At first it seemed like director Ryan Coogler was simply listening to cultural kismet when he tapped Kendrick Lamar to put together the companion album to Black Panther. Casting the decade's reigning monarch (butterfly) of complex blackness in popular music logically followed from assembling a royal procession of black actors (among whom even Angela Bassett can sashay in as the Wakandan queen mother and barely steal focus) and a palatial retinue of behind-the-camera black excellence to mount a redefinition of the decade's reining genre of popcorn entertainment, the superhero movie. From Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City onward, Lamar's always represented his own trinity of black superhero, supervillain, and mortal in one person, exiled in a world not of his making. Who else, then, but King Kendrick or, as he's more Afrocentrically dubbed himself, King Kunta, for this epic of imagined African kingship transcending an American cartoon mythos? Who else but Kung Fu Kenny for this action film meant to dropkick historical trauma with a kinetic pivot to utopian possibility?

Valentine's Day is a time to get close to the ones you love. And, just as importantly, not to get close to scammers. The loving feeling that abounds in February, and the sadness it provokes in many single people, are being exploited by fraudsters who use it to steal people's money and infect their computers. Hundreds of millions of fake emails are being sent out that appear as if they are coming from admirers. But if people follow them up they'll just be subject to scams and frauds, or being sent viruses. Bride Amornrat Ruamsin (L), 27, who is a transgender, holds up her five-month-old daughter with her groom Pitchaya Kachainrum (R), 16, during their wedding ceremony organised by a local TV show, in Bangkok, Thailand, February 9, 2018. The ceremony is not legally-binding as Pitchaya in under 17, the legal age for marriage in Thailand.

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The Assassin's Creed series is known for its vast and richly detailed historical environments, and well... lots of murder. What you might not realize is just how much work goes into making these virtual windows into the past somewhat realistic. That's something Ubisoft is aiming to highlight with Assassin's Creed Origins' Discovery Tour. You can think of it as a museum-like experience set within the game's meticulous rendition of ancient Egypt. To turn one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world into a truly useful educational tool.

One of Bill Gates' Arizona-based investment firms, Belmont Partners, just purchased close to 25 thousand acres of land in Tonoph, Arizona for $80 million dollars to develop a "smart city!" Veuer's Chandra Lanier has the story. Bill Gates visiting an agricultural facility in Adama, Ethiopia, that processes, cleans, bags and ships white pea beans, red kidney beans, and chickpeas grown in Ethiopia to European markets. Tech pioneer Bill Gates thinks the U.S. can keep its historically influential role as a global leader. But for a second year in a row, he cautioned that the nation risks losing its geopolitical clout if the Trump administration succeeds in slashing foreign aid, as proposed Monday in a new federal budget that prioritizes a jump in military spending. Last year, the White House tried to reduce foreign aid by one-third, but Congress did not approve the cuts.

Tech giants have made some major strides in advancing facial recognition technology. But a new study, called'Gender Shades,' has found that it may not be working for all users, especially those who aren't white males. A researcher from the MIT Media Lab discovered that popular facial recognition services from Microsoft, IBM and Face vary in accuracy based on gender and race. A researcher from MIT tested popular facial recognition services and found that they experienced more errors when the used was a dark-skinned female. To illustrate this, researcher Joy Buolamwini created a data set using 1,270 photos of parliamentarians from three African nations and three Nordic countries. The faces were selected to represent a broad range of human skin tones, using a labeling system developed by dermatologists, called the Fitzpatrick scale.

Matrix and tensor decomposition is a fundamental technique in machine learning to analyze data represented in the form of multidimensional arrays, which is used in a wide range of applications such as computer vision (Vasilescu and Terzopoulos, 2002, 2007), recommender systems (Symeonidis, 2016), signal processing (Cichocki et al., 2015), and neuroscience (Beckmann and Smith, 2005). The current standard approaches include NMF (nonnegative matrix factorization) (Lee and Seung, 1999, 2001) for matrices and CANDE-COMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition (Harshman, 1970) or Tucker decomposition (Tucker, 1966) for tensors. CP decomposition compresses an input tensor into a sum of rank-one components and Tucker decomposition approximates an input tensor by a core tensor multiplied by matrices. To date, matrix and tensor decomposition has been extensively analyzed and there are a number of variations of such decompositions (Kolda and Bader, 2009), where the common goal is to approximate an given tensor by a smaller number of components, or parameters, in an efficient manner. Despite the recent advances of decomposition techniques, a statistical theory that can systematically define decompositions for any order tensors including vectors and matrices is still under development. Moreover, it is well known that CP and Tucker tensor decompositions include non-convex optimization and the global convergence is not guaranteed. Although there are a number of extensions to transform the problem into convex (Liu et al., 2013; Tomioka and Suzuki, 2013), one needs additional assumptions on data, such as a bounded variance. Here we present a new paradigm of matrix and tensor decomposition, called Legendre decomposition, based on the information geometry (Amari, 2016), which solves the above open problems of matrix and tensor decompositions.

LONDON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - "Chocfinger" made his name and his money by taking bold bets on cocoa markets. But after nearly four decades of trading, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, Anthony Ward threw in the towel. Ward blames the rise of computer-driven funds and high-frequency trading for forcing him and some other well-known commodities investors to close their hedge funds and look for opportunities where machines can't make a difference. It was in January 2016, after a slide in cocoa prices, that Ward decided the days of traditional commodity investors doing well from taking positions based on fundamentals such as supply and demand may be numbered. "It was just too big, too quick, too dramatic. And completely against the fundamentals," Ward told Reuters.

Artificial intelligence is set to swell the GCC and Egypt's economies to the tune of $320 billion by 2030, according to a report. Globally, the economic uplift could be to the magnitude of $15.7 trillion, more than the current output of China and India combined, according to a report by professional services firm PwC. Within that increase, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity, while $9.1 trillion is likely to come from benefits to consumers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a collective term for computer systems that can sense their environment, think, learn, and take action in response to what they are sensing and their objectives. AI is rapidly evolving, with current technology including autopilots, digital assistants and chatbots.

A significant number of South African startups have revolutionized in 2017 and embraced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) related technologies in their software. The list below contains some South African startups that have either potentially disruptive technologies using AI or developed cutting AI solutions. The Cape Town-based startup was established in 2013 by Daniel Schwartzkopff and Francis Cronje. The startup gives consulting and product development services to some industries from law to finance. The startup was founded in 2011 by Dayne, Ryan Falkenberg, and Mark Pederson.