Watch: AI for All: Dream of democratised and ethical AI
At The Hindu Huddle 2025, experts on the panel 'AI for All' said AI isn't here to replace humans but amplify our capabilities. Kalika Bali of Microsoft Research reminded us that tech mirrors us — both our flaws and brilliance.
Astha Kapoor flagged BPO jobs as vulnerable but pointed to opportunities in data management and regulation. Tanvi Lall said AI can liberate human attention for creativity and critical thinking — if we know how to wield it.
Read more: 'AI will amplify, not replace, human capacity'
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The Hindu
5 days ago
- The Hindu
Watch: AI for All: Dream of democratised and ethical AI
At The Hindu Huddle 2025, experts on the panel 'AI for All' said AI isn't here to replace humans but amplify our capabilities. Kalika Bali of Microsoft Research reminded us that tech mirrors us — both our flaws and brilliance. Astha Kapoor flagged BPO jobs as vulnerable but pointed to opportunities in data management and regulation. Tanvi Lall said AI can liberate human attention for creativity and critical thinking — if we know how to wield it. Read more: 'AI will amplify, not replace, human capacity'
Indian Express
6 days ago
- Indian Express
Microsoft's AI model Aurora can now predict air quality at high speed and precision
Microsoft's foundational AI model for weather forecasting has been upgraded and can now accurately predict air quality as well. Aurora has been developed by Microsoft Research to forecast a range of weather-related phenomena such as hurricanes, typhoons, etc, with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological methods, the company said in a blog post earlier this week. It has also published a research paper on Aurora in science journal Nature. Microsoft further said that Aurora's source code and model weights are now publicly available. A specialised version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds, has been integrated into the MSN Weather app. The Windows maker has claimed that Aurora is one of the top-performing AI models in the field of weather forecasting. 'What sets Aurora apart is that it is originally trained as a foundation model and can then be specialized through finetuning to go beyond what is considered traditional weather forecasting, such as air pollution prediction,' Microsoft said. 'Because the model first learns from a large and diverse set of data, it can be fine-tuned with smaller amounts of air quality data,' it added. Aurora has been trained on over a million hours of data captured by satellites, radar and weather stations as well as past weather simulations and forecasts, the company said. The AI model can be fine-tuned using additional data to provide forecasts about specific weather events. Its underlying encoder architecture helps to translate massive amounts of data drawn from multiple sources into a standard format that the AI model uses to make predictions. 'We're not putting in strict rules about how we think variables should interact with each other. We're just giving a large deep-learning model the option to learn whatever is most useful. This is the power of deep learning in these kind of simulation problems,' Megan Stanley, a senior researcher with Microsoft Research, said. Microsoft claimed that its Aurora AI model accurately predicted the landfall of Typhoon Doksuri in Philippines four days in advance and better than some expert predictions. The model also successfully predicted a sandstorm in Iraq two years ago. It beat the US National Hurricane Center by providing accurate five-day forecasts of tropical cyclone paths in 2022 and 2023, as per the company. Aurora, which draws compute power from graphics processing units (GPUs), provides weather forecasts in seconds compared to hourly predictions by traditional weather systems running on supercomputers. While the initial cost involved in training Aurora was high, Microsoft said its operational expenses are lower than traditional weather forecast systems. AI weather models like Aurora are not entirely new. Over the past few years, Google DeepMind has released several AI models designed for weather forecasting such as WeatherNext.
The Hindu
10-05-2025
- The Hindu
The Hindu Huddle 2025: 'Change will be a constant at work'
The evolution of work in a fast changing globe was discussed at length during a lively session at The Hindu Huddle on Saturday. Aptly titled 'Let's Talk Work' and moderated by L.V. Navaneeth, CEO, The Hindu Group, the freewheeling chat dealt with the multifaceted challenges that modern offices and employees face. First up, the elephant in the room, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), was discussed, and K. Ganesh, serial entrepreneur and partner, GrowthStory, said: 'AI was transformative as creation became possible. Then you had autonomous agents in AI doing work without human prompting.' Adding heft to the conversation, Suparna Mitra, CEO of the Watches and Wearables Division of Titan Company Limited, said: 'We are all on the cusp of a very big change. People joining in their early twenties are not looking at staying long in a company. And then you have machines doing work but it needs human intervention. For a lot of people, AI may be ChatGPT but surely it can play a bigger role in manufacturing.' Striking a blow for gender equity, she added: 'Women have a lot of other things going on in their life, which is not accounted for in workplace design. And at home care-work is not paid, house-work is not paid. Women do dual roles of being at the workplace and also working at home.' The concept of customer delight was analysed too when Hemant Malik, Wholetime Director, Divisional Chief Executive - Foods, ITC, said: 'All of us do work from the customer perspective; can you make it cheaper and faster? There is also the personalisation aspect. Are you being transparent, are you giving the customer new experiences' Who thought 10-minute delivery was so important till it started?' Also Read | The Hindu Huddle 2025 Day 2 live updates The transparency angle was also reiterated by Dr. Shravan Subramanyam, CEO, BPL Medical Technologies. 'How we sell matters as much as how much we sell. To me transparency is our best tool and if breeds accountability. Employee requirements are changing, let's just listen and learn. As for AI, it is used in radiology, surgeries and many facets of medical care,' he said. The tussle between traditional businesses and modern offshoots, climate change and the way it impacts production, storage and employee productivity, were all looked into at a granular level. The gig economy driven by food and grocery delivery firms and the way they have changed, was also spoken about. And as the session drew to a close, the final summary was that change will be a constant at work and both employers and employees have to learn constantly while also harnessing technology. The Hindu Huddle 2025 is presented by Sami-Sabinsa Group Co-powered by: Government of Karnataka, Government of Telangana; Associate Partners: ONGC, Presidency University, TAFE, Akshayakalpa Organic; Energy Partner: Indian Oil Corporation Limited; Realty partner: Casagrand; Knowledge partner: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham; State partner: Meghalaya tourism and Haryana government; Luxury car partner: Toyota; Radio partner: Radio City; Gift partner: Anand Prakash; Broadcast partner: Times Now; Outdoor media partner: Signpost India
