A new research has elevated self-learning to a whole new level by developing an intelligent “judge” who can predict the expertise of a Bharatnatyam dancer. Prof. Dinesh Babu Jayagopi and his team at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, have designed Machine Learning based software that predicts a dancer’s expertise by observing his/her poses and expressions during a dance performance. Such a software can also be used to automatically tag videos and analyse its contents in a video database like YouTube, thus simplifying video search.

The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is the new buzzword in technological corridors with most technology companies announcing a ‘smart’ device of sorts that runs on IoT. In simple terms, IoT is a giant network of connected ‘things’; a network of devices linked to Internet through wired or wireless connections. ‘Things’ could be anything from everyday devices like cell phones, washing machines and wearable devices, to pacemakers, biochips on farm animals, automobiles and industrial machines. It is estimated that, by 2050, a whopping 50 billion such ‘connected’ devices would emerge, dawning a new era of the Internet - one of the most powerful inventions in human history.