Cape Town - The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers exciting opportunities for the retail industry, according to Sven Schoof, head of customer experience at ecommerce fashion website Spree. "The big question is whether AI will become a super convenient feature where we are all lying on the beach while machines do everything for us; or whether machines are taking over and we cannot find the off-switch and it is'game over' for us?" Schoof said at the DHL eCommerce Money Africa conference in Cape Town on Wednesday. "There is currently a lot of debate about whether AI is taking us to the next level or not. Some people are strong opponents, fearing that machines will'take over', while other people are in favour of the use of AI. The best approach is probably somewhere in between."

Then again, even after 19 films in Disney's superhero universe, it's not as if he's had much strong competition. Aside from the puckish Loki and tragic Killmonger, most Marvel villains have been pretty forgettable. Now, after years of build up (we first caught a glimpse of Thanos in 2012's The Avengers) he finally took center stage in this summer's Avengers: Infinity War. But what's most intriguing about Thanos isn't that he wants to wipe out half of life across the universe -- instead, it's that he's a big purple alien who feels genuine emotion. He cries when he's forced to sacrifice Gamora, his adopted daughter.

These artificial cities and towns were built for all kinds of reasons. One example in Russia was dressed up with faux facades for a visit from Putin in 2013, closely following the mold of the Potemkin villages of yore. Some, like China's replica cities, were built by developers to architecturally mimic Western cities like Paris. Others were constructed by the military or self-driving car companies to provide realistic urban environments in which to practice maneuvers or test new tech. "These Potemkin villages are for me an interesting symbol of the sometimes absurd developments of our society," Sailer says, referring to the illusions, fakes, and manipulations that governments and companies employ to maintain and extend their power.

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.

CAIRO – Al-Qaida's chief bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was behind the 2009 Christmas Day plot to down an airliner over Detroit and other foiled aviation-related terror attacks, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Yemeni officials and a tribal leader said Friday. The killing of al-Asiri deals a heavy blow to the group's capabilities in striking western targets and piles pressure on the group that already lost some of its top cadres over the past years in similar drone strikes. A Yemeni security official said that al-Asiri is dead; a tribal leader and an al-Qaida-linked source also said that he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the eastern Yemeni governorate of Marib. The tribal leader said that al-Asiri was struck, along with two or four of his associates, as he stood beside his car. He added that al-Asiri's wife, who hails from the well-known al-Awaleq tribe in the southern governorate of Shabwa, was briefly held months ago by the UAE-backed forces and later released. Al-Qaida itself has remained silent about its top bomb maker.

LaToya Smith was 29 years old when she died from skin cancer. The young doctor had gotten her degree in podiatry from Rosalind Franklin University, in Chicago, just four years prior, and had recently finished a medical mission in Eritrea. But a diagnosis of melanoma in 2010 meant she would work in private practice for only a year before her death. As a black woman, LaToya reflected a stark imbalance in skin-cancer statistics in America. While fair-skinned people are at the highest risk for contracting skin cancer, the mortality rate for African Americans is considerably higher: Their five-year survival rate is 73 percent, compared with 90 percent for white Americans, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

Owning a car means having the freedom to venture at your own pace… it also means a great deal of expenses, and surprisingly a study found that it might be cheaper to Uber in these major cities than to own a car. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has brought Uber back to basics, refocusing on delivering profitable ride-hailing. Uber wants to be more than your first choice for a ride-sharing service: It wants to infiltrate your life, just as Amazon does. The ride-hailing company, now nine years old, is generating revenue growth, and reinvesting that into a variety of expansive ventures – from scooters and bikes to flying taxis. Uber generated $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, up 63 percent from the same period a year ago when revenue was about $1.7 billion.

Deep in the rainforest in a northern corner of the Republic of Congo, some of the most sophisticated monitoring of animal sounds on earth is taking place. Acoustic sensors are collecting large amounts of data around the clock for the Elephant Listening Project. These sensors capture the soundscape in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and adjacent logging areas: chimpanzees, gorillas, forest buffalo, endangered African grey parrots, fruit hitting the ground, blood-sucking insects, chainsaws, engines, human voices, gunshots. But researchers and local land managers who placed them there are listening for one sound in particular -- the calls of elusive forest elephants. Forest elephants are in steep decline; scientists estimate two-thirds of Africa's population has likely been lost to ivory poaching in recent decades. Africa's savannah elephants have also declined by 30 percent over a recent seven-year period, primarily because of poaching, according to results released in 2016 from Paul G. Allen's Great Elephant Census.

Bangassou, Central African Republic - As an IT specialist, Djamaladine Mahamat Salet is used to providing solutions to complex problems. When he discovered there were no high-school classes for the displaced children in his community, he decided to start teaching them basic computer skills. The big challenge was that he would have to do so without electricity, an internet connection, and no laptops. "These children are stuck here due to this conflict," said 38-year-old Salet. "I am trying to prepare these students so that when they can finally go on to university, they will thrive."