Lanfrica is an online resource centre that catalogues, archives and links African language resources. These resources include research papers, datasets, projects, software and models that have to do with one or more African languages. The team behind Lanfrica is Chris Emezue, Handel Emezue, and Bonaventure Dossou, with contribution from Daria Yasafova. We caught up with them to find out more about the project, what inspired them to begin, and the potential that Lanfrica offers the AI community and beyond. Chris: The inspiration came while Bona and I were working as undergraduate students.

Is it finally the year for the rise of the machines? Until not too long ago, AI was just an overused marketing term. Many software vendors who sold solutions based on algorithms and fancy regular expressions branded their stuff as artificial intelligence, even though it wasn't. Times have changed, and the market is--in a helicopter view--divided into two camps: vendors who use a predefined AI framework and vendors who create their own. I'm not looking into the pros and cons of each, but what does this mean for the users?

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. Governments and humanitarian groups can use machine learning algorithms and mobile phone data to get aid to those who need it most during a humanitarian crisis, we found in newly published research. The simple idea behind this approach is that wealthy people use phones differently from poor people. Their phone calls and text messages follow different patterns, and they use different data plans, for example. Machine learning algorithms – which are fancy tools for pattern recognition – can be trained to recognize those differences and infer whether a given mobile subscriber is wealthy or poor.

Pre-trained language models such as BERT have been successful at tackling many natural language processing tasks. However, the unsupervised sub-word tokenization methods commonly used in these models (e.g., byte-pair encoding - BPE) are sub-optimal at handling morphologically rich languages. Even given a morphological analyzer, naive sequencing of morphemes into a standard BERT architecture is inefficient at capturing morphological compositionality and expressing word-relative syntactic regularities. We address these challenges by proposing a simple yet effective two-tier BERT architecture that leverages a morphological analyzer and explicitly represents morphological compositionality. Despite the success of BERT, most of its evaluations have been conducted on high-resource languages, obscuring its applicability on low-resource languages. We evaluate our proposed method on the low-resource morphologically rich Kinyarwanda language, naming the proposed model architecture KinyaBERT. A robust set of experimental results reveal that KinyaBERT outperforms solid baselines by 2% in F1 score on a named entity recognition task and by 4.3% in average score of a machine-translated GLUE benchmark. KinyaBERT fine-tuning has better convergence and achieves more robust results on multiple tasks even in the presence of translation noise.

Imagine you live in a time before the internet. When we all had to work in offices, go to shops to buy things, when TV couldn't be streamed on demand and when most monetary transactions were made using notes and coins. Now imagine someone coming up to you and telling you how something that didn't even exist was going to make all those things seem like ancient history. You'd have found the idea fantastical, laughable even – exactly the way you might feel about the metaverse and the fact that there's a real estate boom going on there right now. Prices have risen by as much as 500% since Facebook changed the name of its holding company to Meta in October 2021, with people paying millions of dollars to buy plots of pixellated land in this virtual world, even though it doesn't fully exist yet.

When we hear about AI in the contact center, it's usually about chatbots and augmented agent. But in this conversation, we hear at how contact center AI can help with sales and marketing. Invoca is doing some fascinating stuff with its conversational intelligence engine. The company's technology has analyzed over 1.5B conversational minutes. Its customers analyze their call center interactions to optimize marketing, improve digital conversion rates, automate contact center QA, and enable agent coaching. Invoca just announced it saw 70% revenue growth during the past 12 months. Invoca's customer base now includes over 2,300 of the leading B2C brands across a number of industries. The common theme, according to Gregg, is they tend to have complex interactions. The small company seems to be doing a few things right. It was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Conversation Intelligence: Sales And Marketing, Q4 2021 report. Just this week it was selected for the Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect. Invoca was also recognized in the Inc. Best Workplaces of 2019 list and achieved the difficult Great Place to Work certification. Dave Michels 0:12 Welcome to talking here today, Evan and I will be talking with Brent Johnson of invoca. But before that Evon must be the pandemic is over, because it's time for Enterprise Connect. I know I'm gonna be there. Evan Kirstel 0:24 You know, after a two year hiatus, I will be there in person at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, and at the Innovation Showcase which you are spearheading I really actually looking forward to it to seeing, well, you not so much, but a lot of other people that I haven't seen in person for a while. You mentioned the Innovation Showcase, because that is without doubt the most valuable session.

