ALTI is a world-leading unmanned aircraft developer and manufacturing company offers the most advanced VTOL (vertical take-off and land) unmanned aircraft systems available. The company is the largest commercial drone manufacturer in Africa, based in South Africa, manufacturing and developing unmanned VTOL aircrafts since 2009 and exporting the most advanced products for the last 8 years. The ALTI Transition VTOL is the principal product of the company, but now introducing ALTI Reach the'bigger brother' to the Transition, aesthetically and configurationally very similar to the Transition, offering vertical take-off and landing and efficient fixed wing flight performance.

Organizations are increasingly reliant on Machine Learning (ML) models to weigh in on decisions to hire, grant loans, sentence criminals, and release prisoners on parole. While it may seem that limiting the role of humans in such decisions would limit subjective biases, these ML models learn from data that are, in many cases, representative of existing societal biases. Researchers from Boston University and Microsoft have shown that software trained with text collected from Google News reproduced gender biases. When asked to complete the statement "Man is to computer programmer as woman is to [blank]," the trained software responded with "homemaker." Female representation is important in the fields of ML and AI to highlight, interrogate, and correct biases such as the ones implicit in the previous example.

With the many, many uses of AI, we're seeing an increase in researchers, scientists, organisations and start-ups of all kinds looking at ways we can leverage this technology for good. Whilst'high-technology' has become synonymous with high wages, and high investment, there are loads of projects out there applying this technology to poverty reduction. Harnessing the power of AI to help the most desperate in our society is a fantastic way to use it. So, how is this being done? Recognising the causes of poverty is key in looking at how to tackle the problems using technologies.

Drone Con 2018 is on the way, and this event would be covering numerous topics relating to commercial drone industry in South Africa. The conference will also be hosting a Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) class for single day. The world-class speakers, live drone demonstrations will also be a part of the event. The focus relies on education and stimulating the South African commercial drone market. The event will also cover major problematic areas and bring in innovative ideas of the attendees, perform complex operations, share knowledge, experience, failures and success stories.

Season's greetings to the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA) community, our partners and all our supporters who showed interest in how exponential technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the...

This year attendance at NAB 2018 was down on previous years but despite the lower visitor numbers the conference content and exhibition produced the buzz and excitement that NAB is synonymous for. This year's show had a little bit of everything, but the main trends seem to revolve around RGB lighting, large format cameras, and a game changing codec, whilst the conference sessions followed some interesting threads under the umbrella of next-generation technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), immersive media and cyber security. From production to distribution, artificial intelligence has taken the broadcast and filmmaking industries by storm. The 2018 edition of NAB dedicated time and space to showcase some of the developments in AI with conference sessions like "Machine Intelligence: The Evolution of Content Production Aided by Machine Learning", "Optimising Production with Neural Networks", "How Machine Intelligence is Transforming Editorial", "New Frontiers in Animation and Computer Graphics", "From Dailies to Master – Machine Intelligence Comes to Video Workflows" and, finally, "The Future of Content with Machine Intelligence". The series of sessions looked at machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies and at how studios, networks and creative service companies can use them to help produce content.

Once a computer scientist's pipe dream, artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives in the form of voice recognition systems, product recommendation platforms and navigation tools. All of these rely on computer algorithms that process information and solve problems in a way similar to – and sometimes superior to – the human mind. Yet artificial intelligence is doing more than just recommending new restaurants and the best routes to them. It is also changing the way scientists across diverse disciplines are studying the world. Aided by the close proximity of medical researchers, computer scientists, psychologists and more, Stanford researchers are deploying artificial intelligence to map poverty in Africa, find safer alternatives to conventional rechargeable batteries and perhaps even understand our own minds.

Kernel transfer operators, which can be regarded as approximations of transfer operators such as the Perron-Frobenius or Koopman operator in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, are defined in terms of covariance and cross-covariance operators and have been shown to be closely related to the conditional mean embedding framework developed by the machine learning community. The goal of this paper is to show how the dominant eigenfunctions of these operators in combination with gradient-based optimization techniques can be used to detect long-lived coherent patterns in high-dimensional time-series data. The results will be illustrated using video data and a fluid flow example.

South Africa is facing a shortage of data scientists -- a new breed of analytical data experts with the technical skills to solve complex problems. And because they straddle both the business and IT worlds, they're highly sought-after and well paid. The demand for data scientists is being driven by the emergence of big data -- that unwieldy mass of unstructured information that can no longer be ignored and forgotten. It's a potential gold mine for companies -- as long as there's someone who can dig in and unearth the business insights that no one thought to look for before. South African universities like Wits and UCT have introduced data science degrees at the master's level, but this is producing about 40 data scientists a year, far short of the number that the country's banks, insurers, retailers, health companies and telecommunications providers, among others, require.

Taking African languages into the digital and the fourth industrial ages is our responsibility. We cannot just import technology, such as speech recognition machines, but we should adjust them to our particular environments, writes Professor Tshilidzi Marwala. The Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) as well as the author of the book Artificial Intelligence for Rational Decision Making, Prof Marwala recently penned an opinion piece, 'African'clicks' outwit artificial intelligence', published by the Sunday Independent, 13 May 2018. IsiXhosa is an interesting language that has over 9 million speakers. It is a language often associated with clicks.