A couple of years ago, Zipline created a national drone delivery system to ship blood and drugs to remote medical centers in Rwanda. Now it has developed what it claims is the world's swiftest commercial delivery drone, with a top speed of 128 kilometers an hour (a hair shy of 80 miles per hour). Zipline is hoping its new fixed-wing aerial robot, which is both speedier and easier to maintain than its predecessor, will help it win business in an industry that's attracted plenty of big players. They include Amazon, which has been testing its Prime Air drone delivery service for years in the UK and elsewhere, and Project Wing, part of Alphabet's secretive X lab, which is using its drones to deliver pharmaceuticals and burritos in a pilot project in Australia. Soon these and other companies will be able to experiment more in America, too.

Are you a woman interested in Machine Learning and Data Science? We meet to socialize and to discuss machine learning and data science in an informal, vendor-neutral setting. Our purpose is to grow the talent and community of women in these fields. We plan to meet quarterly in the evenings. Topics will include presentations from practitioners about their work in machine learning and data science, talks from academics about their related research, and tutorials.

We've been following Zipline very closely for the last few years. The delivery drone startup has been operating in Rwanda since October of 2016, using small autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to paradrop critical blood products to rural medical clinics. The system is able to get blood from a centralized distribution center to where it's needed in minutes, independent of time of day, traffic, or weather. Zipline now manages 20 percent of rural Rwanda's blood supply, and has flown more than 300,000 kilometers (km) worth of commercial deliveries, carrying some 7,000 units of blood. Today, Zipline is announcing major upgrades to its entire delivery system, introducing a bigger drone that can deliver blood faster and more efficiently than ever.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming popular in multilingual societies. This trend induces portmanteau of South Asian languages with English. The blend of multiple languages as code-mixed data has recently become popular in research communities for various NLP tasks. Code-mixed data consist of anomalies such as grammatical errors and spelling variations. In this paper, we leverage the contextual property of words where the different spelling variation of words share similar context in a large noisy social media text. We capture different variations of words belonging to same context in an unsupervised manner using distributed representations of words. Our experiments reveal that preprocessing of the code-mixed dataset based on our approach improves the performance in state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagging (POS-tagging) and sentiment analysis tasks.

Diamond Bank – Nigeria's fastest growing retail bank – has launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot, leveraging pioneering technology to reach more customers with an enhanced service in Nigeria. The Chatbot named'Ada' uses AI technology to provide a human-like interaction and personalized experience for Diamond Bank customers. As Ada learns from past interactions, Diamond can offer more relevant and timely solutions that are really simple for customers to use. Ada enables transactions such as airtime purchase, bill payments, stock trading, and money transfers all via a social network platform. Already live on Facebook Messenger, the most popular social chat programme, Ada will also be on other messaging platforms in the coming months.

Neil Sahota is an IBM Master Inventor and World Wide Business Development Leader in the company's Watson Group. He works to create solutions powered by Watson, the supercomputer that he helped to develop which famously competed on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Sahota is a big believer in the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the lives of people and the health of the environment, and while technology won't solve all human or ecological problems, it has an important role to play, prompting Mongabay to ask him for an interview. Erik Hoffner for Mongabay: At our conservation tech site Wildtech, we increasingly publish news about how AI and machine learning can be applied to conservation, from using eBird to track songbird populations to applications that can curtail illegal rainforest logging. What are your favorite examples of how AI can aid the environment?

An American military drone strike over the weekend in southern Libya killed a top recruiter and logistics specialist for Al Qaeda's branch in northwest Africa, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, and a senior military official warned of more attacks on extremists there. The military's Africa Command said in a statement that the attack killed two militants, one of whom was identified as Musa Abu Dawud, a high-ranking official in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM. Mr. Dawud trained Qaeda recruits in Libya for strike operations in the region, and provided logistics, money and weapons that enabled the group to threaten and attack American and Western interests, the military statement said. Until now, the Pentagon had focused its counterterrorism strikes in Libya -- eight since President Trump took office -- almost exclusively on Islamic State fighters and operatives farther north. Over several months in 2016, the military conducted nearly 500 airstrikes in the coastal city of Surt to destroy the Islamic State's stronghold there.

INTERNATIONAL - The World Economic Forum predicts that five million jobs will be lost by 2020 as the Fourth Industrial Revolution continues to transform labour markets. Many of the casualties will be repetitive manufacturing and mining tasks and those considered dangerous for humans to perform, but white-collar jobs in banks and other services industries are also under threat. Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) can do these jobs faster and with greater precision than humans could ever hope to, leading to higher productivity and lower costs - the Holy Grail of business. A study by Citi and the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford suggests that two-thirds of jobs in South Africa are at risk of being replaced by robots. We're already seeing South African financial services institutions such as Rand Merchant Bank and Nedbank replace thousands of hours of human labour with robotic process automation, a form of intelligent software automation.

Military officials say no civilians appear to be injured in the strike. A U.S. drone strike killed a "high ranking" official in the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb terror cell in Libya on Saturday, the Pentagon disclosed Wednesday. Musa Abu Dawud was one of two AQIM terrorists killed in the airstrike in southwest Libya near the city of Ubari in the Sahara desert. "Dawud trained AQIM recruits in Libya for attack operations in the region. He provided critical logistics support, funding and weapons to AQIM, enabling the terrorist group to threaten and attack U.S. and Western interests in the region," U.S. military's Africa Command said in a statement.

Many executives in all branches of insurance underestimate the disruption that will occur -- and the new talent that is needed. The disruptive power of digital technologies has spread more slowly across the insurance industry than other financial services. This will not last much longer, and many insurance executives risk being caught by surprise by the drastic changes these advanced technologies will inspire. What kind of change is coming? In life insurance, a U.S. company says it can help companies accept or reject new policies by analyzing selfies to determine an applicant's health. In other examples, advanced analytics can help fine-tune prices and segment customers more accurately; machine learning can present precise cross-selling opportunities; and digital interfaces can support single-event policies and purchases without any interaction with human agents. Indeed, the first waves of disruption have already hit automotive insurance, where claims are being processed using smartphone apps and where online aggregators are leading buyers to the lowest-priced offers from a range of companies.