Those who raise questions about Africa's preparedness for the fourth industrial revolution should look no further than the continent's young entrepreneurs, transcending tough resource constraints to lead a burgeoning AI startup ecosystem. Studies show that young people are more enthusiastic about technology. With the youngest and fastest-growing population on earth (Africa has a median age of 19 years compared to Europe's 41.8 years), there could be no better time for Africa than now. Young people in Africa are rising above infrastructure and resource constraints to create ingenious processes to adopt and apply the fourth industrial revolution technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to generate more value for their localities. Since we founded the Alliance for Africa's Intelligence (Alliance4ai) one year ago, we have interacted with more than 100 AI startups to learn about their work and support them with a platform where they exchange knowledge and opportunities with students, schools and other players in the ecosystem.

Researchers argue global warming boosts population and insect appetite, and fastens the metabolic rate of insect pests, thereby causing them to consume more. It is estimated that with a 2 rise in temperature, insect pests could destroy maize--Africa's most essential food crop--by as much as 30% more than they do today.

SHANAHAN: Without question there are some of those. Computer vision is well-established in commercial industry. However, I have not seen in any case yet [where] you just take a commercial capability and immediately apply it to a military problem. First of all, the data set ... you've got to train it against the different kind of datasets. With Maven, we had to get real, full-motion video from the Middle East, tens of thousands of hours of it, curate it, label it, train against it.

During The AI Summit London 2019, Terah Lyons, Founding Executive Director of the Partnership on AI, was joined onstage by WIRED Editor Greg Williams to discuss the AI landscape today, the challenges facing organizations implementing AI, the ethical use of AI, and much, much more. With flagship shows in San Francisco, London, New York, Munich, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Cape Town, 2019 will see over 30,000 delegates from businesses globally joining the AI revolution through The AI Summit events. The AI Summit series uniquely has the support of tech's elite, with our 2019 Industry Partners featuring Agorai, AWS, IBM Watson, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, HCL, Publicis Sapient, Genpact, Intel alongside 300 sponsors and partners. Exclusive, inspirational insights from acclaimed speakers are frequently reported by the world's foremost press including official media partners CBS, Reuters, BBC, The Times, Quartz, Tech Radar.

From depression chatbots to diagnosing eye diseases, developers are coming up with incredible ways of teaching robots to transform the African industries they work in. So says smart technology entrepreneur Jacques Ludik, founder of AI company Cortex Group and of the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa. According to Ludik, artificial intelligence could be the powerful tool Africa needs to tackle its challenges, suck as shortcomings in health, education or employment. While many people see robots as a potential threat to jobs, Ludik believes AI holds the key to uplifting communities, through education and economic development. "Education is key to bridging the increasing gap of our experiences of the world, and improve and increase access to jobs (and other services) that aren't bound by geography. AI, the very technology that is moving the rest of the world forward so rapidly, has the power to do that."

Oblivious to those depending on bananas for their favourite protein shake or breakfast fix, a deadly fungus has sneaked up on banana plantations in South America, threatening the fruit's future. An artificial intelligence-powered smartphone app developed for banana farmers can come in handy to stem further spread of the disease, its makers from Colombia, India and U.S., said. The artificial intelligence-powered tool built into the app called Tumaini – which means "hope" in Swahili- can detect pathogens at an early stage and help fast-track control and mitigation efforts, according to a statement by researchers who designed the application. The app has been developed by scientists from the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the Imayam Institute of Agriculture and Technology (IIAT), Tamil Nadu in India, and Texas A&M University, in the United States. The tool is being tested on three main banana-producing continents: Asia, Latin America and Africa. It has been tried in Colombia in South America; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Benin and Uganda in Africa; and India and China in Asia.

Financial services providers that slack on regulatory compliance and fail to safeguard their operations against money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal activities may face damaged reputations and significant fines. Compliance failures are prevalent worldwide: Approximately $26 billion worth of fines were levied against banks for AML, KYC and sanctions noncompliance between 2008 and 2018. A report found that the U.S. imposed a full $23.52 billion -- 91 percent -- of those penalties, while European regulators demanded $1.7 billion and the Middle East levied $9.5 million. FinTechs could face these same financial pains as regulators increasingly demand that they follow the compliance rules to which FIs must adhere. The People's Bank of China announced in March that it plans to create rules for regulating and securing the FinTech sector, for example.

Financial services providers that slack on regulatory compliance and fail to safeguard their operations against money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal activities may face damaged reputations and significant fines. Compliance failures are prevalent worldwide: Approximately $26 billion worth of fines were levied against banks for AML, KYC and sanctions noncompliance between 2008 and 2018. A report found that the U.S. imposed a full $23.52 billion -- 91 percent -- of those penalties, while European regulators demanded $1.7 billion and the Middle East levied $9.5 million. FinTechs could face these same financial pains as regulators increasingly demand that they follow the compliance rules to which FIs must adhere. The People's Bank of China announced in March that it plans to create rules for regulating and securing the FinTech sector, for example.

Over the past few years, researchers have created a growing number of machine learning (ML)-based face recognition techniques, which could have numerous interesting applications, for instance, enhancing surveillance monitoring, security control, and potentially even forensic art. In addition to face recognition, advancements in ML have also enabled the development of tools to predict or estimate specific qualities (e.g., gender or age) of a person by analyzing images of their faces. In a recent study, researchers at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, in South Africa, developed a machine learning-based model to estimate people's age by analyzing images of their faces taken in random real-life environments. This new architecture was introduced in a paper published by Spinger and presented a few days ago at the International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI) 2019. Most traditional approaches for age classification only perform well when analyzing face images taken in controlled environments, for instance, in the lab or in photography studios.

In Samuel Beckett's novel, The Unnamable, the anonymous narrator laments, "I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their setting, no sky for their dispersing." For Beckett's narrator, words have become unmoored from their meaning. They no longer refer to anything in the physical world. Ultimately, they fail to fully convey or contain the inner message that prompted them. It's a deeply unsettling feeling I suspect we've all experienced. Words become disconnected from our emotions, insufficient for what we want to convey.