Perceptual capabilities of artificial systems have come a long way since the advent of deep learning. These methods have proven to be effective, however they are not as efficient as their biological counterparts. Visual attention is a set of mechanisms that are employed in biological visual systems to ease computational load by only processing pertinent parts of the stimuli. This paper addresses the implementation of top-down, feature-based attention in an artificial neural network by use of externally controlled neuron gating. Our results showed a 5% increase in classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset versus a non-gated version, while adding very few parameters. Our gated model also produces more reasonable errors in predictions by drastically reducing prediction of classes that belong to a different category to the true class. Keywords: feature-based attention, neural networks, top-down attention 1. Introduction Artificially intelligent agents are often designed with bottom-up processing mind. Agents perceive the world through sensors, make decisions based on the sensory information and then perform an action based on the decisions.

Based on 46 in-depth interviews with scientists, engineers, and CEOs, this document presents a list of concrete machine research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa. The goal of this work is to give machine learning researchers a fuller picture of where and how their efforts as scientists can be useful. The goal is thus not to highlight research problems that are unique to East Africa -- indeed many of the problems listed below are of general interest in machine learning. The problems on the list are united solely by the fact that technology practitioners and organizations in East Africa reported a pressing need for their solution. The author is aware that listing machine learning problems without also providing data for them is not a recipe for getting those problems solved. If the reader is interested in any of the problems below, please get in touch.

These intelligent, complex and emotional beasts have come to symbolize wildlife conservation efforts around the globe. Across the African continent, they are under threat from encroaching human settlements and continued poaching -- in the summer of 2018, an aerial survey in Botswana found 87 elephants had been killed and their tusks cut off for their ivory, the biggest slaughter in recent years. But elephants are part of a complex ecosystem and scientists and conservationists know protecting them isn't just crucial to the species itself, but for other African animals, birds and plants. Elephants are a keystone species -- their presence and activities play a crucial role in maintaining the health of the savannah and forests they inhabit. For example, they use their tusks to dig for water, providing this scarce resource for other species as well.

In Kenya, workers from the slums have been trained to produce the data needed to make technology like self-driving cars possible. It means firms like Microsoft, Google are turning to this part of the world for help in creating cutting edge technology.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab questioned people around the world about how driverless cars should be programmed to react if their brakes fail. There were stark cultural differences, according to the website Quartz's summary of the research. When forced to choose who survives an accident, people in car-happy Western countries were lukewarm about keeping pedestrians alive at the expense of passengers; they also strongly preferred -- as did people in African countries such as Kenya and South Africa -- to save children over old people. People in Eastern countries, such as China, strongly preferred to save elders over the young and pedestrians over car passengers.

China now has seminars to teach other countries how to censor free speech as its'techno-dystopia' spreads, a worrying report has found. Governments worldwide are stepping up use of online tools to suppress dissent and tighten their grip on power, a human rights watchdog study found. Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information with 36 of the 65 countries assessed, and provided telecom and surveillance equipment to a number of foreign governments, researchers said. India led the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 so far, claiming that the moves were needed to halt the flow of disinformation and incitement to violence. Many governments, including Saudi Arabia, are employing'troll armies' to manipulate social media and in many cases drown out the voices of dissidents.

The report shows that digital technologies are likely to further reduce trade costs and boost trade significantly, especially in services and for developing countries. Global trade is projected to grow by an additional 2 percentage points annually between 2016 and 2030 as a result of digitalization, falling trade costs and the increased use of services. The share of services in global trade is projected to grow from 21 per cent in 2016 to 25 per cent in 2030. The report also finds that the reduction in trade costs could be especially beneficial for micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) and firms from developing countries, provided they have the ability to keep up with the adoption of digital technologies. In the best scenario, developing and least-developed economies' share in global trade is predicted to grow to 57 per cent by 2030, from 46 per cent in 2015, whereas if they cannot keep up, this share is predicted to rise to 51 per cent.

It's never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase--which is frequently the entire output of a student's first computer program--is supposed to be attributed to the program, awakening for the first time, or to the programmer, announcing their triumphant first creation. Perhaps for this reason, "Hello World" calls to mind a dialogue between human and machine, one which has never been more relevant than it is today. Her book, called Hello World, published in September, walks us through a rapidly computerizing world. Fry is both optimistic and excited--along with her Ph.D. students at the University of College, London, she has worked on many algorithms herself--and cautious. In conversation and in her book, she issues a call to arms: We need to make algorithms transparent, regulated, and forgiving of the flawed creatures that converse with them.

We focus on the task of multi-hop reading comprehension where a system is required to reason over a chain of multiple facts, distributed across multiple passages, to answer a question. Inspired by graph-based reasoning, we present a path-based reasoning approach for textual reading comprehension. It operates by generating potential paths across multiple passages, extracting implicit relations along this path, and composing them to encode each path. The proposed model achieves a 2.3% gain on the WikiHop Dev set as compared to previous state-of-the-art and, as a side-effect, is also able to explain its reasoning through explicit paths of sentences.

Reports of a looming jobs bloodbath have done the reputation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology no favours. A 2016 study by Citi and the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, for instance, fanned apprehension because the researchers found that two-thirds of jobs in SA were at risk of being automated. But some in the industry are more sanguine about the technology's possible effect on the country's fragile labour market. They argue that AI is an opportunity for countries that have a high emotional intelligence quotient (EQ). Ryan Falkenberg, co-CEO of Somerset West-based AI firm Clevva, says SA can use the technology to build a sizeable call centre industry.