Films and TV programmes have long portrayed caveman as using grunts to communicate with one another. But a new study suggests that our ancient ancestors likely did not use sounds to communicate, and instead opted for hand gestures. Researchers from the University of Western Australia asked volunteers to attempt to describe words using only grunts or gestures. They found that gestures were far more effective in communicating meaning and were often similar between cultures. 'The universality of gesture means it is ideally suited to bootstrapping human communication among modern humans and therefore supports the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation,' the researchers said in their study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Films and TV programmes have long portrayed caveman as using grunts to communicate with one another. Searching for a way to make your point?

On the occasion of the upcoming GTC, I had the opportunity of speaking with two very important people that work every day at innovating XR at NVIDIA: David Weinstein, Director of Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Gregory Jones, Director of Global Business Development/Product Management. I had an interesting chat with them about NVIDIA's vision for the future, they also clarified to me what NVIDIA Omniverse is, and when 5G cloud streaming can become reality. As a full disclaimer, this is a paid article that I'm writing for a recent collaboration I started with NVIDIA to help them promote GTC, NVIDIA's flagship event, that this year will be held online on March 21st-24nd. You know me well, so you know that if I accepted a similar collaboration it is only because NVIDIA guaranteed me that it could be valuable for you, my readers. And in fact, this post is so full of interesting information that it doesn't look like a paid one at all This collaboration also lets me offer you one special bonus: if you live in the EMEA area (Europe, Middle East, Africa), if you register for the GTC event using my referral code https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/?ncid The graphics card will be extracted from all those who used my referral to register and who then followed at least one session during the event (the keynote does not count and just registering is not enough). I have not millions of followers, so the odds of winning aren't bad: it can be worth trying You can discover more about the GTC and some of its cool XR sessions in the remainder of this article.

Odanga Madung found users were being paid to tweet disinformation on social media, to try and influence policies in the country. In response to Odanga's research - Twitter permanently suspended hundreds of accounts, but he's called on them to'address the problem' ahead of elections in Kenya this year. The Natural Museum say a new plant-eating dinosaur has been discovered in China. Fossils found of the Yuxisaurus dinosaur include parts of the skull, jaws, limbs and large numbers of armour spines and plates. Microsoft's Direct-Storage API used in the Xbox Series X to massively improve loading times is coming to PC games.

Fox News host gives his take Zelenskyy's latest idea and provides insight on the biolabs in Ukraine on'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," March 14, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. Here is something we just saw. I wish we brought it to you earlier. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, of course, gave an interview recently that didn't get enough attention in this country. Zelenskyy needless to say, is currently engaged in a desperate fight for his country, his government, his life, and he has been since the Russian military invaded Ukraine nearly three weeks ago. So you can assume there is not a lot Zelenskyy thinks about at this point, apart from getting the Russians off of Ukrainian soil. So last week, Zelenskyy floated the idea of accepting so-called Ukrainian neutrality, agreeing not to join NATO; in exchange for that, he will get a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. Now, there is nothing inherently controversial about Zelenskyy's idea. Ukraine was not on the cusp of joining NATO, anyway. NATO officials have long said they don't want Ukraine to join. It is not clear whose interest would be served by Ukraine joining NATO. So if accepting the status quo, going with the way things already were and were always going to be, if doing that convinces Putin to stop killing Ukrainians, and spares Ukraine from total and complete destruction, maybe it's not a crazy idea, maybe Zelenskyy is onto something, he certainly thought about it a lot. Maybe we ought to congratulate Zelenskyy for acting wisely on behalf of the country he leads. This could be a win for him and for the entire world. Probably not a lot of American media outlets will describe it that way; however.