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Technology for MSME: The shift towards more efficient technology solutions from the good old websites and emails, in the name of digital adoption, is apparent among MSMEs that have shied away from evolving technologies for a long time. The shift has largely been visible because of better affordability due to growing on-demand, or pay as you go or what is called the software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecosystem in India liberating small businesses from the cost conundrum to some extent.

As India observes the National Technology Day on Wednesday to commemorate its entry into the elite club of countries having nuclear weapons with the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998, it is also the day to remember the countrys achievement in science and innovation. While a large number of MSMEs are yet to fully benefit from the technology revolution, some of them have certainly been warming up to the new age solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI) and using it also for better growth.

The implementation of AI is across multiple use cases. For instance, Delhi-based long-haul logistics services provider JCCI Logistics has deployed AI and internet of things (IoT) solutions to manage its fleet of around 150 trucks. The company, launched in 2004, uses on-demand fleet management software for GPS tracking of vehicles, fuel management, driver analytics, and route planning.

Vehicles need to run as much as possible and thats what matters. Before deploying this solution in 2020, our monthly cumulative running was around 8,000 to 10,000 kilometres. It has increased by around 20 per cent now. The jump, I think, is primarily because of the on-board diagnostics (OBD) device that you can fit in a vehicle to get data related to fuel consumption, drivers driving behaviour, whether there is unnecessary hard acceleration or not, etc., Sachin Jain, Founder, JCCI Logistics told Financial Express Online.

OBD is essentially a machine learning (ML) and internet of things (IoT) based device that gets signals from different sensors in a vehicle and conveys them to the users dashboard with the help of the software.

JCCI Logistics have been among post-Covid adopters of deep technology solutions as the pandemic perhaps necessitated the use of software and digital for sustenance.

Covid might have caused a faster switch to some AI/ML applications since the labor force was locked up. AI/ML provides a significant opportunity for reduction in input costs, particularly those of human capital. The advent of edge AI/ML will further hasten adoption, particularly as it gets married to IoT on small devices and sensors that are available at scale and used routinely by businesses of all sizes, Utkarsh Sinha, Managing Director at advisory firm Bexley Advisors told Financial Express Online.

Among the top sectors where the use of AI accelerated during the pandemic was restaurant as the pandemic precipitated the eateries into looking at ways that could help them optimize their processes right from sales to inventory management and more.

Kabir Suri who runs Azure Hospitality, which owns restaurant chains like Mamagoto, Dhaba, Speedy Chow, etc., has been using AI in the companys operations for the past five years while Covid only reinforced his commitment to AI for efficiency and growth. We have had a direct saving of 30 per cent in past five years along with getting customer insights due to AI that has led to an uptake in revenue as well. Five years back we had around 10 outlets and now have 60 across India, Suri told Financial Express Online.

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The company has an in-house AI solution that shows live sales, total transactions, menus, items sold, total consumption per restaurant, etc. The solution captures data from every restaurant throughout the day on a real time basis and consolidates it to show up for analysis on its dashboard. This becomes important for restaurants with chains to understand the consumer-behaviour pattern, the impact of different occasions on business like festivals such as Navratras in North particularly, Christmas in Goa, and some other festivals in South, said Suri.

Moreover, the AI solution at Azure Hospitality helps Suri control the HR module as well. You can look at your salary component, leaves, attendance, holidays, payslips, etc., through a single system every day whenever you want. Basically, AI helps you make better decisions as you grow bigger by minimizing the impact of any uncertainty, Suri added.

Another sector that depends heavily on technology and AI particularly is tourism for purposes ranging from travel booking via chatbots, flight forecasting in terms of the current best price and future prices, recommendations for hotel and cab booking based on travel-related searches, etc.

There is AI at every stage in tourism and aviation, Subhas Goyal, Founder and Chairman at B2B travel company STIC Travel told Financial Express Online. The company is the exclusive General Sales Agent (GSA) a sales representative of a company in a specific region or country for 11 international airlines in India including United Airlines, Air China, Croatia Airlines etc.

STIC has been using for the past five years AI-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage customer relationships, track sales leads, marketing, etc., and streamline administrative processes in sales and marketing. The company is now also implementing a chatbot assistant to answer customer queries on its platform. Goyal noted the standard queries around bookings, holiday searches can be answered by the AI bot while for further details and feedback, there would be manual intervention.

