No matter what industry you operate in, you'll have noticed by now that technology is changing the way we do business. Technology continues to evolve, and businesses need to keep up or risk becoming obsolete. Companies that continue to practice traditional business methods will find it more difficult to stay relevant and competitive. If they overlook the significance of digital transformation, they face an imminent threat of being outsmarted by more innovative players in the game. The day is coming when digital transformation will mean the difference between survival, and the ability to thrive in this technology-driven world.

Southern Africa has experienced drought-flood cycles for the past decade that strain the ability of any country to properly manage water resources. This dynamic is exacerbated by human drivers such as the heavy reliance of sectors such as mining and agriculture on groundwater and surface water, as well as subsistence agriculture in rural areas along rivers. These factors have progressively depleted natural freshwater systems and contributed to an accumulation of sediment in river systems. In a region where two or more countries share many of the groundwater and surface resources, water security cuts across the socioeconomic divide and is both a rural and urban issue. For example, the City of Cape Town had to heavily ration all water uses in 2017 and 2018, as its dams were drying up.

Tactician helps users make tactical proof decisions while they retain control over the general proof strategy. To this end, Tactician learns from previously written tactic scripts and gives users either suggestions about the next tactic to be executed or altogether takes over the burden of proof synthesis. Tactician's goal is to provide users with a seamless, interactive, and intuitive experience together with robust and adaptive proof automation. In this paper, we give an overview of Tactician from the user's point of view, regarding both day-to-day usage and issues of package dependency management while learning in the large. Finally, we give a peek into Tactician's implementation as a Coq plugin and machine learning platform.

Neural Architecture Search has achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks, out-performing human-designed networks. However, many assumptions, that require human definition, related with the problems being solved or the models generated are still needed: final model architectures, number of layers to be sampled, forced operations, small search spaces, which ultimately contributes to having models with higher performances at the cost of inducing bias into the system. In this paper, we propose HMCNAS, which is composed of two novel components: i) a method that leverages information about human-designed models to autonomously generate a complex search space, and ii) an Evolutionary Algorithm with Bayesian Optimization that is capable of generating competitive CNNs from scratch, without relying on human-defined parameters or small search spaces. The experimental results show that the proposed approach results in competitive architectures obtained in a very short time. HMCNAS provides a step towards generalizing NAS, by providing a way to create competitive models, without requiring any human knowledge about the specific task.

Cloud computing offers unique opportunities to drive inclusive growth and economic transformation in Africa by developing the digital economy and supporting artificial intelligence (AI) opportunities. This was the message emerging from this week's HUAWEI CLOUD Summit Africa 2020, an online event to unpack the opportunities of cloud computing for African business under the theme "Building an Intelligent Africa". "AI and digitization offer untold benefits for almost every sector," said Marcus Tay Soon Guan, Chief Tech Director of HUAWEI CLOUD Africa Region at the Summit. "AI and the opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) can help enterprises build relevant, game-changing offerings for their customers and society." Tay said that due to the enormous amounts of information being generated by people, equipment and connected devices in the emerging 4IR era, there were massive data storage and analysis needs, and Cloud was the most effective way to deliver this.

As there is no vaccine or specific treatment for Covid-19, countries have implemented physical distancing guidelines to spur collective action to prevent the spread of the virus. Physical distancing is not new in South Africa – it has long been an integral part of our way of life. In African societies, for example, people traditionally lived far apart and the clustering of people into densely populated areas is a new phenomenon. In addition, when African people greeted, traditionally there was no physical contact. In fact, there was a distance maintained between the people greeting.

The UAE is rolling out its biggest effort yet to develop a workforce versed in artificial intelligence, as the rapidly-advancing technology transforms economies worldwide. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a new graduate-level AI research institution in Abu Dhabi, is accepting applications for its first masters and PhD programmes this month, with classes scheduled to begin in September 2020. As the first university to have a singular focus on AI, the institution aims to attract students from around the world to advance the technology and propel the UAE's economic diversification efforts. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence is an open invitation from Abu Dhabi to the world to unleash AI's full potential To compete with more than a hundred graduate degree programmes in AI – mainly in North America, China and the UK – MBZUAI is offering full scholarships, monthly stipends, health insurance and accommodation to all students. MBZUAI is named after Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, who believes in the transformative power of knowledge and scientific thinking.

At Takealot, our Data Engineering team is focused on designing, building, and troubleshooting data processing systems that are secure, reliable, fault-tolerant, scalable, and efficient. We are currently working towards building a completely new Real-Time Event-Driven Architecture for data processing using open-source and serverless technologies such as Debezium, BigQuery, Flink, Kafka, among others. This new Lakehouse will serve as the central source of truth, which multiple internal users will have access to, to drive their daily/monthly/quarterly decisions. Takealot is growing quickly, which brings a number of unique and interesting challenges. As such, data within the organisation is also growing quickly.

As head of EMEA analytics, Lunn has led the team responsible for delivering analytics projects to customers throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and for bringing advances in analytics technology to customer projects. In her new role, she will oversee regional delivery teams in EMEA, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and North America, as well as the company's Global Analytic Delivery Center based in Bangalore, India, applying the latest breakthroughs in analytics to solve specific customers' challenges. "FICO has been a global leader in analytics for more than 60 years, ever since it brought the first credit scoring systems to market," said Louise Lunn, vice president of Global Analytics Delivery. "The explosion in data and the increasing use of AI and machine learning have brought the power of FICO analytics to more businesses worldwide, in every industry. I'm proud to be on the front lines of this effort, and to lead a global team of data scientists addressing the specific challenges of businesses worldwide."

For many entrepreneurs, starting their startup is the most significant thing they do. For Rana el Kaliouby, it's one achievement in a series of unpredictable things that this self-described "nice Egyptian girl" has accomplished in her life. In her remarkable book Girl Decoded, el Kaliouby shares her inspiring academic and professional journey. Alongside this, it is an intimate meditation about what it took from her personally to accomplish all that she has. Born in Egypt to conservative Egyptian parents, the family spent several years in Kuwait and eventually fled back to Cairo when Iraq invaded Kuwait.