"thwop," "muah" and "boop" are some of the sounds made by Humpback Whales. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From the "boing" of a minke whale to the "drum" of a red piranha, scientists are documenting more sounds in our world's oceans, rivers and lakes every year. Now, a team of experts wants to go a step further and create a reference library of aquatic noise to monitor the health of marine ecosystems. The Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS) will include every "thwop," "muah" and "boop" of a humpback whale, as well as human-made underwater sounds and records of the geophysical swirl of ice and wind, according to a paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

We have the pleasure of introducing Radiant Earth Foundation's first online course, Machine Learning for Earth Observations (ML4EO) Bootcamp. Available on Atingi, an open digital learning platform designed to improve training and employment opportunities, this self-paced course contains a mixture of lectures and hands-on exercises for novice data science or remote sensing practitioners. Atingi is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). A discussion exchange forum has been set up for participants to post questions about the course content and get help from others taking the course. The Radiant MLHub LinkedIn community page and Slack channel can also be used to crowdsource answers to questions.

DURBAN, Feb 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Determined to use her skills to fight inequality, South African computer scientist Raesetje Sefala set to work to build algorithms flagging poverty hotspots – developing datasets she hopes will help target aid, new housing or clinics. From crop analysis to medical diagnostics, artificial intelligence (AI) is already used in essential tasks worldwide, but Sefala and a growing number of fellow African developers are pioneering it to tackle their continent's particular challenges. Local knowledge is vital for designing AI-driven solutions that work, Sefala said. Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent, and tech experts say young, home-grown AI developers have a vital role to play in designing applications to address local problems.

Even though artificial intelligence can bring about a substantial positive impact in many areas of our lives, AI's inappropriate and unethical use has become a big concern in recent years. During my investigation of artificial intelligence in business and in societies in the last five years, I have been negatively surprised by the quantity of wrong and unethical usage of AI worldwide. Several big technology companies have been involved in scandals by allowing wrong and unethical use of data and artificial intelligence in their platforms. The most well-known is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook gave access to sensitive user data of 87 million user to consultant firm Cambridge Analytica which used AI algorithms to micro-target their political ads in the 2016 US elections.

Arm has introduced a design for an automotive image signal processor to enhance driver assistance and automation technologies. The Arm Mali-C78AE image signal processor (ISP) is part of Arm's AE line of safety-capable intellectual property suitable for advanced drivers assistance systems (ADAS) and human vision applications. It's the first product announcement since Nvidia called off the $80 billion acquisition of Arm last week. The first licensee for the tech is Intel's Mobileye, which is licenses the Mali-C78AE and the next-generation EyeQ technology. ADAS tech has grown from a premium vehicle feature to a capability consumers now expect as standard in new vehicles, as the systems have helped with driver safety.

You can almost smell the drying fish as you step into Ubisoft's latest Discovery Tour, Viking Age, a free add-on for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (also available to play stand-alone, without the game). Previous Discovery Tour titles have allowed players to take a combat-free jaunt through Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and now early Viking Britain--all "curated by historians and experts," according to Ubisoft. In partnership with UKIE, the British gaming trade association, the game developer wants to introduce Discovery Tour to 52 schools across the UK. But this isn't the first time someone has deployed a video game for education. As early as 1971, when Paul Dillenberger showed The Oregon Trail to his students, the effect gaming could have in a learning environment was apparent.

According to a new report by Speechmatics, more than a third of global industry experts reported that the COVID-19 pandemic affected their voice tech strategy, down from 53% in 2021. This shows that companies are finding ways around obstacles that seemed impassable less than two years ago. The last two years have exacerbated the adoption of emerging technologies, as companies have leveraged them to support their dispersed workforces. Speech recognition is one that's seen an uptick: over half of companies have successfully integrated voice tech into their business. However, more innovation is needed to help the technology reach its full potential.

In this newsletter I future a recent recording from BusinessDay TV - a panel discussion I was involved in. It was hosted by Michael Avery and our guests were Tumisang Nkosi (Tumi) Director: Executive Education & Programmes at Johannesburg Business School (JBS) & Kanshukan Rajaratnam (Kanshu), Director: School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University. I also include an article I wrote for BusinessDay newspaper on the same topic. The smart technology era is a revolution characterised by the blending of the physical, digital and biological worlds. Artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, genetic engineering, and quantum computing is spurring on the creation of products and services that are rapidly becoming more important in today's world.

This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of indirect and noisy clues, crucially including signals from the visual modality co-occurring with spoken utterances. Several fields have made important contributions to this approach to modeling or mimicking the process of learning language: Machine Learning, Natural Language and Speech Processing, Computer Vision and Cognitive Science. The current paper brings together these contributions in order to provide a useful introduction and overview for practitioners in all these areas. We discuss the central research questions addressed, the timeline of developments, and the datasets which enabled much of this work. We then summarize the main modeling architectures and offer an exhaustive overview of the evaluation metrics and analysis techniques.

Google Developer Student Clubs University of Ibn Zohr presents W6: Intro to Data Visualization with Python #MLStart #30DaysOfML | Feb 18, 2022. Find event and ticket information.