Paris, October 02, 2019 – Capgemini has developed an intelligent data platform called Project FARM (Financial and Agricultural Recommendation Models), which is designed to optimise the agricultural value chain and bolster global food supply. The platform uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to determine farming patterns through big data, generating insights from the data to make recommendations. It uses Machine Learning to make the platform applicable at scale by connecting it with cell phones. This solution has been built in collaboration with Agrics, a social enterprise operating in East Africa, which provides local farmers with agricultural products and services on credit. Global demand for food is anticipated to increase by 60% by 2050[1].

Scientists can now weigh wild whales using remote-controlled drones hovering above them. In the past it has only been possible to measure the weight of free-living whales if they were dead and out of the water or stranded on a beach. But researchers have released aerial footage of them flying a drone over a mother and baby southern right whale, near Argentina, to work out how much they weigh. They can do this by taking photographs to work out the length, width and height of the animal. This can then be compared to past measurements of the density of that particular species of whale's body, to estimate its volume and weight.

The global AIaaS market is predicted to gather pace in terms of growth as it registers a healthy CAGR during the forecast period 2018-2026. Well-established tech companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google offer AI services alongside their technology services in order to stay competitive in the industry. They realize that offering AI tools and software is not enough to maintain their supremacy in the technology world. Other software or professional service firms may partner with AI solutions providers to expand their customer base. In this regard, it could be said that the demand in the global AIaaS market will increase in the next few years.

I t wasn't long ago that technology was a topic only discussed among techies. In fact, technology was an elective course in many graduate school programs until very recently. Today, technology is part of our daily lives so it's not surprising that technology is very much a part of any industry. It's also not surprising to see the direction technology has taken. It has evolved from a way to communicate with each other and store important information, to a way to interact with each other, express ourselves and manage our lives. The drive to monetize our personal information for the purpose of creating the latest and greatest target marketing algorithm has paved the way for artificial intelligence or AI. Google was a pioneer and early adopter of this type of AI, gathering information about our interest based on our searches and pairing businesses and products we would likely use. It is this type of AI that brings customers to businesses like an arranged marriage. Collection of data through cloud-based applications originally created for business solutions slowly evolved for consumer convenience for everything from banking to entertainment. Amassing raw data to create solutions for everyday activities helped to speed the process of AI for the birth of AI. Had we not partaken in taking information once only saved on our desktops and placing it on cloud servers, AI may not have evolved into the presence of daily life today. Years ago, reluctance and lack of understanding of how digital information is used kept many people who are not computer savvy from partaking in this community. Today, thanks to companies like Facebook and Amazon, people readily share their information with companies with a basic trust that the information will only be used for the purpose intended. This is why, even though the information is occasionally breached, we are so willing to join communities like Citizens app and Waze which use crowd sourcing for the collective purpose of helping each of its participants. Crowd sourcing applications can then place ads as a form of revenue, though not all do. This rather invasive, though passive, business model hones in on our inherent need to share information in order to benefit from the information shared by others.

In today's connected world, factories are smart, cars are smart, buildings are smart, and homes are smart. School campuses should be smart too. The number of gun-violence incidents in the United States is much too high, and while politicians and special interest groups argue about how exactly to curb this violence, technology could help keep campuses safer. The latest IoT (Internet of Things) technologies could streamline campus and school operations to help them run as efficiently as possible. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global IoT in education market is expected to grow from $4.8 billion in 2018 to $11.3 billion by 2023.

Sengupta: Thank you so much for having me today. I'm really excited to be in San Francisco. I don't get to come here that often, which is strange because I live in Los Angeles, but I do like to come whenever I can. For my talk today, I'm going to talk about the future of transportation, specifically on the things that I worked on that I think are kind of the up and coming thing, the thing that I'm working on now and what's going to happen in the future. I think part of my career has always been about just doing fun and exciting new things and all my degrees are in aerospace engineering, ever since I was a little kid, I loved science fiction. I actually am a Star Trek person versus a Star Wars person, but I knew since I was a little kid that I wanted to be involved in the space program, so that's why I decided to go the aerospace engineering route and I wanted to build technology. I got my Ph.D. in plasma propulsion systems. Has anyone heard of the mission called Dawn that's out in the main asteroid belt? My Ph.D. research actually was developing the ion engine technology for that mission. It actually flew and got it to a pretty cool place out in the main asteroid belt looking at Vesta and Ceres. I did that for about five years and then I kind of felt like I had done everything I could possibly do on that front, from a research perspective. My management asked me if I wanted to work on the next mission to Mars. There's very few engineers in the space program who'd be like, "No, I'm just not interested in that." And they're like, "We want you to do the supersonic parachute for it."

The AI Career Fair Night will be held on the evening of December 1, 2019 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The event will feature different job opportunities across machine learning, data engineering, data visualization, and data architects. During the event, participants could attend professional lectures on career-related topics. In the Mentor Corner, participants could seek guidance on career development issues, from developing professional competencies to job interviewing. Our mentors included HR professionals, data analysts and executives.

If you've ever attended an AI conference, I bet you passed under the placid gaze of a chrome-plated humanoid, lovingly selected from an ocean of creepy robot stock images that marketing teams can't resist pasting on every billboard these days. Clearly, I'm personally guilty of using octarine-blue sci-fi art to lure weary travelers to my blog. It certainly works, which is why it's a pity that those images have next to nothing to do with AI. Robots are very exciting but mostly useless. Today's AI is mostly boring but very useful.

Estonia is a pioneer in digital initiatives. The Estonian government-initiated AI strategy counts with over 20 machine learning-based solutions live in the Estonian public sector. In Estonia, citizens are always the owners of their own data. None of this comes as a surprise, though, in a country which has been named the most advanced digital society in the world by many. Below, the opening to the third annual Tallinn Digital Summit that took place on September 16 - 17.

Some stood in front of posters, which wound around the tree's sprawling roots, depicting machine learning systems that promised to predict everything from soil nutrition, to whether a small-scale farmer would repay a loan, to how a self-driving car might navigate the bustling streets of Cairo. Over the last three years, academics and industry researchers from around the African continent have begun sketching the future of their own A.I. industry at a conference called Deep Learning Indaba. The conference brings together hundreds of researchers from more than 40 African countries to present their work, and discuss everything from natural language processing to A.I. ethics. Founded in 2017, Indaba is a direct response to Western academic conferences, which are often difficult for researchers from distant parts of the world to access. Take, for instance, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the most well-known meeting dedicated to artificial neural networks.