Post-Covid, more MSMEs had started to use primary technology tools at least such as social media, online service aggregators, company websites etc. According to a Crisil survey of around 540 micro and small units released in April this year, over 65 per cent respondents adopted or upgraded their use of online aggregators, social media platforms, and company websites. Among sectors, manufacturing reported higher adoption with 71 per cent respondents adopting or upgrading their use of digital platforms in comparison to 66 per cent respondents in the services sector.

Good technology is invisible. AI/ML will soon form a fundamental layer in all operations and interactions for small businesses. As technology offerings scale, it will soon be easier to get good AI to do certain tasks than to get a human to do it. The impact of this on labor force utilization will be significant, added Sinha.

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National Technology Day: How artificial intelligence is helping MSMEs to optimize processes, accelerate growth - The Financial Express

A Christian pastor launched a scathing rant after finding out about artificial intelligence technology that aims to prosecute criminals in China.

The AI tech, which was developed and tested by the Shanghai Pudong Peoples Procuratorate, can charge a suspect with more than 97% accuracy based on a description in a criminal case.

While it may seem to be a futuristic method for tackling crime and keeping people safe, Pastor Tom Hughes was less than enthused and made wild claims that the advancements are 'demonic' and are out to 'control' people.

In a video posted to his YouTube channel yesterday (May 12), he explained: "Folks when I look at the department of homeland security information, with the direction that they are going with, in 2022, it is coming and then to see that in China they've got an AI prosecutor to be able to prosecute people in real-time.

"They're claiming with 97% accuracy, they'll be able to prosecute people for crimes. Listen, this stuff is demonic. This artificial intelligence is going to be controlling every single thing that we say and that we do.

"[Pastor] Matt Ward wrote about this back in 2018 and he said when he was projecting what was going to be coming in the future. He said that by 2022 we will see this in place. Folks we are watching it now."

The advancement was first announced in December 2021 as Professor Shi Yong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences big data and knowledge management laboratory claims it will help as reduce prosecutors daily workload.

However, prosecutors have had their concerns about the risk of mistakes.

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A prosecutor from Guangzhou said: The accuracy of 97 per cent may be high from a technological point of view, but there will always be a chance of a mistake.

Who will take responsibility when it happens? The prosecutor, the machine or the designer of the algorithm? AI may help detect a mistake, but it cannot replace humans in making a decision."

But China is continuing to use AI in nearly every sector of the government to try to improve efficiency, reduce corruption and strengthen control, according to the South China Morning Post.

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Christian pastor says China's AI tech is 'demonic' as it will 'control everything' - Daily Star

Vatic Investments ("Vatic" or the "Firm"), a systematic quantitative investment manager, announced today the appointment of Li Deng, Ph.D., as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Global Head of Machine Learning, effective May 9, 2022. Dr. Deng will report to James Chiu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vatic.

Recognized as one of the world's leading experts in AI, speech technology and machine learning, Dr. Deng was previously Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Head of Machine Learning at Citadel LLC. Before that, he was the Chief Scientist of AI, Founder of Deep Learning Technology Center, and Partner Research Manager at Microsoft for over 17 years. Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Deng worked for nearly a decade as a tenured professor at the University of Waterloo. He earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2000, Dr. Deng has also been an Affiliate Full Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering of Canada, the Academy of Sciences (Washington State), the IEEE, Acoustical Society of America, and ISCA, among other technical societies.

During his nearly 30-year career in academia, technology and finance, Dr. Deng has published more than 350 academic papers and authored several books on machine learning and AI, as well as lectured at many of the world's top universities, institutes and finance summits. In 2012, he published a groundbreaking paper on deep neural networks for speech recognition with Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist who is recognized as the "Godfather of Deep Learning." The paper has received about 11,000 academic citations as of May 2022.

In recognition of his pioneering AI research on disrupting speech recognition using large-scale deep learning, Dr. Deng has been honored with many of the AI industry's highest awards, including the IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award for "Outstanding Contributions to Automatic Speech Recognition & Deep Learning" (2015) and, separately, the IEEE SPS "Industrial Leader Award" (2019). Most recently, he was presented with the AI-2000 Most Influential Scholar Award.

"We are thrilled to attract a technologist and talent of Li's caliber. He has dedicated his life to the study of machine learning, signal generation and modeling of financial markets," said James Chiu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vatic. "Vatic's momentum and ability to attract the world's top academic and financial talent is rooted in the special culture we are creating. Our mission is centered on rigorous research, intense collaboration and removing trading silos to allow the best ideas and strategies to always rise to the top. We welcome Li to our growing Vatic family."

