"The level of growth that AI stands to bring to the UAE's economy is unparalleled. The nation's leaders already understand the impact of this powerful technology, evidenced by the appointment of the first Minister of AI last year. While AI-led growth will be felt across a wide variety of industries, the financial services sector has the most to gain -- which isn't surprising, given that many of its jobs can be significantly augmented with AI and machine learning. In addition, Accenture reports have already shown that banking executives globally are taking action to transform their businesses through the use of AI," said Amr El Saadani, managing director of Accenture's Financial Services practice in the Middle East and Turkey. The report identifies five key strategies for policy makers to consider when looking to implement AI: growing the local talent pipeline using AI; advocating for a code of ethics for AI; becoming the global testbed for social AI; preparing the next generation of workers for the AI future; and minimising the impact of labour market dislocation.

Technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are fashioning how people interact with everything from food to healthcare -- and so, too, for religion. From electronic scriptures to robot priests, different faiths have absorbed new ideas from the world of technology to enhance mainstream religious practices. Other apps automatically adjust fasting times during the month of Ramadan, depending on the location of a device. In fact, Muslims are one of the most plugged-in religious communities due to the high concentration of young people aged between 16 and 30 across the Middle East and Asia. A survey by the Pew Research Center in 2017 showed that poorer Muslim-majority countries boast a large amount of people with smartphones.

The Gauteng department of infrastructure development has launched a programme using drones to monitor the progress of projects across the province. The initiative -- launched in Etwatwa‚ Ekurhuleni‚ on Monday -- uses drones in tandem with the nerve centre of the department‚ called Lutsinga Infrastructure House. It combines human intelligence‚ business intelligence and now also artificial intelligence to ensure that the entire value chain of project delivery is efficient and that projects are delivered in time‚ within cost and at the right quality. "It is possible for the public sector to be efficient and to be productive in what we do and that is exactly what we are demonstrating today. One of the things that we have looked at is that globally infrastructure performance is lagging behind other industries. Therefore over the past two years we've been working hard to introduce efficiencies across the value chain of development‚" said infrastructure development MEC Jacob Mamabolo.

EVERY DAY AROUND 10m people take an Uber. The company has made ride-hailing commonplace in more than 600 cities in 82 countries. But the Volvo XC90 picking its way through traffic on a wintry morning in Pittsburgh is no ordinary Uber. Climb into the back, and you will see a screen mounted between the front seats, showing a digital representation of the world around the car, with other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists highlighted as clusters of blue dots. Tap the screen to say you are ready to leave, and the car starts to move.

When you look at the mammal that is Homo sapiens in the context of geological time, the approximately 200,000 years we have been around is a tiny, tiny amount of time -- less than 0.005 percent of Earth's existence. And yet, so significant has been our species' impact on the planet, that climatologists and geologists have named our era the Anthropocene epoch, because for the first time in the 4.1-billion-year history of life on Earth we humans, as a species, are changing what happens to and on the planet significantly, rather than simply being the observers and subjects of natural forces. In that 200,000 years since Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa and spread across the planet, we have evolved to become a "reasonably smart" apex primate at the top of the food chain in a closed system called planet Earth. You could argue that we're only "reasonably smart" because whilst we are sentient, have consciousness, self-awareness, intellectual capacity, language, moral reasoning, and the ability to create, we haven't yet figured out how to live without degrading our own environment through pollution, overpopulation, overexploitation of natural resources and species extinction. As we celebrate International Biological Diversity Day this month, it's worth taking stock of where humankind finds itself, and what the future holds for the species at the top of the food chain. Humankind's "reasonable smarts" come courtesy of what might be the most amazingly complex thing in the universe: the human brain.

From robotic process automation to machine learning algorithms, many of today's most influential companies are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to drive business results. While most decision makers are aware of the business opportunities that emerging technologies present, many are unprepared simply because they fail to understand them. AI includes a variety of technologies and tools, some that have been around for a long time and others that are relatively new. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: businesses are thinking harder about how to prioritize AI in 2018. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence will jump from $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020.

Have you ever stopped to ask this introspective question on how Artificial Intelligence might impact your career or organisation? I try to do this often because I have come to realise that a number of businesses will become extinct either because AI will affect them negatively or they fail to proactively anticipate the future. A McKinsey report after analysing some cases states, "Artificial intelligence impact will most likely be substantial in marketing and sales as well as supply-chain management and manufacturing." The same report states that "AI has the potential to create trillions of dollars of value across the economy, if business leaders work to understand what it can and cannot do." Looking at this critically, one would wonder how Nigeria's manufacturing industries would be able to compete with their counterparts abroad who are massively adding AI-powered tools and solutions to their production lines.

We propose a new algorithm to learn a one-hidden-layer convolutional neural network where both the convolutional weights and the outputs weights are parameters to be learned. Our algorithm works for a general class of (potentially overlapping) patches, including commonly used structures for computer vision tasks. Our algorithm draws ideas from (1) isotonic regression for learning neural networks and (2) landscape analysis of non-convex matrix factorization problems. We believe these findings may inspire further development in designing provable algorithms for learning neural networks and other complex models.

Artificial intelligence owes a lot of its smarts to Judea Pearl. In the 1980s he led efforts that allowed machines to reason probabilistically. In his latest book, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, he argues that artificial intelligence has been handicapped by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is. Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria.

A drone footage of the Niger ambush that killed four U.S. and five Nigerian soldiers that surfaced recently shows the service personnel desperately trying to escape and fighting for their lives after friendly Nigerien forces mistook them for the enemy. The video shows the harrowing hours of troops holding off their enemy and waiting for rescue. It shows how the soldiers set up a defensive location on the edge of a marsh and wrote letters to their loved ones thinking they were going to die. Pentagon released the video with explanatory narration and it contains more than 10 minutes of drone footage, animation and file tape that was not made public last week when the military released a portion of the final report on the October attack, the Guardian reported. In a failed attempt to target a local ISIS leader, 46 U.S. and Nigerien troops were involved in the initial mission in the West African nation.