Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. In this episode we're chatting to Caitlin about gender and AI, that technology isn't neutral, using technology for good, diversity creation and exploitation, lived experience expertise, co-creating technologies and AI life cycle, importance of success metrics, international treaties on AI, and more… Alliance is a leader of the UN's Generation Equality Action Coalition Technology & Innovation for Gender Equality. Caitlin was co-chair of the Expert Group for the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) in 2023 with its first ever priority theme of Technology & Innovation. Caitlin leads the Human Rights Toolbox initiative, an educational platform that supports a global community working for a human rights-based approach to AI – with equity & inclusion at the core of the code. Women at the Table are a leader of the fr feminist AI research Network, with Hubs in Latin America & the Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, SouthEastAsia, and sister network in Africa, and serves as Civil Society lead for the World Benchmarking Alliance's Collective Impact Coalition for Ethical AI.

This paper investigated the potential of a multivariate Transformer model to forecast the temporal trajectory of the Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) for short (1 month) and long horizon (more than 1 month) periods at the regional level in Europe and North Africa. The input data covers the period from 2002 to 2022 and includes remote sensing and weather data for modelling FAPAR predictions. The model was evaluated using a leave one year out cross-validation and compared with the climatological benchmark. Results show that the transformer model outperforms the benchmark model for one month forecasting horizon, after which the climatological benchmark is better. The RMSE values of the transformer model ranged from 0.02 to 0.04 FAPAR units for the first 2 months of predictions. Overall, the tested Transformer model is a valid method for FAPAR forecasting, especially when combined with weather data and used for short-term predictions.

A Huawei executive said Thursday information and communications technologies, or ICT, will enable the digitalization of industry, spark innovation and make other industries green. The remarks were made at a session organized by the Global Innovation Hub (UGIH) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the ongoing 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP27, in Sharm El-Sheikh of Egypt. Referring to what is known as the "enabling effect", Philippe Wang, Huawei's Executive Vice President for the Northern Africa region, said ICT is "making other industries greener". "5G, Artificial Intelligence, data analytics, cloud computing – all these things will improve industrial processes in a way that cuts energy use, and lowers carbon emissions," he said. According to Philippe Wang, in the same way that ICT enables a smart streetlight to turn itself off when no one is around, 5G wireless base stations can automatically shut down when there is no data traffic, which saves energy.

Scaleflex joins a small group of enterprise technology companies serving VIP clients and is the first European-based modern Digital Asset Management provider to propose a fully customizable media picker widget for online news and media businesses, industrial brands and large finance groups. With more than 40% of the web and 60% of the global CMS market built on WordPress, WordPress VIP provides a fully managed WordPress cloud platform for unparalleled scale, security, performance, and flexibility, as well as end-to-end guidance and hands-on support. Some of their enterprise clients include Capgemini, Merck, and News Corp. Founded in 2016, Scaleflex's strong technical capabilities and experience in the B2D market have helped build scalable, efficient and secure APIs for large brands with dense catalogs like Michelin, GoCar, Hyundai, Banque Populaire and Nice Matin, among others. Its flexible, technically agnostic, composable architecture and easily interoperable solutions have also been recognized by the MACH Alliance, which few companies can boast. As a fast-growing international company, Scaleflex now has over 70 passionate members from 16 nationalities in 15 locations across Europe, North Africa and APAC, solving DAM challenges for more than 1300 customers worldwide.

"Broadly accessible machine translation systems support around 130 languages; our goal is to bring this number up to 200," the authors write as their mission statement. Meta Properties, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, on Wednesday unveiled its latest effort in machine translation, a 190-page opus describing how it has used deep learning forms of neural nets to double state-of-the-art translation for languages to 202 languages, many of them so-called "low resource" languages such as West Central Oromo, a language of the Oromia state of Ethiopia, Tamasheq, spoken in Algeria and several other parts of Northern Africa, and Waray, the language of the Waray people of the Philippines. The report by a team of researchers at Meta, along with scholars at UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, "No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation," is posted on Facebook's AI research Web site, along with a companion blog post, and both should be required reading for the rich detail on the matter. "Broadly accessible machine translation systems support around 130 languages; our goal is to bring this number up to 200," they write as their mission statement. As Stephanie relates, Meta is open-sourcing its data sets and neural network model code on GitHub, and also offering $200,000 I'm awards to outside uses of the technology.

Chatbot trends 2022: This year, we reported AI trends in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. We were all in for them, so we decided to peer into our looking glass once more and give it another try. In summary, the year 2021 was a good one for conversational automation. AI became a useful tool for many internet enterprises once the pandemic shifted everyone to the Internet's side. Today's chatbots are significantly more intelligent than those of a year ago.

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI).

In the natural selection process, beneficial gene mutations are preserved from generation to generation until they become dominant in our genomes. The protection against pathogens drives the process. However, gene mutations that are protective against one pathogen could make people susceptible to new diseases whenever there is a change in the environment. Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) is one example of such disease. It is an autoimmune disease that has emerged over the past 20,000 years in southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.

Google in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute launched today'The A to Z of AI' in Arabic, with an objective to make information on Artificial Intelligence more universally accessible. It's a series of simple, bite-sized explainers to help everyone understand what AI is, how it works and how it's changing the world. Search interest for'artificial intelligence' related queries on Google Search has grown due to the growing number of jobs requiring AI skills across the Middle East and North Africa in the last few months. While there's plenty of information out there on AI, it's not always easy to distinguish fact from fiction nor find simple explanations.

Around the world, artificial intelligence (AI) is automating functions and making new services possible with breakthroughs in low-cost computing power, cloud computing services, growth in big data and advancements in machine learning and related processes. This webinar discussed the current use of AI in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), along with trends and challenges in business models, barriers to innovation and AI's ethical and responsible use towards achieving the sustainable development goals. This study examines the current use of AI in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) across Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The report mapped a sample of 450 start-ups by sector in alignment with the UN Sustainable ...