"I'm excited to join the world-class team of investment professionals at Vatic," Dr. Deng said. "The Firm's intention to continue building an intensely collaborative environment is a key factor in the efficiency of research and in creating sustainable trading strategies both short and long term. We aim to continue bringing in the best AI and machine learning talent in the world to work collaboratively with the investment professional as a joint team in our unique culture at Vatic."

About Vatic Investments

Vatic Investments is a systematic quantitative investment management firm where traders, AI researchers and technologists collaborate to develop autonomous trading agents and state-of-the-art investment software. The firm is data-driven, with machine learning and cutting-edge technology piloting its trading strategies. Learn more at http://www.vaticinvestments.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005310/en/

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Vatic Investments Appoints Li Deng, Ph.D., as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Global Head of Ma - Benzinga

Will robots replace human workers?

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to permeate our daily lives by 2025. This could have huge implications on several business sectors, most notably health care, customer service, and logistics. Already, AI is responsible for medical research breakthroughs and climate research, not to mention self-driving cars.

Will robots replace human workers?

The answer to that seems to be divided. According to PEW research, about half (48%) of experts surveyed felt that robots and digital agents will displace a significant number of blue- and white-collar jobs. Their concern is that this will increase income inequality and create a mass of virtually unemployable people. The other half (52%) expect robotics and AI to create more jobs than they take. This latter half believes that while AI will replace humans, these experts have faith in human ingenuity to create new jobs, industries, and new ways of making a living much like at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Of interest in the PEW study, both groups are concerned that our educational institutions are not adequately preparing people for the job market of tomorrow.

What is artificial intelligence?

AI in its simplest form stands for artificial intelligence designed to mimic human intelligence to perform tasks. Advocates of AI see this as a positive step forward. It will make it easier for businesses to identify and rectify problems. AI will potentially improve recruitment, cybersecurity, marketing, and standard operating processes.

AI can process large amounts of data and execute complex algorithms quickly and accurately. Each year, AI is getting "smarter" and increasing business efficiency.

What will it be like to work with robots?

Leading expert Martina Mara, Professor of Robopsychology at Johannes Kepler University Linz, suggests we ask a different question: What do we want the future of work to look like? How do we want robots to change our lives? She reminds us that robots are developed by people. While robots can work 24/7, they cannot generalize or contextualize. They have no soft skills.

They're hard wired, literally, to perform highly specific and clearly structured tasks. This is great news for humans we get to pass off the mundane repetitive tasks and adopt those that require critical thinking and problem solving based on human intuition.

AI is evolving and technology is having an increasingly bigger role, but it will complement and augment most jobs, not replace them. In a study involving 1500 companies, researchers found that the most significant performance improvements occurred when humans and machines worked together. Humans perform three crucial roles: they train machines what to do, explain outcomes especially when those are counterintuitive or controversial, and they sustain responsible use of machines. Robots need us just as much as we need them.

Robots are used to do the heavy lifting, literally. In manufacturing, cobots, context-aware robots, perform repetitive actions dominated by heavy lifting, while their human coworker completes complementary tasks that require more dexterity and judgment.

Whether you are pro-bot or anti-bot, you may not have a choice. Rosie the Robot who worked for the Jetsons is probably still far away, but we already have robots that will vacuum our floors and AI has been used in the customer service industry for years.

We need to begin to look at how we can improve technology-related skills while at the same time promoting characteristically human skills. Creativity, intuition, initiative, and critical thinking are human skills that will not likely translate to robots at least not soon. We should already be thinking of how we as employers and employees can harness robots to augment the work we do.

If not already, it won't be long before your next coworker is a robot.

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The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence: Will Robots Actually Replace People? - Forbes

(TNS) With wildfires becoming bigger and more destructive as the West dries out and heats up, agencies and officials tasked with preventing and battling the blazes could soon have a new tool to add to their arsenal of prescribed burns, pick axes, chain saws and aircraft.

The high-tech help could come way of an area not normally associated with fighting wildfires: artificial intelligence. And space.

Lockheed Martin Space, based in Jefferson County, Colo., is tapping decades of experience of managing satellites, exploring space and providing information for the U.S. military to offer more accurate data quicker to ground crews. They are talking to the U.S. Forest Service, university researchers and a Colorado state agency about how their their technology could help.

The scenario that wildland fire operators and commanders work in is very similar to that of the organizations and folks who defend our homeland and allies. Its a dynamic environment across multiple activities and responsibilities, said Dan Lordan, senior manager for AI integration at Lockheed Martins Artificial Intelligence Center.

