Unfamiliar faces aren't welcome at Beijing public housing projects. To prevent illegal subletting, many have facial recognition systems that allow entry only to residents and certain delivery staff, according to state news agency Xinhua. Each of the city's 59 public housing sites is due to have the technology by year's end. Artificial intelligence startup Megvii mentioned a similar public housing security contract in an unspecified Chinese city in filing for an initial public offering in Hong Kong last week. The Chinese startup, best-known for facial recognition, touts its government dealings, including locking down public housing to curb subletting, as a selling point to potential investors.

Rightly or wrongly, the AI-driven world has come to typify the woes of modern economic life, as tech giants such as Facebook and Alphabet amass vast fortunes, due in large part to the huge quantities of data that users often freely provide them. Accusations of economic imbalance tend to be multi-faceted. Not only do these companies typically employ fewer people than the industrial titans of yore, but they also attract the ire of officials over their tax practices and have grown insanely rich off the back of something users receive no compensation for. It's helped to create a world in which the haves are increasingly well off, while the have nots make do with insecure and poorly paid work. Nowhere is this exchange more evident than in the data annotation industry, where people from around the world help to prepare and tidy up the data used by the tech giants to train the algorithms upon which their fortunes increasingly rest.

Let's think differently and use IoT to solve local problems says Jack Ngaare, MD of Microsoft Africa Development Center, Kenya site. He was sharing insights on Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Internet of Things(IoT) during keynote address at the third East Africa IoT and AI Summit. Speaking to delegates at the conference he emphasized the need to focus on the problems Africa has and be more deliberate about solving these problems using such emerging technologies. Let's think differently and use IoT to solve local[Africa] problems He asked "What problems do we have? What are the focus areas and what are the simple solutions?

IQ Fulfillment, the Middle East and North Africa region's first robotic fulfillment centre, has opened in Dubai. Launched by IQ Holding, the centre provides full back-end solutions using the latest in robotics, AI and software platforms to support the supply chain and logistics industry. The robotic technologies used at the centre help process 12,000 robotic orders daily, delivering a 99.9 percent accuracy rate, and three times the human output, a statement said. It added that the key features are robotic picking, end to end track & trace, intelligence storage, package protection, gift wrapping and seasonal packing. IQ Fulfillment said it supports the needs of small and medium enterprises, incubators, accelerators and e-commerce players, enabling them to accelerate their business growth.

Faced with spending cuts by clients, stiffer competition from upstart legal services providers, and the rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), law firms' traditional model of the billable hour may have had its time in the sun. "Law firms are looking for different ways to charge for their services, especially in the corporate market where clients are just not accepting the old way of billing," says Dani McCormick, director of solutions at Lexis Nexis. The billable hour has long been the bedrock of how the legal profession works out how much to charge clients for their services. Fee earners log the time they spend on client work each day, usually in six-minute increments, and this helps them to provide clients with accurate bills and keep track of annual billing targets. While this model was effective in the past, critics say its rigid structure is incompatible with the current market, where clients are more price conscious, and see more value in project-based pay and success fees.

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine learning-led technological innovation has already laid the foundation for higher productivity, better-income jobs, and socio-economic prosperity. In the coming years, automation will completely transform the nature and future of work, making things better and faster. However, these developments have also created the fear that the fourth industrial revolution or automation will lead to widespread labor displacement, lower wage growth, and worsen income inequality, especially in developing economies. The concerns may somehow be true as the automated technologies will replace aging and unskilled workforce with the new and technically skilled. As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has stated in its'OECD Employment Outlook 2019' report, "the risk of job automation is real but the trend varies greatly across countries. Automation technologies do not just destroy jobs, they also create and transform them. Historically, the net effects of major technological revolutions on employment have been positive, and there are few signs of this trend changing radically in the years to come."

During The AI Summit London 2019, TechXLR8's own Tech TV team sat down with Praveeen Kombial, Global Product Head, Business Applications, for Edgeverve, to discuss the business AI landscape today, the challenges facing enterprises, and the steps ahead for industry. 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.

A team of researchers from Bioversity International in Africa has created a smartphone app to help banana farmers protect their crops against diseases and pests. The Tumaini App (meaning'hope' in Swahili) is based on artificial intelligence algorithms that have been trained to recognize five major diseases and one common pest affecting the world's favorite fruit, demonstrating accuracy of more than 90 per cent in most models. The software has been tested in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Benin, China, and Uganda. Tumaini can recommend the means of addressing a specific disease and automatically upload identification data into a global database to help coordinate international response. It is hoped that the app can stop disease outbreaks and protect the livelihood of small, independent farmers.

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."

AIMS invites applications from qualified men and women of any nationality for postdoc and PhD positions available in our Health and Interventions Monitoring with Artificial Intelligence (HIMAI) project. By using approaches substantially reliant on machine learning and AI, the HIMAI project seeks to transform the practice of pharmacovigilance and the diagnosis and control of various diseases. Successful applicants will be based in our Rwandan campus, and may be temporarily placed in collaborating wet/engineering labs in Rwanda and elsewhere, depending on their research topic. Successful PhD applicants may be required to take remedial courses in computing, calculus, and/or statistics. Email CV and cover letter to research@nexteinstein.org with the subject line "HIMAI application".