Assassin's Creed Origins is due out later this month, taking players to Cleopatra's Egypt and revisiting one of the most fascinating and mysterious times in the history of the human race. Developer Ubisoft, having spent time exploring and researching this period of history realised that there is still much we don't know or understand about it, including the mysteries of one of humanities oldest written languages – hieroglyphics. That's why, with the aid of Google's TensorFlow technology, Ubisoft has set up The Hieroglyphics Initiative. The idea is, with the collaboration with Google, that machine learning could help to look through the imagery and research from history and using object identification to identify all the individual differences in each hieroglyph. To do that, however, Ubisoft and google need help.

If you worked for a startup in the 1990s, chances were you were figuring out how to make money on the brand spankin' new World Wide Web. Leap forward 10 years, and the typical startup was all about apps on your smartphone, to do everything from touching up selfies, to booking flights, to getting your laundry picked up. Now, we're in the decade of the startup launched to remake transportation--the electric cars, ride sharing networks, and personal flying machines that will transform the way people get around. Lyft, formed in 2012, joined Uber and others in persuading people that's it's fine to get into strangers' cars. Zipline started national drone delivery networks, dropping medical supplies in Rwanda and Tanzania. Tesla made electric propulsion, once the province of eco-warriors, fast and cool.

With the final war of the Roman Republic brewing, the period has proven hugely influential in fine art, theatre and film, from Shakespeare to Hollywood. But later this year it may be subject to its most rigorous investigation yet: a video game. Out at the end of October, Assassin's Creed: Origins, follows the story of Bayek, a military officer looking to protect his people as Julius Caesar's Roman army threatens invasion. The game is set to feature a vast open-world recreation of ancient Egypt, featuring several cities as well as stretches of wilderness and ocean. As with all titles in the series, historical events and figures are set to figure, but this time, the gargantuan project isn't just about the game – Ubisoft has more ambitious plans for its rich simulation.

Some film memorabilia fetches millions of pounds at auction, but it can cost nothing to start a collection. A life-size replica of the Joker, as played by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film Batman, leers down from a podium. His plum-coloured suit is unmistakable in its sinister glory. A few metres away, a mannequin sports a coral and maroon-hued cowboy outfit that looks like it's seen better days. It once belonged to fictional character Marty McFly and was worn by Michael J Fox in the 1990 film Back to the Future Part III.

African Business Review: Tell me a little about your role with Econet Wireless Zimbabwe. I have extensive experience in IT networks, telecom services, and the financial technology space, now exploring artificial intelligence to add value to myself and add to my skills, as machine learning is the future of every business and technology of today. I sit in a very key position to oversee the entire changing landscape of the financial IT i.e. fintech services sector. In our previous issue of African Business Review, you discussed the challenge that banking and financial organisations face in trying to keep costs low while ensuring the same high quality of services - is this still the case? Keeping costs low is the prime idea, as this is a low margin business for low value transactions, if the cost at any time starts looking north, customers immediately start running south.

Active Edge feature - Start Google Assistant by squeezing sides of the phone (Hi HTC!), works even when the phone is in a case. Now playing feature - Music identified with machine learning. "Google Assistant works with over 1,000 smart home products from over 100 brands." Google Home compatible with find my phone with Android even when the device is silent (and iPhone, with a phone call). "An assistant can only be useful if it knows who you are." "Made by Google products represent the ultimate Google experience" Google Home can pick up voices in a noisy room, Google Wi-Fi picks up connections as people move devices through rooms, Pixel revolutionized end to end photo experience for users.

David Fletcher was born in England in 1952. On leaving school he studied production engineering for five years then jumped on an aircraft bound for New Zealand where he's lived ever since. He was employed as an illustrator and cartoonist by New Zealand's largest daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, for three years, but for the last thirty years he's been pretending to work from home as a comic strip artist. He draws two daily strips called The Politician and Crumb the Blackbird, also several weekly strips. His cartoons are syndicated to Europe, Britain, US, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Why? What could possibly have motivated Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant, to open fire from a balcony above a Las Vegas music festival, killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500? Police found 23 guns in Paddock's hotel room, but have not discovered any connection to international terrorism, despite a claim of involvement from so-called Islamic State. President Donald Trump described the act as "pure evil" and some investigators say there is reason to believe the gunman, 64, had a history of psychological problems. Meanwhile, searches have uncovered explosives at Paddock's home in a retirement community in the small town of Mesquite, north east of Las Vegas. There is a second house in northern Nevada which Swat teams are due to check for booby-traps before carrying out a search. The authorities have yet to confirm the identities of any of the people killed, but Jordan McIldoon, 23, from British Columbia in Canada, has been named as a victim of the attack by CBC News.

Current remote sensing image classification problems have to deal with an unprecedented amount of heterogeneous and complex data sources. Upcoming missions will soon provide large data streams that will make land cover/use classification difficult. Machine learning classifiers can help at this, and many methods are currently available. A popular kernel classifier is the Gaussian process classifier (GPC), since it approaches the classification problem with a solid probabilistic treatment, thus yielding confidence intervals for the predictions as well as very competitive results to state-of-the-art neural networks and support vector machines. However, its computational cost is prohibitive for large scale applications, and constitutes the main obstacle precluding wide adoption. This paper tackles this problem by introducing two novel efficient methodologies for Gaussian Process (GP) classification. We first include the standard random Fourier features approximation into GPC, which largely decreases its computational cost and permits large scale remote sensing image classification. In addition, we propose a model which avoids randomly sampling a number of Fourier frequencies, and alternatively learns the optimal ones within a variational Bayes approach. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated in complex problems of cloud detection from multispectral imagery and infrared sounding data. Excellent empirical results support the proposal in both computational cost and accuracy.

Listen, you're kinda spooked about the rise of artificial intelligence, and I get that. It's a tremendously powerful technology that promises to transform the very nature of work, inevitably leading to the automation of certain white-collar jobs. But AI also promises to make human labor smarter and more efficient, even something as traditional as small-scale farming. To that end, researchers have developed a smartphone-based program that can automatically detect diseases in the cassava plant--the most widely grown root crop on Earth--with darn near 100 percent accuracy. The most impressive bit about the technology is that the neural network that powers it runs entirely on the smartphone, no cloud computing or hulking processors required, as the researchers detail in a preprint paper to be published in Frontiers in Plant Science.