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".

During The AI Summit London 2019, TechXLR8's own Tech TV team sat down with Rema Algunaibet, AI Developer for Saudi Aramco, 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.

Kathleen Siminyu is a data scientist & machine learning engineer who is Regional Coordinator for the Artificial Intelligence for Development – Africa Network. She is Co-Founder of the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning & Data Science community, and part of the Deep Learning Indaba Steering Committee. Her other interests include natural language processing for African languages and low-cost hardware robotics. We share this story as a demonstration of how AI can indirectly bring people together and empower communities instead of downgrade, divide, or discriminate against them. We believe that community leaders have an important role to play in defining humanity's place in a world of algorithms.

WITH the cost of bringing a new drug to market now an average US$2.6bn1 and one-in-ten drug candidates failing to make it to market despite successfully completing Phase I trials2, it is no wonder that pharmaceutical companies have seized on the unparalleled data-processing potential of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Their use in identifying compounds, some of which may have completed clinical trials already, that could be re-purposed to treat alternative diseases quickly and comparatively cheaply, is well documented. But as research scientists are beginning to find, AI systems are capable of achieving so much more. The potential applications of AI in drug discovery are almost endless, but one of the main areas of focus to date has been repurposing existing drugs. Typically, this involves finding new uses for drugs that have already attained market and regulatory approvals for the treatment of a specific disease.