Category: Technology

Artificial Intelligence

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a software program that depicts human intelligence like learning, knowledge sharing, planning etc. AI is not in physical form. AI is machine intelligence similar to normal human behavior. John McCarthy is considered as father of Artificial Intelligence as he initiated the work in the field of AI. He was an American scientist who got many awards and honors in field of Computer Science. Examples of AI in daily activities like Siri, Alexa, Amazon, Netflix. These all use intelligence and make our task easy.

Objective of Artificial Intelligence

The objective of Artificial Intelligence is to enable a computer to accomplish human-like activities. The basic objective of AI is to enable computers to perform intellectual tasks or we can say to simulate human intelligence.

From SIRI to self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly.

 

 

Basics of Artificial Intelligence

AI programmers aim to simulate human attributes such as creativity, logical reasoning, and knowledge acquisition in systems to varying levels. This is achieved using machine learning and deep learning.

Machine Learning

All of us learn and grow. We gain knowledge from various means from our elders, from books, and now of course internet. In the similar way Machine Learning is there. It means automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine Learning is the method that gives computers the capability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

machine-learning
machine-learning

 

Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves. Currently, machine learning has been used in multiple fields and industries. For example, medical diagnosis, image processing, learning association, regression, financial services, speech recognition etc.  

Deep Learning

Deep Learning means in depth learning with multiple layers of network or we can say a set of learning techniques in neural networks. Models are trained by using a large set of labeled data and neural network architectures that contain many layers.

deep-learning
deep-learning

 

Deep learning requires large amounts of labelled data and computing power to perform classification tasks directly from images, text, or sound. Deep learning is a basic technology behind driverless cars. Many more examples are Space, Defence, Medical Fields etc.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Siri

Siri is Apple’s personal assistant for iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS devices that uses voice recognition and is powered by artificial intelligence (AI).It is a voice-controlled personal assistant designed to improve human interaction with Apple products. 

Cortana

Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant that offers hands-free help, answers questions, provides reminders, keeps notes, takes care of tasks, and helps in managing the calendar. It uses the Bing search engine to produce information. It is installed on Microsoft Operating Systems by default.

Alexa

It is a virtual assistant AI technology developed by Amazon. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information, such as news. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.

Tesla

Tesla has taken excellent use of AI and Big Data for expanding its customer base. Tesla builds not only all-electric vehicles but also infinitely scalable clean energy generation and storage products. 

Amazon

Amazon’s AI capabilities are designed to provide customized recommendations to its customers. AI is everywhere from the number of customers willing to buy a product to running a cashier-less grocery store. Amazon’s approach to AI is called a flywheel.

Netflix

Netflix has done a great job of applying AI,  science, and machine learning in the perfect way. Netflix is able to use computer algorithms to recommend the right content tailored to each of its users, resulting in an optimal brand experience.

Uses of Artificial Intelligence

  1. Smart assistants
  2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools
  3. Logistics
  4. AutoPilots
  5. Cybersecurity
  6. Healthcare
  7. Speech recognition
  8. Ride Sharing Apps like Uber

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

 

JPG to PDF Converter

Convert Image to PDF, JPG to PDF, PNG to PDF – Combine Images to PDF?

Many often there is a requirement to convert Images to PDF. The requirements include need to convert JPG to PDF. 

 

This requirement has increased substantially due to the ongoing scenario, wherein schools are left with no other option but to conduct examinations from home. This leaves the students with the burden of sending the examination sheets to the teachers. 

 

 

Most of the time the requirement is to capture the answer sheets and send as an attachment. It would have been easier for students if they need to just send the images. However, this will obviously lead to lots of challenges at teachers end; as it will be very difficult for them to check answers from different image files.

 

 

So, schools are urging students to send the images in form of a single document in PDF form. Now, comes the challenge – How to combine multiple images to PDF file? 

 

 

Does IrfanView  the fastest image viewer and editing tool come to our rescue? Off-course, it does. 

