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Corrects adjusted pretax profit to 48 million pounds from 59.4 million)
Industrials
LONDON, March 1 (Reuters) – Senior Plc (SNR.L): * FY adjusted pretax profit 48 million STG versus consensus 46.1 million STG * Says year starts ahead of board’s expectations, expects 2010 performance in
line with 2009 * Says reduces net debt by 72 million STG to 102.3 million STG in 2009
London, Sep 18 (ANI): Ex-Ferrari driver Eddie Irvine has claimed that all Formula One teams are cheats.
Irvine says there has been an overreaction to the race-fixing charges being levelled at the Renault team.
He admitted the Crashgate scandal that cost Renault team chief Flavio Briatore and technical boss Pat Symonds their jobs had gone too far.
“F1 is a war and all is fair in war. When I was in various teams you would do anything to win. You pushed people off, you did whatever you could do to win,” he said.
“This is probably slightly on the wrong side of the cheating thing, but in F1 – if you look back at days gone past – then every team has done it. They will cheat, bend the rules, do whatever they could, sabotage opponents.
“Nothing was beyond the realms of decency and that is what F1 always is. It is not a pure sport,’ The Sun quoted Irvine, as saying.
The Renault team still has to appear before the World Motor Sport Council in Paris on Monday where they face a massive fine, race suspension or even being kicked out of the sport.
But Irvine reckons they could escape with a more lenient penalty amid fears that another team is about to leave the sport.
Irvine, who also raced for Jordan and Jaguar, added: “If you think that McLaren got a 100 million dollars fine for having some papers of the Ferrari team, what punishment is relevant here? It is complete banning. But I don’t believe that is going to happen as F1 cannot afford to lose more teams.”
Briatore threatened to sue Piquet Snr after the three-time world champ made the revelations about his son. (ANI)
Washington, July 9 (ANI): Coimbatore-based experts have turned to neural networks to help photographers clean up blur’s noise and distortion in images.
S. Uma of the Coimbatore Institute of Technology and S. Annadurai of the Government College of Technology say that their approach can significantly reduce information loss while reversing blurring caused by lens aberrations and faults and reducing noise that distorts the appearance of an image.
They suggest that distortions in an image due to atmospheric disturbances between camera and distant subjects could be unravelled and a photo taken on a hot, hazy day made acceptable.
The researchers point out that earlier attempts at this kind of inverse filtering of an image rely on the image having a high signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio.
According to them, other approaches require huge amounts of computing power and are generally untenable.
They say that this is especially true in the fledgling field of artificial vision, whether robotic or prosthetic.
However, they add, some success with neural networks has been achieved.
Uma and Annadurai have developed a modified recurrent Hopfield neural network that builds and extends the work of others to allow them to quickly process an image, and reduce distortion, noise and blurring.
When they tested their approach on square grayscale images just 256 pixels across, they were able to reverse severe blurring and noise deliberately added to the original photographic sample to much more acceptable levels in a short time using limited computing resources than was possible with previous neural network approaches or any other inverse filtering techniques.
An analysis of the before and after quality shows that quality is improved by between 39 and 67 per cent using the team’s approach, and results take half the time of other methods that produce lesser improvements.
The success bodes well for image processing, in various fields including vision research, art, homeland security, and science.
A research article describing the new approach has been published in the journal International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering. (ANI)
London, April 28 (ANI): In a head to head challenge of man versus machine, IBM is all set to pit a supercomputer code-named ‘Watson’ against human contestants in the famed trivia quiz show Jeopardy.
According to a report by BBC News, ‘Watson’ is a new question-answering system based on natural language.
“The aim is to get Watson to think and interact in human terms,” said Dr David Ferrucci, an IBM artificial intelligence researcher and team leader on the project.
“It will try to understand a users question and intent and understand it at a rudimentary level and provide and accurate and confident answer,” he added.
For the last two years, scientists have been working on perfecting the system that will drive Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J Watson Snr.
“The most challenging aspect of this is that Watson has to know what it knows with utmost confidence,” said Ferrucci.
“Otherwise if it buzzes in and gets the answer wrong that is bad on Jeopardy because you lose money and lose the game,” he added.
On the show, Watson would be looking to solve an open-ended problem that requires an entirely new approach.
To win on the show, contestants need a good knowledge across a range of topics and the ability to quickly analyse subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities that humans excel at but computers do not.
The rules of the game will be slightly modified for this battle.
Watson will be given the questions as electronic text while the human contestants will both see the text and hear it spoken by the show’s host Alex Trebek.
The computer will answer in a synthesized voice and choose follow up questions.
For the taping of the show, Watson will not be hooked up to the Internet, but will only be able to draw from what it has “read”, or processed and indexed, before the show.
