SOMEBODY LESS driven than Tom Siebel would have long since thrown in the towel. In 2006 the entrepreneur, then 53 years old, sold his first firm, Siebel Systems, which made computer programs to track customer relations, to Oracle, a giant of business software. That left him a billionaire--but a restless one. In 2009, a few months after Mr Siebel had launched a new startup, he was trampled by an elephant while on safari in Tanzania. When, a dozen surgeries later, he could work again, the enterprise almost went bankrupt.

What gave you the idea to work in this area? What problem--or problems--are you trying solve? When I was doing my PhD at Cambridge University, I was constantly using my laptop to communicate with my family back home in Egypt. I realized I was spending more time interacting with technology than with any other human being. And as I communicated with my family, they had no clue how I was feeling except for the smiley or sad face emojis that I could send them.

I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chilling, the larval stage face-hugger was terrifying. Not only did it penetrate the human host's throat, planting the chest-burster in the gut, but it was intrinsically grotesque, an odious, zoological mash-up of scurrying spider and slithering snake. It's easy to interpret our fears of alien predators as nothing more than superficial horror ginned up by the Hollywood fright machine.

China designed and executed a policy that shrank the industrialization process in a mere 25 years -- something that many economies took at least a century to do. That redesign has brought immense dislocation in global commerce and industry, enabling China to become one of the world's leading economies. China's success has led many African capitals to pursue the country's same industrialization trajectory. Over the last few years, African leaders have been pursuing policies designed to mimic the path China took. Some of these policies include creating special economic zones after China's Shenzhen and positioning the manufacturing sector as a fulcrum to attract investments and create new jobs.

Over the history of Science and Technology in the world, Africa has received relatively little attention compared to other regions of the world, despite notable African developments in mathematics, metallurgy, architecture, and other fields. Our Event is to shine light on the emerging advances going on in parts of Africa and speaking to leaders head on about what can be done to gain mass adoption. We will be speaking to Kevin Kissi Founder of Engineer Africa & Brian Asingia Founder of DreamGalaxy & Author of "The Last Digital Frontier"

SqwidNet, in partnership with Sigfox, has concluded the second round of its Internet of Things (IoT) SA University Challenge with ten university teams competing in the final pitch presentation day this week. The programme is designed to challenge students to develop and create innovative projects focused on building solutions that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals using SqwidNet/Sigfox technology. "We were astounded by the creative thinking displayed by the ten teams that presented their solutions to the judges this week," says Phathizwe Malinga, managing director of SqwidNet. "The solutions presented ranged from agricultural solutions for early pest detection to avoid crop losses, to generating electricity from plants by collecting electrons from roots in an anode and converting that into electricity. We also saw an IoT water monitoring solution, an early fire detection for rural communities and a two-way learning solution using artificial intelligence."

What examples are there of AI helping to solve some of the world's problems? A couple of examples that I find motivating are areas where AI is being used to provide healthcare, where human support might be quite restrictive or not enough. AI can also improve accuracy rates to help more people in a safer manner. Another example is a product we've developed at AI for Good called rAInbow, where we've built an AI tool to help detect early signs of domestic violence and abuse. It's an issue that affects one in three women, whether it's physical, sexual, psychological or financial abuse.

KYOTO – A team including Kyoto University researchers has said it succeeded in automatically recognizing the faces of wild chimpanzees with an accuracy of over 90 percent using an artificial intelligence system. Kyoto University conducts research on wild chimpanzees in a field site in Guinea in West Africa set up in 1976. Using the AI system's deep-learning methods, the University of Oxford analyzed a total of 50 hours of footage recorded between 2000 and 2013 by three cameras at the field site on the top of a small mountain. The system detected some 10 million images of chimpanzee faces from the footage, according to the team, whose study is to be published Thursday on an electronic edition of the U.S. journal Science Advances. The system improved its face-recognition ability as time advanced, recognizing the identities of 23 individuals with an accuracy of 92.5 percent.

Artificial Intelligence is the biggest threat to mankind, right? Even if robots aren't taking over the planet by force, the yarn goes, computers will surely push us all into unemployment in the next decade or so. Let's meet someone who can give us a slightly different perspective. This is Joel, standing in front of his house, a few kilometers outside Gulu, Uganda, where he lives with his 14 brothers and sisters. Joel works for Zillow, the leading online real estate marketplace in the US with 1.1B of revenue in 2017.

Evaluation was performed on a held-out test set using the standard protocol outlined by Everingham et al. (39). The precision/recall curve was computed from a method's ranked output. Recall was defined as the proportion of all positive examples ranked above a given rank, while precision is the proportion of all examples above that rank which are from the positive class. For the purpose of our task, high recall was more important than high precision (i.e., false positives are less dangerous than false negatives) to ensure no chimpanzee face detections were missed. Some false positives, such as the recognition of chimpanzee behinds as faces (e.g., fig.