What a confused hairball of a book. Yet somehow, out of the terrible writing, forests of typo's, vast swaths of formatting errors, splatter-shot jumps of topic (from the minutiae of one company's website to settlement patterns of ancient Madagascar), SOMEHOW out of all the NOISE and IRRELEVANT and DISTRACTING signals, the errors, the garden paths, the red herrings,the level jumps, and general mayhem in this horrific mishmash of a "book", some kind of ... INSIGHT... may begin to organically ... EMERGE... and may contribute to a careful and well-seat-belted reader's useful and possibly even ultimately coherent .... INTUITION ... about Deep Learning.

Over the course of the last few years, Artificial intelligence (AI) has become recognised as one of the keys to solving some of the world's most complex issues - unlocking a level of growth and innovation that has never been seen before. Governments across the globe are now shifting gear, actively designing investment approaches, invectives and discussing regulatory frameworks to help their nations maintain a top spot in this emerging industry. U.S. policy makers and industry are grappling with the challenge of regulating without stifling innovating and the AI opportunity was central focus earlier this year at Davos, as the UK Prime Minister outlined her commitment "to ensure it works for everyone – be that in people's jobs or their daily lives". For all the good that is being touted about AI, there are also some unsavoury reports on the effect AI could have on the current demographic of the workforce, far more imminent than the Hollywood narrative of'robots taking over the world' – if true this could rock women's hard fought and rightful place on the career ladder. This is demonstrated in recent research from PwC, which indicates that women's jobs could be affected by automation over the next decade – with potentially 23% of women's jobs at risk, around 7% more than men. At a crucial time when the world is discussing and designing the way that AI will change the way we work, the higher risk of displacement felt by certain members of society must be made more visible and addressed alongside the serious skills shortage we are seeing in the tech sector amongst women.

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.