I was lucky to be selected to the Square Kilometre Array Big Data Africa School funded by the SKA and the Development of Africa With Radio Astronomy (DARA). It was held in Cape Town, South Africa. Big Data is a cloudy idea. Easy to know when you have it, hard to describe. I like thinking of it as data that is sufficiently large such that it is difficult to draw information from it "easily".

AI assists organisations in reducing operational costs, boosting user experience, elevating efficiency and cultivating revenue. But it also creates a number of security challenges for personal data and forms many ethical dilemmas for organisations. Such challenges for information security professionals mean re-calibration of approaches to data security, data classification and privacy. For regulators, this is translated to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). AI's lifeline is data, and one source of data is the Internet of Things (IoT), which feeds by personal data.

I can't profess to fully understand all of the complexities of localizing services for various languages, nuances, accents and dialects where voice recognition is concerned. However, with Amazon's Alexa ambitions ramping up after its hardware event Thursday, it's worth questioning why the voice assistant's language support is so abysmal. Almost four years after launching, Alexa supports English, French, German and Japanese, with Italian and Spanish on the way. Compare that with Siri, which, within a year of launch, supported all of the above languages, along with Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese -- and some languages were tuned for local differences by that point, too. Apple's voice assistant is now available in 21 languages.

In many parts of the world, mosquitoes are more than just a campsite nuisance -- they carry that cause an estimated 725,000 deaths per year. On Singapore, the effect isn't so terrible -- some mosquitoes carry dengue fever, but it affects less than a dozen people per year. But because it's a city and an island, Singapore is the perfect testing ground to see how easy it might be to get rid of the disease-carrying bugs, all sans gene editing. That's what Alphabet-owned healthcare company Verily hopes to do. The company, along with Singapore's environmental agency, plans to release male mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia, a naturally-occurring bacteria that reduces the bugs' ability to transmit disease and prevents their eggs from hatching.

Listen to the two one after another. Music anymore is digitally recorded and are gust a bunch of 1s and 0s.

INRIX chose its criteria based on a future business model where an autonomous truck powered by electric batteries or diesel-hybrid motors would cross long highway miles and then be taken over by people who would pilot the rigs through crowded cities to the final loading dock or port, said Avery Ash, INRIX's autonomous vehicle director.

The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, "Each generation thinks it invented sex." He was presumably referring to the pride each generation takes in defining its own sexual practices and ethics. But his comment hit the mark in another sense: Every generation has to reinvent sex because the previous generation did a lousy job of teaching it. In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they'll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1

THE TVET EXPERT OF THE WEEK, p18 Madeleine Anne Decker is information and knowledge management specialist for the Canadian Vocational Association/Association canadienne de la formation professionnelle. The Canadian Vocational Association (CVA) was created in 1960 to promote and foster education and training which leads to occupational competence. The CVA is also a world leader in DACUM training, development and research, and Canada's premier voice and expert in competency-based learning and training. Madeleine joined the CVA team in 2011 to increase the visibility by publishing a monthly newsletter and creating two TVET online databases. She added to these tasks the role of community manager by feeding the Association's Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

The following is an interview with Daniel Wagner, ahead of the release of his new book, AI Supremacy: Winning in the Era of Machine Learning. Can you briefly explain the differences between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning? Artificial intelligence (AI) is the overarching science and engineering associated with intelligent algorithms, whether or not they learn from data. However, the definition of intelligence is subject to philosophical debate-even the terms algorithms can be interpreted in a wide context. This is one of the reasons why there is some confusion about what AI is and what is not, because people use the word loosely and have their own definition of what they believe AI is. People should understand AI to be a catch-all term for technology which tends to imply the latest advances in intelligent algorithms, but the context in how the phrase is used determines its meaning, which can vary quite widely. Machine learning (ML) is a subfield of AI that focuses on intelligent algorithms that can learn automatically (without being explicitly programmed) from data.

Facebook begins publicly testing its online-dating product, called Dating, in Colombia today. The service was first announced at the annual F8 conference in May this year, and will likely be available in other locations in the future. For now, users aged 18 and older in Colombia will be able to create dating profiles and, once those reach a critical mass, find some matches. WIRED got to preview an early version of the service, and it looks promising--especially for users looking for meaningful long-term relationships rather than hookups. In other words, you can expect to find exactly zero swiping.