The Cape Town International Convention Centre hosted Miss Pepper, a humanoid robot capable of detecting human emotions during the recent BIOMIN World Nutrition Forum 2018. Developed by SoftBank Robotics, "Miss Pepper" who is capable of interacting with humans and can adapt her interaction according to a human's emotions, was unveiled during the three-day international conference. According to SoftBank Robotics, the Pepper robot is the "first humanoid robot capable of recognising the principal human emotions and adapting his behaviour to the mood of his interlocutor". Herbert Kneissl, chief marketing officer at Erber AG, the parent company of Biomin, said robotics, artificial intelligence and big data will become an everyday topic in the livestock industry. "She (Miss Pepper) is able to perceive emotions, and what is a conference like the Biomin World Nutrition Forum without emotions? The digital experts of Biomin additionally trained her to be the little star on the stage - to welcome the audience, break the tensions, but in first line to demonstrate that the future of using humanoid robots has started now. "By using Miss Pepper we have the intention to create the image overflow from technological developments of other industries to biotechnology and animal nutrition, an overflow that develops already towards a merger, when we see the modern technologies like Farm 4.0, one of the big topics of this conference," said Kneissl. Miss Pepper is capable of recognising faces, speech, and can hear; she can also identify when someone is experiencing joy, sadness, is surprised and filled with anger. Over and above recognising these emotions, Miss Pepper can also detect tone of voice, smiles, and frowns. Facilitating emerging technologies "At the CTICC, we are committed to facilitating the introduction of emerging technologies such as Miss Pepper to delegates and visitors.

For those keeping count, the world is now entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That's the term coined by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, to describe a time when new technologies blur the physical, digital and biological boundaries of our lives. Every generation confronts the challenges of preparing its kids for an uncertain future. Now, for a world that will be shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and bioengineering, how should society prepare its current students (and tomorrow's workforce)? The popular response, among some education pundits, policymakers and professionals, has been to increase access to STEM and computer science skills.

A new wave of technologies is changing every aspect of human life–from online shopping and scheduling a ride with Uber to completing wells and managing reservoirs. The stuff of science fiction is becoming science fact. The HR Discussion team, via this article, aims to inform young professionals (YPs) about three trends that will change the way we will work in the future. These three trends are introduced in the form of three key questions for YPs. Everything– and everyone–will be measured, recorded, analyzed, and rated.

The SA Innovation Summit as an annual flagship event on the South African Innovation Calendar, is a platform for nurturing, developing and showcasing African innovation, as well as facilitating innovation thought-leadership. Created to support and promote innovation and facilitate collaboration within its own eco-system, the initiative brings together corporates, thought leaders, inventors, entrepreneurs, academia and policy makers to amplify South Africa's renowned competitive edge and to inspire sustained economic growth across the continent of Africa. The outcomes achieved by the Summit, is a powerful platform to bring together thought leaders and accelerate innovation in South Africa, and into the African continent as whole. MIIA ill also be represented at the South African Innovation Summit and invitethe MIIA community to also join the 48-hour hackathon being held in Cape Town Stadium from 5 - 7 September 2017.

New facial recognition technology has identified three immigration cheats at one of America's busiest airports - in just forty days. The trio - who travelled separately during August and September - were intercepted at Washington's Dulles International Airport, which processes more than 21 million people per year. According to a statement by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they were each flagged-up by new software which scans minute differences between the person seeking entry and their passport photo. Impressively, mismatches are identified in as little as two seconds. Most recently, on Monday, a woman arriving on a flight from Accra, Ghana, presented a U.S. passport with a suspect image.

Effective data science is becoming the differentiator between business success and failure, but few have the broad range of skills and expertise needed to deliver on the promise of data science. It is both an art and a science, demanding a range of seemingly disparate skills. Much like a conductor must coordinate and guide a performance to deliver a meaningful final product, the data scientist must apply a range of toolkits and skills to not only interrogate data, but ask meaningful questions that deliver true value, and then ensure the data product drives meaningful business change. These maestros of data science are in short supply. Both globally and in South Africa, forward-thinking enterprises are looking to harness skilled data scientists to drive more than just competitive edge; they need their insights to help companies reinvent, innovate and disrupt into the future.

Many types of data can be represented as graphs. Edges may correspond to actual links in the data (e.g., users connected by some social network) or to levels of similarity induced from the data (e.g., users having liked a large common set of movies). The resulting graph is typically sparse in the sense that the number of edges is much lower than the total number of node pairs, which makes the data hard to exploit. A standard approach to the analysis of sparse graphs consists in embedding the graph in some vectorial space of low dimension, typically much smaller than the number of nodes [15, 19, 4]. Each node is represented by some vector in the embedding space so that close nodes in the graph (linked either directly or through many short paths in the graph) tend to be represented by close vectors in terms of the Euclidian distance.

Read "technology" and "children" in the same sentence, and you'll probably think about screen time or social media. But technology's implications are vastly more profound: AI, machine learning, big data and automation will fundamentally reshape the lives of our youngest generation. How might we direct the power of emerging innovations to fulfill their rights? One trailblazer addressing this question is Erica Kochi, Co-Founder of UNICEF Innovation at the United Nations Children's Fund, who was named one of TIME's most influential people in the world. Erica continues to accelerate action – unveiling a new urban tech bets opportunity just this week – and to drive crucial dialogues as Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Human Rights.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is still relatively new to South Africa, with mainly the major banks moving to deploy it to manage certain repetitive and manual processes. But RPA presents significant promise in many sectors where manual processes delay operations and add costs in a price-sensitive market. The insurance industry is one sector that stands to achieve multiple gains from deploying RPA: through intelligent automation, they can achieve more streamlined processes, improved customer service, lower overheads and reduced risk. RPA is akin to deploying an army of artificial intelligence workers, or bots, to automate processes both in customer-facing and internal functions. From managing invoices and onboarding new customers, to validating data, assessing risk and confirming the market value of insured items, RPA tools can replace human resources; delivering outputs faster and more accurately.

A young mother and her baby visit the local nutrition center in rural Madagascar to participate in a discussion around children's nutrition and learn new cooking recipes that promote a varied diet. Persistent humanitarian crises caused by natural and man-made disasters, oppression and other emergencies have plagued our world as long as time itself. And while global relief organizations scramble to respond to these events, their work by definition is often reactive and difficult to scale. We believe that technology, like artificial intelligence (AI) combined with cloud technology, can be a game changer, helping save more lives, alleviate suffering and restore human dignity by changing the way frontline relief organizations anticipate, predict and better target response efforts. Today, in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly meeting, we are announcing AI for Humanitarian Action, a new $40 million, five-year Microsoft program.