OVER THE past five years researchers in artificial intelligence have become the rock stars of the technology world. A branch of AI known as deep learning, which uses neural networks to churn through large volumes of data looking for patterns, has proven so useful that skilled practitioners can command high six-figure salaries to build software for Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The top names can earn over $1m a year. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. The standard route into these jobs has been a PhD in computer science from one of America's elite universities.

Last year we launched new AWS Regions in France and China (Ningxia), and announced that we are working on regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the United States. South Africa in Early 2020 Today, I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa. The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will also enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organizations to leverage advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation. AWS customers are already making use of 55 Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has announced Morocco as the host of a forum on artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa.The forum which will be held on 12-13 December 2018 will discuss issues and challenges of AI in the continent. "This forum will finally address these issues by ensuring that the potential of artificial intelligence as a lever for development is promoted and maximized," said UNESCO, noting that "about 150 participants" are expected in this event jointly organized with the University Mohamed VI Polytechnic (UM6P). The forum will feature plenary sessions and two-day thematic workshops. Parallel events will be organized in the form of round tables. An exhibition space, in which UNESCO will hold the main stand, will also be dedicated to exhibitors wishing to present their work in the field of artificial intelligence.

The summit is scheduled to hold on Wednesday, 10 October 2018 at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos and with the theme, "New Algorithms for the Financially Excluded Segment". This is a broad based stakeholder session focused on understanding emerging trends and advanced data analytics use cases applied to issues of financial inclusion. Leading the plenary and discussions are leading local and international experts like Adebisi Shonubi, MD/CEO, NIBSS; Dr (Mrs) Yinka David-West, Director, Lagos Business School; Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Temitope Akin-Fadeyi and Head Financial Inclusion Secretariat, Central Bank of Nigeria; Ekow Duker. The one-day Summit will be followed by a five-day residential, all-expenses-paid Artificial Intelligence bootcamp and hackathon on emerging trends in machine learning and deep learning between 10 and 14 October 2018. The goal is to build world-class capacity in advanced data analytics, upskill financial inclusion data analysts and researchers in emerging best practices, and to support the development of contextually relevant algorithm and tech innovation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing society as profoundly as the steam engine and electricity have done. But unlike past technological revolutions, the AI revolution offers a unique chance to improve lives without opening up and exacerbating global inequalities. That will require widening of the locations where AI is done. The vast majority of experts are in North America, Europe and Asia. Africa, in particular, is barely represented.

Artificial Intelligence tools are rapidly changing how financial institutions operate, manage data, and interact with customers. The revolution brought by the AI – a blend of three advanced technologies: machine learning, natural language processing and cognitive computing – has huge implications for the financial services industry in Nigeria. According to Microsoft Nigeria Country Manager, Mr Akin Banuso, with the use of modern tools like Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning platform, Financial Service Providers can crunch large volumes of data faster and more accurately, which considerably lessens time-to-market to deliver products and services. "The AI has the potential to advance nearly every field of human endeavour and address countless societal challenges. This is why we are investing in not only making the technology more accessible, but also building capacity in the use of machine learning concepts to address analytical gaps in financial inclusion and other areas," Banuso says.

PlantVillage, a research and development project, based at Penn State University, is beginning to bring artificial intelligence to these smaller farms. Scientists at PlantVillage, in collaboration with international organizations, local farm extension programs and engineers at Google, is working to tailor A.I. technology for farmers in Tanzania who have inexpensive smartphones. The initial focus is on cassava, a hearty crop that can survive droughts and barren soil. But plant disease and pests can reduce crop yields by 40 percent or more. PlantVillage and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture have developed a simple A.I. assistant, called Nuru ("light" in Swahili). Wave the phone over a plant leaf, and the software diagnoses the disease or pest blight and suggests low-tech treatments.

Across various domains--such as health, education, and housing--improving societal welfare involves allocating resources, setting policies, targeting interventions, and regulating activities. These solutions have an immense impact on the day-to-day lives of individuals, whether in the form of access to quality healthcare, labor market outcomes, or how votes are accounted for in a democratic society. Problems that can have an out-sized impact on individuals whose opportunities have historically been limited often pose conceptual and technical challenges, requiring insights from many disciplines. Conversely, the lack of interdisciplinary approach can leave these urgent needs unaddressed and can even exacerbate underlying socioeconomic inequalities. To realize the opportunities in these domains, we need to correctly set objectives and reason about human behavior and actions. Doing so requires a deep grounding in the field of interest and collaboration with domain experts who understand the societal implications and feasibility of proposed solutions. These insights can play an instrumental role in proposing algorithmically-informed policies. In this article, we describe the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) research agenda, which involves using insights from algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design to improve access to opportunity. The MD4SG research community takes an interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to improve societal welfare. We discuss three exciting research avenues within MD4SG related to improving access to opportunity in the developing world, labor markets and discrimination, and housing. For each of these, we showcase ongoing work, underline new directions, and discuss potential for implementing existing work in practice.

The results of a routine check-up at Oregon Zoo in the US has caused a stir online when X-ray images of some of its animals were shared to Twitter. As part of the procedure the animals are photographed and scanned to ensure they are in good health. The eerie images reveal that the tail of a beaver has a bone reaching all the way to the tip and an X-ray of a snake reveals the mesmerising vertebrae that curve and stretch throughout the deadly ball python. Other images show the difference between birds (a screech owl) and flying mammals (a flying fox) and a hedgehog with trapped gas in its stomach. The Rodrigues flying fox (pictured) is actually a species of bat called Pteropus rodricensis and is only found in the wild on Rodrigues, an island in the Indian Ocean belonging to Mauritius.

It is designed to plug in to Metacorps, an experimental web app for annotating metaphor. As Metacorps users annotate metaphors, the system will use user annotations as training data. When the system is confident, it will suggest an identification and an annotation. Once approved by the user, this becomes more training data. This naturally allows for transfer learning, where the system can, with some known degree of reliability, classify one class of metaphor after only being trained on another class of metaphor. For example, in our metaphorical violence project, metaphors may be classified by the network they were observed on, the grammatical subject or object of the violence metaphor, or the violent word used (hit, attack, beat, etc.).