Mobile health apps are revolutionizing the healthcare ecosystem by improving communication, efficiency, and quality of service. In low- and middle-income countries, they also play a unique role as a source of information about health outcomes and behaviors of patients and healthcare workers, while providing a suitable channel to deliver both personalized and collective policy interventions. We propose a framework to study user engagement with mobile health, focusing on healthcare workers and digital health apps designed to support them in resource-poor settings. The behavioral logs produced by these apps can be transformed into daily time series characterizing each user's activity. We use probabilistic and survival analysis to build multiple personalized measures of meaningful engagement, which could serve to tailor content and digital interventions suiting each health worker's specific needs. Special attention is given to the problem of detecting churn, understood as a marker of complete disengagement. We discuss the application of our methods to the Indian and Ethiopian users of the Safe Delivery App, a capacity-building tool for skilled birth attendants. This work represents an important step towards a full characterization of user engagement in mobile health applications, which can significantly enhance the abilities of health workers and, ultimately, save lives.

Building a usable radio monitoring automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a challenging task for under-resourced languages and yet this is paramount in societies where radio is the main medium of public communication and discussions. Initial efforts by the United Nations in Uganda have proved how understanding the perceptions of rural people who are excluded from social media is important in national planning. However, these efforts are being challenged by the absence of transcribed speech datasets. In this paper, The Makerere Artificial Intelligence research lab releases a Luganda radio speech corpus of 155 hours. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available radio dataset in sub-Saharan Africa.

Millions of shipments of nuclear and other radiological materials are moved in the U.S. every year for good reasons, including health care, power generation, research and manufacturing. But there remains the threat that bad actors in possession of stolen or illegally produced nuclear materials or weapons will try to smuggle them across borders for nefarious purposes. Texas A&M University researchers are making it harder for them to succeed. If border agents intercept illicit nuclear materials, investigators need to know who produced them and where they came from. Fortunately, nuclear materials carry certain forensic markers that can reveal valuable information, much like fingerprints can identify criminals.

The financial services and banking sector is predicted to become the highest spender on artificial intelligence technology in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Google. The sector will have a share of almost 25 per cent of all AI investments in the region, with the use of the technology in banking alone expected to contribute up to 13.6 per cent to the region's gross domestic product by 2030, the Alphabet-owned company said in the Future of AI in the Mena report. "This would take shape through a range of applications, such as deep learning for algorithmic trading, fraud analysis and investing, as well as smart portfolio management and customer profiling," the report said. The overall potential effect of AI on the region's economic growth is significant, with the Mena region estimated to accrue $320 billion by 2030 from the value added by the technology. This is mostly from costs saved through automating processes, as well as improving products and services across the region's industries, the report said.

In 1950, the ingenious computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a thought experiment he called the Imitation Game. An interviewer converses via typewriter with two subjects, knowing one is human and the other a machine. If a machine could consistently fool the interviewer into believing it was the human, Turing suggested, we might speak of it as capable of something like thinking. Whether machines could actually think, Turing believed, was a question "too meaningless to deserve discussion." Nonetheless, the "Turing test" became a benchmark for machine intelligence.

Welcome back to Pushing Buttons – this is Keza, back with you after a period of convalescence. As I was lying in bed with Covid, watching what felt like 4,000 trailers from the live-streamed summer video-game showcases, I struggled to tell the difference between a lot of them. Every shooter seemed to be set in space. Every wholesome indie seemed to feature frogs or bears. Admittedly I was quite ill, but also, as our games correspondent Keith Stuart explored in last week's newsletter, we've reached a point where a lot of mainstream culture, including games, is starting to feel as if it's folding in on itself.

With a GDP of AED 1.5 trillion in 2020, the UAE's economy is the fifth-largest in the Middle East. The UAE economy, which was once reliant on oil exports, is now increasingly dependent on earnings from petroleum and natural gas. Economic diversification has occurred in recent years, particularly in Dubai. According to studies, the worldwide number of internet-connected devices is predicted to reach 1 trillion by 2030, with the UAE alone expected to achieve this amount by 2050. As a transit country between the East and the West with a pro-business environment, the UAE has become a technology powerhouse for the Internet of Things in all fields, enabling digital transformation in airports, freight, and logistics.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I) Past, Present and Future. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use AI. Often what they refer to as AI is simply one component of AI, such as machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms.

Millions of shipments of nuclear and other radiological materials are moved in the U.S. every year for good reasons, including health care, power generation, research and manufacturing. But there remains the threat that bad actors in possession of stolen or illegally produced nuclear materials or weapons will try to smuggle them across borders for nefarious purposes. Texas A&M University researchers are making it harder for them to succeed. If border agents intercept illicit nuclear materials, investigators need to know who produced them and where they came from. Fortunately, nuclear materials carry certain forensic markers that can reveal valuable information, much like fingerprints can identify criminals.

Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next. Today, the internet is a mostly 2D platform that we consume through a screen. It is a command-line prompt for the reality we live in. Instagram posts, Tiktoks, text messages, emails and voice memos are all digital artifacts things people create and receive in the physical world. But this will change when the metaverse becomes so immersive and photo-realistic that physical reality extends into virtual spaces.