more-in An unlikely guest speaker will share the dais with national and international leaders at the World Congress on Information Technology, 2018 (WCIT-2018), yet another global event that the city is set to host from February 19 to 21. The guest to address the congregation alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sri Lankan premier Ranil Wickramasinghe, Canadian minister of Innovation, Science, Economic Development Navdeep Bains, Indian IT Minister Ravishankar Prasad, and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, is none other than Sophia, the first humanoid robot to be granted citizenship of any country. She has been prominently featured among speakers on the web page of the NASSCOM’s WCIT-Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2018, and is scheduled to speak on February 20, in the morning session. NASSCOM is partnering with the State government for the event. Already popular for the sophisticated use of Artificial Intelligence in the making of her, Sophia also boasts of looks like Hollywood celebrity Audrey Hepburn. She is the work of Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics in 2015, manufactured to be media-savvy with exceptional conversational skills. In 2017, the robot was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, and made the United Nations Development Programme’s Innovation Champion for Asia and the Pacific. Equipped with face and voice recognition, and visual data processing features, Sophia can not only answer simple questions on predetermined topics, but also has the inherent capabilities to process the interactions, and progressively improve on her conversational skills. Endowed with 62 kinds of human-like expressions/emotions, she has also been given the gift of mobility at the start of this year. Albeit her maiden visit to the city, this is by no means Sophia’s first to the country. She had earlier made a sari-clad appearance at IIT-Bombay’s annual techfest in December last years, where she called for collaborative coexistence between humans and robots.

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