Lockheed Martin aims to use its technology developed over years in other areas to reduce the time it takes to gather information and make decisions about wildfires, said Rich Carter, business development director for Lockheed Martin Spaces Mission Solutions.

The concept of a regular fire season has all but vanished as drought and warmer temperatures make Western lands ripe for ignition. At the end of December, the Marshall fire burned 991 homes and killed two people in Boulder County. The Denver area just experienced its third driest-ever April with only 0.06 of an inch of moisture, according to the National Weather Service.

Colorado had the highest number of fire-weather alerts in April than any other April in the past 15 years. Crews have quickly contained wind-driven fires that forced evacuations along the Front Range and on the Eastern Plains. But six families in Monte Vista lost their homes in April when a fire burned part of the southern Colorado town.

Since 2014, the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control has flown planes equipped with infrared and color sensors to detect wildfires and provide the most up-to-date information possible to crews on the ground. The onboard equipment is integrated with the Colorado Wildfire Information System, a database that provides images and details to local fire managers.

Last year we found almost 200 new fires that nobody knew anything about, said Bruce Dikken, unit chief for the agencys multi-mission aircraft program. I dont know if any of those 200 fires would have become big fires. I know they didnt become big fires because we found them.

When the two Pilatus PC-12 airplanes began flying in 2014, Colorado was the only state with such a program conveying the information in near real time, Dikken said. Lockheed Martin representatives have spent time in the air on the planes recently to see if its AI can speed up the process.

We dont find every single fire that we fly over and it can certainly be faster if we could employ some kind of technology that might, for instance, automatically draw the fire perimeter, Dikken said. Right now, its very much a manual process.

Something like the 2020Cameron Peakfire, which at 208,663 acres is Colorados largest wildfire, could take hours to map, Dikken said.

And often the people on the planes are tracking several fires at the same time. Dikken said the faster they can collect and process the data on a fires perimeter, the faster they can move to the next fire. If it takes a couple of hours to map a fire, what I drew at the beginning may be a little bit different now, he said.

Lordan said Lockheed Martin engineers who have flown with the state crews, using the video and images gathered on the flights, have been able to produce fire maps in as little as 15 minutes.

The company has talked to the state about possibly carrying an additional computer that could help crunch all that information and transmit the map of the fire while still in flight to crews on the ground, Dikken said. The agency is waiting to hear the results of Lockheed Martins experiences aboard the aircraft and how the AI might help the state, he added.

They have a strong interest in applying their skills and capabilities to the wildland fire problem, and I think that would be welcome, Finney said.

The lab in Missoula has been involved in fire research since 1960 and developed most of the fire-management tools used for operations and planning, Finney said. Were pretty well situated to understand where new things and capabilities might be of use in the future and some of these things certainly might be.

However, Lockheed Martin is focused on technology and thats not really been where the most effective use of our efforts would be, Finney said.

Prevention and mitigation and preemptive kind of management activities are where the great opportunities are to change the trajectory were on, Finney said. Improving reactive management is unlikely to yield huge benefits because the underlying source of the problem is the fuel structure across large landscapes as well as climate change.

Logging and prescribed burns, or fires started under controlled conditions, are some of the management practices used to get rid of fuel sources or create a more diverse landscape. But those methods have sometimes met resistance, Finney said.

As bad as the Cameron Peak fire was, Finney said the prescribed burns the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests did through the years blunted the blazes intensity and changed the flames movement in spots.

Unfortunately, they hadnt had time to finish their planned work, Finney said.

Lordan said the value of artificial intelligence, whether in preventing fires or responding to a fire, is producing accurate and timely information for fire managers, what he called actionable intelligence.

One example, Lordan said, is information gathered and managed by federal agencies on the types and conditions of vegetation across the country. He said updates are done every two to three two years. Lockheed Martin uses data from satellites managed by the European Space Agency that updates the information about every five days.

Lockheed is working with Nvidia, a California software company, to produce a digital simulation of a wildfire based on an areas topography, condition of the vegetation, wind and weather to help forecast where and how it will burn. After the fact, the companies used the information about the Cameron Peak fire, plugging in the more timely satellite data on fuel conditions, and generated a video simulation that Lordan said was similar to the actual fires behavior and movement.

While appreciating the help technology provides, both Dikken with the state of Colorado and Finney with the Forest Service said there will always be a need for ground-truthing by people.

Applying AI to fighting wildfires isnt about taking people out of the loop, Lockheed Martin spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said. Somebody will always be in the loop, but people currently in the loop are besieged by so much data they cant sort through it fast enough. Thats where this is coming from.

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How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Fight Fires in the West - Governing