“It requires critical thinking. It requires a whole lot more than knowledge alone,” said Jeopardy’s executive producer Harry Friedman.
IBM and the show’s producers are hoping grand champion Ken Jennings to take part. He won Jeopardy 74 consecutive times and collected 2.52 million dollars (1.71 mln pounds) in 2004.
“Ken is the best and no-one gets close to his achievement. This is just a great test for Watson,” said Dr Ferrucci.
According to John Kelly, IBM’s director of research, “This represents a new level of communications between computers and human beings.” (ANI)
London, April 28 (ANI): In a head to head challenge of man versus machine, IBM is all set to pit a supercomputer code-named ‘Watson’ against human contestants in the famed trivia quiz show Jeopardy.
According to a report by BBC News, ‘Watson’ is a new question-answering system based on natural language.
“The aim is to get Watson to think and interact in human terms,” said Dr David Ferrucci, an IBM artificial intelligence researcher and team leader on the project.
“It will try to understand a users question and intent and understand it at a rudimentary level and provide and accurate and confident answer,” he added.
For the last two years, scientists have been working on perfecting the system that will drive Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J Watson Snr.
“The most challenging aspect of this is that Watson has to know what it knows with utmost confidence,” said Ferrucci.
“Otherwise if it buzzes in and gets the answer wrong that is bad on Jeopardy because you lose money and lose the game,” he added.
On the show, Watson would be looking to solve an open-ended problem that requires an entirely new approach.
To win on the show, contestants need a good knowledge across a range of topics and the ability to quickly analyse subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities that humans excel at but computers do not.
The rules of the game will be slightly modified for this battle.
Watson will be given the questions as electronic text while the human contestants will both see the text and hear it spoken by the show’s host Alex Trebek.
The computer will answer in a synthesized voice and choose follow up questions.
For the taping of the show, Watson will not be hooked up to the Internet, but will only be able to draw from what it has “read”, or processed and indexed, before the show.
“It requires critical thinking. It requires a whole lot more than knowledge alone,” said Jeopardy’s executive producer Harry Friedman.
IBM and the show’s producers are hoping grand champion Ken Jennings to take part. He won Jeopardy 74 consecutive times and collected 2.52 million dollars (1.71 mln pounds) in 2004.
“Ken is the best and no-one gets close to his achievement. This is just a great test for Watson,” said Dr Ferrucci.
According to John Kelly, IBM’s director of research, “This represents a new level of communications between computers and human beings.” (ANI)
London, Apr 4 (ANI): President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have become the 11th US First Family to meet with the Queen.
The Royal meeting is said to have been the most touchy-feely gathering that anyone could ever remember, especially after the Queen and Michelle Obama hugged one another, doing away with the Palace protocol, reports the Mirror.
The Obamas gave the Queen an iPod loaded with hits from musicals, while Her Majesty presented them with a framed photograph of herself.
The meeting between them is said to have gone off without a hitch, and for the Queen meeting with a US President is no longer a new thing as she has met with 11 of them during her 57-year reign.
The first US President that the Queen met was President Harry S. Truman in 1951, two years before her coronation, followed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959.
The Queen then met John F. Kennedy in 1961, Richard Nixon in 1970, Jimmy carter in 1977, Ronald Reagan in 1982, George Bush Snr in 1991, Gerald Ford in 1976, Bill Clinton in 2000, and George W. Bush in 2003. (ANI)
New Delhi, Feb 9 (ANI): Maytas Infra made a startling revelation to the Bombay Stock Exchange on Monday that three of its promoters–B Ramalinga Raju, B Rama Raju and B Nandini Raju had pledged their entire holdings of 15.14 percent to lenders.
While Ramalinga Raju, the former chairman of fraud-hit Satyam Computers pledged his holding worth 48.54 lakh shares, which is 8.25 percent of the paid up capital of Maytas Infra, B Rama Raju pledged 14.85 lakh shares representing 2.52 per cent stake in the firm.
The company further revealed that B Nandini Raju pledged 25.73 lakh equity shares or 4.37 per cent holding in the company.
The other promoters of the firm include Ramalinga Raju’s son B Teja Raju who holds 2.53 per cent stake, SNR Investments Pvt Ltd holding 8.92 per cent, Veeyes Investments with 8.92 per cent and B Ramalinga Raju HUF holding 1.13 per cent.
These seven promoters held a joint stake of 36.64 per cent in Maytas Infra.
In a bid to end future company frauds like the 7,800 crore Satyam scam, the Security and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) had issued a notice asking the companies to disclose the shares pledged by their promoters.
The share index of Maytas Infra has been constantly dipping since the past 22 trading sessions.
The market share the company dipped by nearly five per cent at Rs 54.50 on the Bombay Stock Exchange today. (ANI)
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