Samsung Electronics is now believed to be upgrading its Bixby artificial intelligence platform following its latest acquisition. The South Korean giant's affiliate has apparently acquired AI search engine startup Kngine. The Investor learned Wednesday that Samsung Research America has acquired a 100-percent stake in Kngine, a startup that develops mobile solutions that understand and answer inquiries with the use of AI including deep learning. The functionality is something that could strengthen Bixby as a whole and set it apart from its rivals, like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Kngine started its operations in 2013 in Egypt.

AI platform Globality is giving small and medium businesses access to broader opportunities. In a post-Brexit, "America First" world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion, and globalization has become something of a dirty word. Since the 1990s, global trade has helped lift over a billion people out of poverty, driven sustained economic growth, lowered consumer prices, and delivered unprecedented freedoms to much of the world's population. Still, middle-income earners have seen their living standards stagnate, while many of the great leaps forward in automation are destroying the jobs of those least able to cope, with vastly greater levels of disruption feared. Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace. Small and medium-sized businesses, which constitute the bulk of the world's economy and drive most job creation, find it more difficult to make valuable connections that can lead to international trade opportunities and contracts with large organizations.

"Just because something works, doesn't mean it can't be improved." She has an innovative spirit and mind, and she wants to take her African nation of Wakanda to a new level. Wakanda is a world in which women play an equal and vital role, and can ascend to any position. Shuri possesses the genius to take vibranium -- the precious metal that fuels Wakanda's technology -- to drive new innovations that keeps this African country more advanced than all others. Technological change and advancement is often the focus of the future.

Technology and automotive companies touting self-driving cars as the future of transportation may have some work to convince San Franciscans, who keep attacking the vehicles. A third of traffic collisions involving autonomous vehicles in 2018 so far featured humans physically confronting the cars, according to data released by California. In one case, a taxi driver exited his cab and slapped the front passenger window of a General Motors Cruise parked behind him. No one was hurt, though the car sustained a scratch. In another case, a pedestrian hurtled across an intersection despite a "do not walk" sign, shouting as he went, and rammed his body into a different Cruise's rear bumper.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive intelligence is being used to transform cyber security and aid security analysts' identity threats more accurately. This is word from global firm IBM, which released results this week from an online survey of 150 federal IT managers familiar with their department's current cyber security capabilities and future strategies. Titled "The Federal Cyber AI IQ Test," the survey found that federal IT managers see cyber security as the single biggest opportunity for AI in the federal government. "Only 21% say they are'very comfortable' with the idea of using AI for cyber security today. Feds are roughly split regarding the ideal adoption pace for AI - 46% want to be first, 48% are afraid to take the risk. "Meanwhile 90% of Feds say AI could help prepare agencies for real-world cyber-attack scenarios and 87% say it would improve the efficiency of the federal cyber security workforce.

Samsung Electronics has acquired a 100% stake in artificial intelligence (AI) startup Kngine, the company announced today. The San Francisco based startup specialises in an AI search engine that understands, answers questions and perform actions. This is the second AI startup acquisition by Samsung in the last four months. In late November 2017, the company had acquired Korean AI startup Fluenty, which also specialises in conversational AI. Set up in 2013 in Egypt, Kngine is an intelligent engine that can be used to automate customer service, power voice interfaces and drive enterprise search.

Talking fast and dreaming big, William Elong shows off the first "made in Cameroon" drone at his sixth-floor workshop in downtown Douala, minutes from the economic capital's Atlantic seafront. The 25-year-old, known as a high-flyer after being named one of Forbes' most promising young Africans under 30, is enthusing about his new unmanned aerial drones and keen to promote his company and Africa as a place where IT and new tech can flourish. We must "get out of the Afro-centric vision of business" to "understand that when one has a global vision, worldwide, this includes Africa," Elong says in a discussion of future technologies. Elong has no degree in IT or robotics but studied strategy and competitive intelligence in France, becoming the youngest-ever graduate from Paris' Economic Warfare School. He founded his startup Will & Brothers in 2015 with a main project called Drone Africa, which aims to provide drones for civil purposes to businesses, the state in Cameroon and elsewhere.

The machine-learned smarts that enable Microsoft's Skype Translator, Bing and Cortana to accomplish tasks such as translating conversations, compiling knowledge and understanding the intent of spoken words are increasingly finding their way into third-party applications that people use every day. These advances in the democratization of artificial intelligence are coming in part from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of 25 tools that allow developers to add features such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, and language understanding to their applications with zero expertise in machine learning. "Cognitive Services is about taking all of the machine learning and AI smarts that we have in this company and exposing them to developers through easy-to-use APIs, so that they don't have to invent the technology themselves," said Mike Seltzer, a principal researcher in the Speech and Dialog Research Group at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington. "In most cases, it takes a ton of time, a ton of data, a ton of expertise, and a ton of compute to build a state-of-the-art machine-learned model," he explained. Take one of the tools that deals with speech recognition, for example.

For many countries, the prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) are thrilling. They conjure up the kinds of innovations we see in science fiction. In Africa, however, the dawn of AI carries with it a fear of falling further behind more-developed economies, rather than the eager anticipation of new technology--the World Economic Forum predicts a net loss of five million jobs to AI worldwide by 2020. But Africa need not dread the age of robotics and automation. Across the continent, from Ghana to Zimbabwe, this technology has the potential to bring myriad positive changes in sectors such as health care and finance, bridging the gap between physical infrastructure inadequacies and consumer demands, while freeing up more time for skilled labor and increased labor productivity.

There isn't much that scares a fully grown African elephant. It turns out that what really scares elephants is something much smaller, although it can fly in large swarms: honeybees. And it makes sense, because an elephant's bulk doesn't do much to protect it from bees, which can find all kinds of unpleasant nooks and crannies to sting. Elephants reliably flee from bees, which has led some communities to create fences made of beehives to keep elephants from raiding their crops. A few years ago, researchers from Duke University brought a quadcopter to Wonga Wongue National Park in Gabon, in West Africa, to develop a system for monitoring African forest elephants. The elephants did not appreciate being monitored by a drone one bit, and would run away from it or even throw dirt at it with their trunks.