SoftBank Group Corp. has secured pledges from Microsoft Corp. and other investors of around $108 billion for a second Vision Fund aimed at investing in technology firms. The Japanese conglomerate itself plans to invest $38 billion in the fund, it said in a statement. Others set to join include Apple Inc. and Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Foxconn) -- both investors in the first fund. Notable for their absence on the list of state and corporate backers were the sovereign wealth funds of the two countries that formed the cornerstone of its first fund: Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, as well as investment bank Goldman Sachs. SoftBank said it is still talking to potential investors and that it expects the fund's anticipated capital to grow.

There is a great deal of public concern about deepfakes, most of it centered on the ramifications of being able to quickly and easily face-swap videos. That concern is certainly well-founded, but it may be obscuring an even more immediate threat – deepfake audio. Voice-swapping has already been put to use in at least a handful of artificial intelligence (AI) cyber attacks on businesses, enabling attackers to gain access to corporate networks and convince employees to authorize a money transfer. The primary use of deepfake audio is to enhance a very common type of attack – business email compromise (BEC). A business email compromise attack usually begins with some sort of phishing to gain access to the company network and reconnoiter the payment systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been put forward as a potential solution for many of the gravest problems facing society, from the opioid crisis to poverty and famine. But although technology clearly has the potential to do a great deal of good, there's a sound business reason that tech companies often pour large amounts of resources into social projects that don't seem to align with their core business of selling software and services. This is down to the fact that tackling social issues often involves developing solutions to problems very similar to those faced by businesses. Additionally, working with governments or NGOs on building these solutions can often mean access to new datasets. Learning derived from these datasets can later be developed into products and services to offer to clients (even if the data itself isn't).

The second annual CyFyAfrica 2019 -- the Conference on Technology, Innovation, and Society -- took place in Tangier, Morocco, in June. It was a vibrant, diverse and dynamic gathering attended by various policymakers, UN delegates, ministers, governments, diplomats, media, tech company representatives, and academics from over 65 nations, mostly African and Asian countries. The conference's central aim, stated unapologetically, was to bring forth the continent's voices in the global discourse. The president of Observer Research Foundation (one of the co-hosts of the conference) in their opening message emphasized that the voices of Africa's youth need to be put front and center as the continent increasingly comes to rely on technology to address its social, educational, health, economic, and financial issues. The conference was intended in part to provide a platform for those young people, and they were afforded that opportunity, along with many Western scholars from various universities and tech developers from industrial and commercial sectors.

CIO East Africa is back with its annual series of East Africa's IoT & AI Summit scheduled for 22nd –23rd August, 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya. This summit lined to explore and review the various applications of Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) is further purposed to highlight the true potential of technology across multiple sectors and industries acting as a catalyst between policy makers, government, market movers, and thought leadership. While launching the Advisory Board for the 3rd IoT & AI Summit, Laura Chite, CEO, CIO East Africa said: "Our highly researched summit agenda is determined to deliver insightful and the latest information from inspiring speakers from across Africa." According to Chite delegates at the two-day summit will be equipped with knowledge of latest developments that shall enable them to network with the industry key personnel. Among the volunteer IoT & AI Summit 2019 Advisory Board members dedicated to crystalize the visionary conference agenda are Ahmed Maawy, Developer BRCK, Lorraine Maina – Enterpreneur.

At first glance, the Berlin startup doesn't seem so different from others: a factory floor in the rear courtyard of a building in the city's Neukölln district, stacked preserving jars filled with muesli in the kitchen, a discarded ping-pong surface repurposed as a conference table. The employees are young, relaxed and very international. The company's head and founder, Christian Kroll, is 35 years old, the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. The two men also share a quirk: To avoid wasting time in the mornings choosing an outfit, he always wears the same thing -- in his case, blank white T-shirts made from organic cotton. Zuckerberg's favorite color, by contrast, is gray.

An intelligent robot can be used for applications where a human is at significant risk (like nuclear, space, military), the economics or menial nature of the application result in inefficient use of human workers (service industry, agriculture), for humanitarian uses where there is great risk (demining an area of land mines, urban search and rescue). This paper implements an experiment on one of important fields of AI Searching Algorithms, to find shortest possible solution by searching the produced tree. We will concentrate on Hill climbing algorithm, which is one of simplest searching algorithms in AI. This algorithm is one of most suitable searching methods to help expert system to make decision at every state, at every node. The experimental robot will traverse the maze by using sensors plugged on it. The robot used is E.V.3 Lego Mind storms, with native software for programming LabView. The reason we chose this robot is that it interacts quickly with sensors and can be reconstructed in many ways. This programmed robot will calculate the best possibilities to find way out of maze. The maze is made of wood, and it is adjustable, as robot should be able to leave the maze in any design.

Machine learning is an increasingly prevalent buzzword in the media. Its applications in science and the private sector are frequently discussed--but what about global development? Can it also help advance fields like health, agriculture, and financial inclusion? That's because it can help us uncover previously invisible patterns in data, to identify the most effective solutions and target them in the right way. Machine learning (ML) has been around for decades, but now is our chance to apply it to development challenges in new ways, for three reasons.

This fall, the School of Science will welcome four new members joining the faculty in the departments of Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Chemistry. Evelina Fedorenko investigates how our brains process language. She has developed novel analytic approaches for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain imaging techniques to help answer the questions of how the language processing network functions and how it relates to other networks in the brain. She works with both neurotypical individuals and individuals with brain disorders. Fedorenko joins the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as an assistant professor.

Flight Simulator was once one of the jewels in Microsoft's crown, as close to synonymous with PC gaming as it's possible to get. The series debuted a staggering 37 years ago, pre-dating even Windows as an operating system, and demanded exacting attention from players as they guided increasingly detailed planes safely through the skies. Over the course of a dozen iterations spanning nearly four decades, the flying experience evolved from blocky cockpit views to full aerial tours with a hangar's worth of realistically modelled aircraft to get to grips with. It's been running so long that even Microsoft does not know its sales figures, but Flight Simulator has certainly been played by millions. Yet as PC gaming blossomed, becoming home to everything from competitive shooters to arthouse narrative games, Flight Simulator's star began to wane. The last major release was 2006's Microsoft Flight Simulator X (eventually revamped and repackaged for Steam in 2014), while 2012's simplified spin-off, Microsoft Flight, had an aborted take off, cancelled a mere five months after launch.