouarre who oversees Zora controls the robot from a laptop. He often stands out of view so patients don’t know it’s him at the controls. The robot can have a conversation because the nurse types words into a laptop for the robot to speak. Some patients refer to Zora as “she,” other...

Facebook’s new gadgets, Portal and Portal Plus , are meant to bring people closer together. So we — Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo, two technology writers for The New York Times — took the $199 and $349 devices for a test run over the last week to see if they could make us feel more connected to each other. We both installed the Portal, which starts shipping on Thursday, in our homes (our bedrooms, to be exact). The devices are video-calling machines that people can use to talk through a screen to other Facebook users . They have a 12-megapixel camera with high-definition video and artificial intelligence software; the camera follows people about as they move around. The Portal has raised some privacy concerns, especially since Facebook has been scrutinized for how much information it already has on users. Were we worried about what these always-on devices might collect on us? Here’s how it played out. Read Complete Article Business Standard

Touted as the world's "most human" Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that can "read between the lines" and "understand emotional expressions", Amelia has the potential to turn India's healthcare sector into an inclusive one, believes her creator Chetan Dube, CEO of New York-headquartered AI company IPsoft. Amelia got her name from Amelia Earhart, one of the pioneering women in American history who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. The tech Amelia combines automation, cognitive and emotional intelligence with Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to perform as a digital colleague. When Amelia was first created, her conversational abilities sent shockwaves in the AI community, raising fears of job losses, especially in countries like India where a large number of people are employed in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. But Dube, who left a teaching job at New York Un...