India's First Cognitive Computing System Developed - Wipro's Holmes - India's Answer to IBM’s Watson

[MilSpec]

Great thread...

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Mahindra experimenting with driverless cars; developing software to control car’s movement in India

Mahindra’s electric car subsidiary, Mahindra Reva, has submitted proof of concepts for driverless cars in the UK and Singapore.​

BENGALURU: Mahindra Group is all set to join an elite league of companies such as Google, Tesla, BMW and Audi that are experimenting with driverless cars.

Mahindra's electric car subsidiary, Mahindra Reva, has submitted proof of concepts for driverless cars in the UK and Singapore, a senior executive told ET. "We have already begun experiments in our R&D facility in Bengaluru. Once we get approvals from the respective governments, we'll start testing these cars on road," the executive said.

Mahindra Reva will need 3-4 years to develop a production model after starting trials, according to the executive. While the road tests would be carried out in the UK and Singapore, the software to control the car's movement and other aspects is under development at the company's research and development facilities in India, in partnership with the group's technology arm, Tech Mahindra, the executive said.

A Mahindra spokesperson declined to comment on the development. "In terms of Indian car makers, Mahindra has always been the most innovative.

This culture is driven from the top with their moto Mahindra Rise," said Satish RM, principal research analyst at Gartner. "The biggest challenge they'll face is in building different technologies for different countries because of varied regulatory environment."

Today's top-end cars are laden with a number of technologies that automate some tasks, such as intelligent cruise control and lane-departure detection. Range Rover Evoque has a 'Park Assist' feature, wherein the car parks itself into the nearest vacant parking spot.

Mahindra Reva currently has about 2,000 electric cars on India's roads, each with more than 100 sensors attached. The company collects data from the cars for analysis and diagnosis, as even offers a feature to fix many glitches remotely.

The Mahindra executive mentioned above said this data will be crucial for the company to understand how various functions of a car can be automated.

The executive, however, said the company so far has no plans to test driverless cars in India. "Indian roads are too crowded to test driverless cars at the moment. Currently, our focus is on the US, Europe and South-East Asian markets. Once these experiments are successful, we might start road tests in India as well."

Mahindra is also trying to crowdsource some of the innovation in the area of driverless cars. The company last month began a driverless car challenge, inviting engineers to build such cars for a prize money of $700,000.

The project will let the selected teams build driverless car prototypes for decongesting Indian roads. The first edition will have a timeline of 2-3 years split into three phases.

Source:- Mahindra experimenting with driverless cars; developing software to control car’s movement in India - The Economic Times

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Software robots: Indian IT cos’ new challenge​

Last week, IBM announced it would invest as much as $3 billion (Rs. 18,000 crore) over the next four years to set up a new Internet of Things (IoT) unit. Please remember that the giant is no longer a product company, although it makes some, and is essentially a consulting and services company that is market leader in the IT services industry.

The news is symbolic of how there is a new round of reinvention ahead for Indian or India-centric companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Cognizant and Wipro, which have already taken some steps in the direction. This may be their most challenging phase yet, because this is no longer about bringing Westbased work to India at lower costs, but to cope with automation of services by advanced pieces of software or its new, hybrid cousins.

IBM says 90% of data generated by devices such as smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analysed or acted on. As such data becomes part of manufacturing businesses, clients of IT services change, and with it, the way software-driven services respond to it.

Last month, Cognizant released a study of 537 senior decision-makers under its “Center for the Future of Work” that focuses on intelligent process automation (IPA), which in plain English more or less means “work done earlier by real people”. The study says software robots and concepts such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and Big Data (analysis) are driving savings, speed and insights in client companies.

On an average, 25-40% of the workflows are getting automated today, Cognizant said, quoting its executive vice-president Gajen Kandiah: “The future of process work includes connecting skilled people to increasingly powerful technologies...This shift is playing out in just about every industry.”

“To take advantage of new, cloud-based opportunities, today’s companies will need to fundamentally rethink their orthodoxies about value creation and value capture,” the Harvard Business Review said last year in article titled “How the Internet of Things Changes Business Models” – and argued that a simple emphasis on cost, focus or differentiation from competitors will not do in future.

The article’s focus is mainly on manufacturing companies, but given the rise of software automation and the fact that these companies are the clients for Indian IT companies, what this means is that in hiring, training and rewarding their knowledge workers, they have to move well beyond the past and current practice of hiring and managing code factories.

Software robots: Indian IT cos’ new challenge

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

TCS set to launch artificial intelligence-based automation platform

TCS will launch a new automation platform over the upcoming months, at a time when India’s top software firms are automating traditional, commoditized services to boost margins and increasing investments in newer areas of technology and platforms.​

BENGALURU: India's largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services will launch a new artificial intelligence-based automation platform over the upcoming months, at a time when India's top software firms are automating traditional, commoditized services to boost margins and increasing investments in newer areas of technology and platforms.

On a post-earnings conference call with analysts, chief executive N. Chandrasekaran said that the company had already done pilot runs with 5 of its large clients and would soon launch the platform.

"After operating in a near-stealth mode for the last couple of years, I want to share with you the progress made by TCS's cloud platforms, consisting of our financial inclusion platform and our horizontal platforms, consisting of HR, accounting, accounts payable procurement, etc -- these 7 platforms together are software-as-a-service platforms," he said.

Chandrasekaran said the cloud platforms had crossed the annual run-rate of $100 million and generated $125 million of annual revenue in FY15 at a growth rate of 55% year-on-year.

"We called it a new category of platforms...which will increasingly automate many activities and whose self-learning capabilities will yield productivity gains and actually improve with time because of its intelligence," Chandrasekaran said. "We have done several pilots," he added. "We will launch this platform formally over the next few months. So far, all the pilot-clients are delighted. It's been well-received and has been successful so far."

Source:- TCS set to launch artificial intelligence-based automation platform | ET Telecom

 

[Dr. Sen]

Indian roads and traffic management systems must change before we introduced automated cara. OR we have to master AIs and supercomputers to be able to have automated cars on Indian roads))

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Indian roads and traffic management systems must change before we introduced automated cara. OR we have to master AIs and supercomputers to be able to have automated cars on Indian roads))

Some cities like Bangalore have a decent traffic management system and some expressways and roads like Yamuna Expressway and Bandra-Worli Sea Link are even better due to strict surveillance. Automated driving can help on those roads at least!