From Thursday, African leaders will gather in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, home of the African Union (AU), for the continental body's annual summit. According to AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat, regional integration and "maintaining momentum in addressing issues of peace and security" is high on the agenda. But in an ironic twist, the host of the summit has either initiated or been involved in multiple conflicts in the last three years. Ethiopia's two-year civil war with the state of Tigray may have ended in November 2022 after a Pretoria pact, but federal troops are currently upping drone strikes against rebels known as Fano militia in the state of Amhara, next door to Tigray. This week, the Ethiopian Human Rights Council said "at least 45 civilians" had been killed by federal troops in Amhara.

Addis Ababa — The recently inaugurated Artificial Intelligence Center has signed Memorandums of Understanding with five institutions to cooperate …

This is the proceedings of the Computer Vision for Agriculture (CV4A) Workshop that was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020. The Computer Vision for Agriculture (CV4A) 2020 workshop was scheduled to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 26th, 2020. It was held virtually that same day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The workshop was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020.

The International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2020 is four months away but has already attracted more than its share of drama with a deluge of submissions and doubts about the qualifications of some reviewers. Yesterday the conference programme chairs finally put the selection process behind them, announcing 687 out of 2594 papers had made it to ICLR 2020 -- a 26.5 percent acceptance rate. ICLR 2020 will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from April 26 to 30. This will be the first trip to Africa for a major AI conference, a move long-encouraged by many leading AI researchers. All accepted papers will be presented as posters as usual, while 23 percent will have an oral presentation.

Researchers from Google AI (formerly Google Research) and Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago have created ALBERT, an AI model that achieves state-of-the-art results that exceed human performance. ALBERT now claims first place on major NLP performance leaderboards for benchmarks like GLUE and SQuAD 2.0, and high RACE performance score. On the Stanford Question Answering Dataset benchmark (SQUAD), ALBERT achieves a score of 92.2, on General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, ALBERT achieves a score of 89.4, and on ReAding Comprehension from English Examinations (RACE) benchmark, ALBERT gets a score of 89.4%. ALBERT is a version of Transformer-based BERT that "uses parameter reduction techniques to lower memory consumption and increase the training speed of BERT," according to a paper published on OpenReview.net The paper was published alongside other papers being considered for publication as part of the International Conference of Learning Representations, which will take place in April 2020 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Newly elected Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia was elected on a mandate of transformational change and has promised a new era for Ethiopia and the African continent. Ethiopians are jubilant and excited about the future as Abiy launches significant political and economic reforms. Abiy Ahmed and his team are building towards a vision that embraces all Ethiopians and facilitates their effective participation in the global economy. When our team visited the beautiful city of Addis Ababa two weeks ago, we were energized by the passion of her people and also their unwavering optimism and faith in the future. Sophia echoed our sentiments too and Dr. Ben Goertzel had in-depth discussions with Abiy and his team.