 

Steps to convert multiple images to PDF using IrfanView

 

  • Open IrfanView image viewer and editor
  • Select Options > Multiple images>Create Multiple PDF…(Plugin)

  • You will get a pop-up screen in which you can chose the output directory (1), the output filename (2) Select the images that you need to combine. After this you can add the images (3)

 

  • You also get to see the preview of the images that you choose: 

  • If the order of selected images is not correct, you can use the buttons to change the order by selecting “Move Files up/Down” options.
  • Once everything is ready; click on the “Create PDF Image” to generate pdf file.

  • The Oops moment: Please ensure that you have plugins installed otherwise you may run into an error while trying to generate the PDF.  

  • If you have the required plugins installed, you will get a success message.

  • Here’s the output PDF from the 3 images that we selected:

Conclusion

Once again, IrfanView has been successful in quickly helping us combine multiple images to generate PDF.  

It’s fast, quick, easy and flexible. Isn’t it?

References

IrfanView Official site

IrfanView Wikipedia site

Irfanview – The Fastest Image Viewer & Editor

 

IrfanView is the fastest, intuitive, powerful free image viewer and editor.

 

The lightning speed at which this tool is able to open images has no match. 

 

IrfanView has been highly popular tool ever since it’s first release in 1996. It is completely free for personal use and that too without any annoying Shareware messages like “I Agree” or “Evaluation expired”.

 

It’s small footprint (size) of about 3.4 MB and the power it brings in is simply unimaginable.

 

Huge User Base

IrfanView has been highly popular tool ever since it’s first release in 1996. Since year 2003, IrfanView has over 1 Million downloads every month. 

I have been using this tool for over 2 decades, and it gets better with each release. You can read some info on IrfanView Wikipedia link. 

What makes IrfanView so very popular?

The speed, features and continuous development have resulted in widespread popularity of the tool. 

 

As per Wikipedia, “In a series of image quality tests conducted in 2004, compared with commercial image compressors and Adobe Photoshop 7, Irfanview 3.91 produced “consistently better images than the Adobe Photoshop JPEG encoder at the same data rate”, and its JPEG2000 compression quality “closely followed” the best codec.“

 

Interesting features of Irfanview that have made it a must have utility:

 

  • Cut, Copy, Crop
  • Auto Crop Borders
  • Create Panorama Image
  • Rotate – Left, Right
  • Flip – Verticle and Horizontal
  • Image Resize
  • Convert to Grayscale, Negative
  • Image Effects
  • Color Corrections
  • Save Image in multiple formats including PDF
  • Add overlay text/image (watermark)
  • Image Rotation, Crop and EXIF / IPTC Info
  • Screen Capturing
  • 32 and 64 bit version
  • Huge list of supported file formats – Note: for some formats; plugins are required
  • Thumbnail/preview option
  • Edit Image (Paint) option – to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
  • Fast directory view (moving through directory)
  • Batch conversion (with advanced image processing of all files)
  • Multipage TIF editing
  • Multiple undo steps
  • Scan (batch scan) support
  • Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)

Practical useful Feature – Combine Images to PDF?

Due to the ongoing scenario, schools are left with no other option but to conduct examinations from home. This leaves the students with the burden of sending the examination sheets to the teachers. 

Most of the time the requirement is to capture the answer sheets and send as an attachment. It would have been easier for students if they need to just send the images. However, many schools are urging students to send the images in form of a single document in PDF form; which will ease out the work of the teachers as then they have to use only single document to check. 

If you have such requirement, don’t forget to read our article on how to convert JPG to PDF document using our  favorite and fastest image viewer and editing tool – IrfanView. 

Need more Features?

If you are looking for additional power and features, don’t worry. Several others who found IrfanView an excellent tool, have contributed to it’s by writing powerful plugins that further enhance the power of this awesome tool. 

Good thing is that like Irfanview, both 32 and 64 bit versions of the plugins are available. You can download these plugins from here.

Where to Download?

IrfanView is available both for Windows 32 and 64 bit versions. 

You can download from these links: 32 bit or 64 bit.

Conclusion

Irfanview is faster, powerful and much more flexible than the operating system’s default. It’s shortcuts are quite intuitive.

 

Go, make it the default image viewer on your machine. This is the first step of getting my new machine ready.

 

I am sure you gonna love it!!