Nowadays we are hearing a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence or AI and robotics. We have even felt their presence in our surroundings in one or the other way. The technology sounds new but its seeds have been long sown. Do you know that AI found its way into film-business around 100 years ago? Yes, the 1927 release Metropolis depicts AI that takes the form of a humanoid robot with an intent on taking over the titular mega-city by inciting chaos.

Chris Bain is a professor of Digital Health in the Faculty of IT at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Abraham Oshni Alvandi is a research assistant in Digital Health in the Faculty of IT at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) launched its inaugural NII Shonan Meeting in February 2011. It was the first international conference of informatics in Asia, following in the style of the Dagstuhl seminars in Germany, designed to bring together the world's leading researchers and engineers to discuss open problems and challenges. More than 140 meetings have been held since then, and the number of participants totaled approximately 3,500 by November 2019. NII supports all the administrative arrangements for organizers and covers approximately half the fee for every academic participant (including room, board, and meeting fees). Sometimes, we also have summer/winter schools.

India is turning to WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country, to create awareness about the coronavirus pandemic. Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister, said on Saturday that citizens in the country can text a WhatsApp bot -- called MyGov Corona Helpdesk -- to get instant authoritative answers to their coronavirus queries such as the symptoms of the viral disease and how they could seek help. Here is an effort by WhatsApp and @mygovindia to ensure you receive accurate and verified information on Coronavirus. Please click on this link https://t.co/REabfIp5QT An individual is required to text 919013151515 (or click on this shortcut link) to connect to the bot.

"High demand and tight labor markets have made candidates with AI skills highly competitive, but hiring techniques and strategies have not kept up," said Peter Krensky, research director at Gartner. "In the recent Gartner AI and Machine Learning Development Strategies Study, respondents ranked "skills of staff" as the No. 1 challenge or barrier to the adoption of AI and machine learning (ML)." Departments recruiting AI talent in high volumes include marketing, sales, customer service, finance, and research and development. These business units are using AI talent for customer churn modeling, customer profitability analysis, customer segmentation, cross-sell and upsell recommendations, demand planning, and risk management. A significant portion of AI use cases are reported from asset-centric industries supporting projects such as predictive maintenance, workflow and production optimization, quality control and supply chain optimization.

In this paper, we propose an autonomous UAV path planning framework using deep reinforcement learning approach. The objective is to employ a self-trained UAV as a flying mobile unit to reach spatially distributed moving or static targets in a given three dimensional urban area. In this approach, a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) with continuous action space is designed to train the UAV to navigate through or over the obstacles to reach its assigned target. A customized reward function is developed to minimize the distance separating the UAV and its destination while penalizing collisions. Numerical simulations investigate the behavior of the UAV in learning the environment and autonomously determining trajectories for different selected scenarios.

The graph represents a network of 2,273 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "TopCyberNews", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 17 February 2020 at 18:20 UTC. The requested start date was Monday, 17 February 2020 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of tweets (going backward in time) was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 4-day, 1-hour, 45-minute period from Monday, 10 February 2020 at 23:14 UTC to Saturday, 15 February 2020 at 01:00 UTC. Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods.

Artificial intelligence (AI) experimentation is now prolific across South African companies, with many businesses demonstrating enthusiasm for AI. According to Business Tech (2019), over 45% of South African businesses say that they're already actively piloting AI within their organisations. Metaphorical robots are infiltrating organisations and reinventing business processes due to the rapid rise in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which has become a readily available solution offered by ICT service providers. A year ago, says 4IR guru Arthur Goldstuck, "only 6% of South African enterprises were using robotics. Then came the RPA explosion. Now the figure stands at 37% (in Engineering News, 2019)."

DURBAN - The recent Covid-19 fuelled rush on retailers in South Africa, as consumers start stockpiling grocery staples, is leaving many shelves empty. Some, such as Makro, have recently announced that they will be "enforcing customer limits on shoppers … to give customers fair access to essential items." Morne Laubscher, CTO of Logicalis South Africa said, "Both online and brick-and-mortar retailers are experiencing a run on products, which is limiting their ability to service the needs of their entire customer base". Retailers have the data that they need for customer buying patterns but often aren't always able to access the benefits. The 2019 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis, a global provider of IT solutions which questioned 888 CIO's from around the globe, found that just under one in ten (9 percent) of respondents believe that their organisation is very successful at understanding the advantages of AI technology in some areas of business; whereas 44 percent believe their organisation is not very successful at all.

We consider sketched approximate matrix multiplication and ridge regression in the novel setting of localized sketching, where at any given point, only part of the data matrix is available. This corresponds to a block diagonal structure on the sketching matrix. We show that, under mild conditions, block diagonal sketching matrices require only O(stable rank / \epsilon^2) and $O( stat. dim. \epsilon)$ total sample complexity for matrix multiplication and ridge regression, respectively. This matches the state-of-the-art bounds that are obtained using global sketching matrices. The localized nature of sketching considered allows for different parts of the data matrix to be sketched independently and hence is more amenable to computation in distributed and streaming settings and results in a smaller memory and computational footprint.