Recently I innocently posted online (okay, maybe not so innocently) a few graphic images from a hot and hip open-source AI image generator called Stable Diffusion 2. The reason for this was an ongoing debate I have had for years with an architect friend of mine. My position is that AI will eventually (in our lifetimes) compete successfully with human creativity in essentially every conceivable field. My architect friend, and most people, do not agree. I wanted to show my friend that the AI could create a pleasing, surprising and imaginative graphic for the cover of a hypothetical book on modern architecture, or perhaps a banner ad for an architecture conference. So I typed the following into the text box on the front page of the Stable Diffusion 2 website: "architect imagination, building with clean lines, impressionist".

The adoption of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa received a major boost after Uniccon Group, an Abuja-based tech startup, unveiled the continent's first humanoid robot. Omeife, the 1.8m female human-like robot, is African by design and has Igbo-like physical attributes. The battery-powered robot can speak Igbo, Yoruba, English, French, Swahili, Wazobia, Pidgin, Afrikaans and Arabic with native accents. Uniccon Group chief executive Chuks Ekwueme said: "Omeife also identifies objects and calculates positions and distances of objects." The launch of Omeife comes a few months after Abdul Malik Tejan-Sie, a South African-based Sierra Leonean innovator, presented a prototype of South Africa's first humanoid robot.

In Nigeria, the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has significantly pushed the country to advance in machine learning, the …

This paper introduces the Forgotten Realms Wiki (FRW) data set and domain specific natural language generation using FRW along with related analyses. Forgotten Realms is the de-facto default setting of the popular open ended tabletop fantasy role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. The data set was extracted from the Forgotten Realms Fandom wiki consisting of more than over 45,200 articles. The FRW data set is constituted of 11 sub-data sets in a number of formats: raw plain text, plain text annotated by article title, directed link graphs, wiki info-boxes annotated by the wiki article title, Poincar\'e embedding of first link graph, multiple Word2Vec and Doc2Vec models of the corpus. This is the first data set of this size for the Dungeons & Dragons domain. We then present a pairwise similarity comparison benchmark which utilizes similarity measures. In addition, we perform D&D domain specific natural language generation using the corpus and evaluate the named entity classification with respect to the lore of Forgotten Realms.

Using graph neural networks for large graphs is challenging since there is no clear way of constructing mini-batches. To solve this, previous methods have relied on sampling or graph clustering. While these approaches often lead to good training convergence, they introduce significant overhead due to expensive random data accesses and perform poorly during inference. In this work we instead focus on model behavior during inference. We theoretically model batch construction via maximizing the influence score of nodes on the outputs. This formulation leads to optimal approximation of the output when we do not have knowledge of the trained model. We call the resulting method influence-based mini-batching (IBMB). IBMB accelerates inference by up to 130x compared to previous methods that reach similar accuracy. Remarkably, with adaptive optimization and the right training schedule IBMB can also substantially accelerate training, thanks to precomputed batches and consecutive memory accesses. This results in up to 18x faster training per epoch and up to 17x faster convergence per runtime compared to previous methods.

K Raveendran A global survey of companies has revealed a serious shortage of tech talent when it comes to artificial intelligence, which is threatening to slow down the shift towards the new productivity tool. A majority of respondents in the survey, carried out by management consultancy McKinsey, have reported difficulty in hiring for each AI-related role in the past year, and most say it either wasn't any easier or was more difficult to acquire this talent than in years past. AI data scientists remain particularly scarce, with the largest share of respondents rating data scientist as a role that has been difficult to fill, out of the roles we asked about. The findings are particularly relevant to India, which boasts the world's biggest talent pool, and have lessons for the country's education system. India has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the IT boom, triggered by the highly feared Y2K problem at the turn of the new millennium, which ultimately turned out to be a non-issue.

Croatia take on Morocco for the third-place playoff at World Cup 2022. Saturday's game will be the second encounter between the Atlas Lions and 2018 runners-up at this year's World Cup in Qatar. Their opening group match ended in a goalless draw. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win on Saturday. Prediction: Morocco's dreams of reaching the World Cup final were dashed after a 2-0 loss to France in the semifinal.

This article presents morphologically-annotated Yemeni, Sudanese, Iraqi, and Libyan Arabic dialects Lisan corpora. Lisan features around 1.2 million tokens. We collected the content of the corpora from several social media platforms. The Yemeni corpus (~ 1.05M tokens) was collected automatically from Twitter. The corpora of the other three dialects (~ 50K tokens each) came manually from Facebook and YouTube posts and comments. Thirty five (35) annotators who are native speakers of the target dialects carried out the annotations. The annotators segemented all words in the four corpora into prefixes, stems and suffixes and labeled each with different morphological features such as part of speech, lemma, and a gloss in English. An Arabic Dialect Annotation Toolkit ADAT was developped for the purpose of the annation. The annotators were trained on a set of guidelines and on how to use ADAT. We developed ADAT to assist the annotators and to ensure compatibility with SAMA and Curras tagsets. The tool is open source, and the four corpora are also available online.

Molecule generation is central to a variety of applications. Current attention has been paid to approaching the generation task as subgraph prediction and assembling. Nevertheless, these methods usually rely on hand-crafted or external subgraph construction, and the subgraph assembling depends solely on local arrangement. In this paper, we define a novel notion, principal subgraph, that is closely related to the informative pattern within molecules. Interestingly, our proposed merge-and-update subgraph extraction method can automatically discover frequent principal subgraphs from the dataset, while previous methods are incapable of. Moreover, we develop a two-step subgraph assembling strategy, which first predicts a set of subgraphs in a sequence-wise manner and then assembles all generated subgraphs globally as the final output molecule. Built upon graph variational auto-encoder, our model is demonstrated to be effective in terms of several evaluation metrics and efficiency, compared with state-of-the-art methods on distribution learning and (constrained) property optimization tasks.

War in Europe, a momentous volcanic eruption and a surprise finding that could rewrite our understanding of reality – 2022 really has been a busy year for science, technology, health and environment news, and all that happened in just the first few months. From stunning space imagery to pig heart transplants, here are the New Scientist news editors' picks of the biggest scientific developments, discoveries and events of the year. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February has sparked devastation across the country and affected many areas of life around the world, as both nations play a key role in the global supply chains for energy, food and more. It has also raised the spectre of nuclear weapons, with Russian president Vladimir Putin making not-so veiled threats about deploying his atomic arsenal. Thankfully, Armageddon has been avoided, but Russia's offensive has sparked discussion of a new kind of nuclear war, as Ukraine's nuclear power plants became a battleground this year.