Artificial intelligence startup Racetrack.ai said it has secured $5million from a group of high net-worth individuals in a funding round that has valued it at $21 million. "With the fresh capital, we are now looking forward to announce our next overseas operation base in the USA, Mauritius and Singapore," Subrat Parida, founder of Bengaluru-based Racetrack.ai, "We further plan to raise our Series A by the end of this year." The 50-member startup, founded in 2015, offers two flagship products --a chatbot for sales and support, and a business accelerator that helps in better business planning and execution. "This move will help us delve into newer business verticals like retail, banking and healthcare. This boost in our physical presence will open new doors for us to partner with intercontinental brands and decision-makers while helping us to create global footprint in the AI industry," Parida said in a statement.

A recent Chatham House paper on the impact of artificial intelligence on international relations raises the prospect of a "power gap" fuelled by the concentration of AI investment and expertise in the US and China. Looking beyond the strategic rivalry between those technological superpowers, states across the world will seek to deploy emerging technologies, especially AI, because these systems are cheaper and more accessible than the traditional military, financial and economic tools of statecraft. The impacts of emerging technologies are uneven and unpredictable, depending on the specific uses. China and the Western countries writing the programs stand to benefit most from systems that are attuned to anticipate their languages, goals and needs. Consumers in India and other developing countries already complain that their AI assistants are frustrating to use and less helpful than the English-speaking versions.

The first dedicated masters degree program for machine intelligence in Africa is launching in September with backing from tech leaders Google and Facebook. The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), which created the program, says the African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) is crucial so African countries don't get left behind as advancements in machine intelligence rapidly develop. "The lack of MI researchers from Africa means that many opportunities to use MI to create a better and more stable world are being missed," said Moustapha Cissé, founder of the program. He noted Africa is on the lower end of a "technology gap" in the field. This is why the program is called the "African Masters" in machine intelligence, as a branding strategy but also because the challenges they are choosing to focus on in the program will be challenges and insights relevant to Africa.

Wi-Fi) and the second/third/fourth generation (2/3/4G) mobile network, the number of mobile phones, which is 7.74 billion, 103.5 per 100 inhabitants all over the world in 2017, is rising dramatically [1]. Nowadays, mobile phone can not only send voice and text messages, but also easily and conveniently access the Internet which has been recognized as the most revolutionary development of Mobile Internet (M-Internet). Meanwhile, worldwide active mobile-broadband subscriptions in 2017 have increased to 4.22 billion, which is 9.21% higher than that in 2016 [1]. Figure 1 shows the numbers of mobile-cellular telephone and active mobile-broadband subscriptions of the world and main districts from 2010 to 2017. The numbers which are up to the bars are the mobile-cellular telephone or active mobile-broadband subscriptions (million) in the world of the year which increase each year. Under the M-Internet, various kinds of content (image, voice, video, etc.) can be sent and received everywhere and the related applications emerge to satisfy people's requirements, including working, study, daily life, entertainment, education, healthcare, etc. In China, mobile applications giants, i.e., Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, held 78% of M-Internet online time per day in App which was about 2,412 minutes in 2017 [2]. This figure indicates that M-Internet has entered a rapidly growth stage.

Norm Judah is chief technology officer, Microsoft Services. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a transformative impact across every industry. From helping employees at transportation companies predict arrival times or issues that may arise, to predicting toxins in grains of food. It's helping scientists learn how to treat cancer more effectively and farmers are figuring out how to grow more food using fewer natural resources. A 2017 study by PWC calculated global GDP will be 14 percent higher by 2030 as a result of AI adoption, contributing an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy.

"Space is big," wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Adams's assertion comes repeatedly to mind when reading David Sumpter's Outnumbered, which attempts to reckon with the sheer scale of the systems that manage much of our digital lives. It's easy, when faced with the numbers at hand, to succumb to a kind of vertigo: Facebook has two billion users, who make tens of millions of posts every hour.

Territory Manager, Autodesk Africa, Mr. Simon Bromfield, who was in Nigeria for the Autodesk Future Forum, spoke with Emma Okonji on the need for different sectors of the economy to adopt emerging technologies for business growth. What is your view about Nigeria's manufacturing industry? One of the challenges about Nigeria's manufacturing industry is the issue of doing things in silos instead of through collaboration and integration. Everyone wants to control his or her business and they do not want to share ideas with others. Nigerians need to work together to build better projects and that is the secret of global industries because they share ideas and build on existing ideas that are workable.

This paper addresses planning and control of robot motion under uncertainty that is formulated as a continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problem, by developing a topology-guided path integral control method. The path integral control framework, which forms the backbone of the proposed method, re-writes the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation as a statistical inference problem; the resulting inference problem is solved by a sampling procedure that computes the distribution of controlled trajectories around the trajectory by the passive dynamics. For motion control of robots in a highly cluttered environment, however, this sampling can easily be trapped in a local minimum unless the sample size is very large, since the global optimality of local minima depends on the degree of uncertainty. Thus, a homology-embedded sampling-based planner that identifies many (potentially) local-minimum trajectories in different homology classes is developed to aid the sampling process. In combination with a receding-horizon fashion of the optimal control the proposed method produces a dynamically feasible and collision-free motion plans without being trapped in a local minimum. Numerical examples on a synthetic toy problem and on quadrotor control in a complex obstacle field demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

Convolutional neural networks have recently achieved significant breakthroughs in various image classification tasks. However, they are computationally expensive,which can make their feasible mplementation on embedded and low-power devices difficult. In this paper convolutional neural network binarization is implemented on GPU-based platforms for real-time inference on resource constrained devices. In binarized networks, all weights and intermediate computations between layers are quantized to +1 and -1, allowing multiplications and additions to be replaced with bit-wise operations between 32-bit words. This representation completely eliminates the need for floating point multiplications and additions and decreases both the computational load and the memory footprint compared to a full-precision network implemented in floating point, making it well-suited for resource-constrained environments. We compare the performance of our implementation with an equivalent floating point implementation on one desktop and two embedded GPU platforms. Our implementation achieves a maximum speed up of 7. 4X with only 4.4% loss in accuracy compared to a reference implementation.

DAKAR, Senegal – The U.S. military in Africa has taken steps to increase the security of troops on the ground, adding armed drones and armored vehicles and taking a harder look at when American forces go out with local troops, the head of the U.S. Africa Command says. Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser told reporters on Monday the U.S. also has cut the response time needed for medical evacuations -- the result of a broad review in the wake of last year's ambush in Niger that killed four U.S. soldiers and four of their Niger counterparts. "Since that happened, there were significant things to change and learn," Waldhauser said. "We've done a thorough scrub really on every level, whether it's at a tactical level ... or how we conduct business at AFRICOM." A report is due in mid-August on actions taken in response to the findings, Waldhauser said.