I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chilling, the larval stage face-hugger was terrifying. Not only did it penetrate the human host's throat, planting the chest-burster in the gut, but it was intrinsically grotesque, an odious, zoological mash-up of scurrying spider and slithering snake. It's easy to interpret our fears of alien predators as nothing more than superficial horror ginned up by the Hollywood fright machine.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, made his first regional keynote speech at GITEX Technology Week today. Speaking on how an experimental mindset helps drive continuous innovation on a worldwide scale, he highlighted how digital acceleration can create new opportunities and extolled entrepreneurs to work on things that truly differentiate their businesses. At this afternoon's keynote, Dr. Vogels said that the most disruptive businesses in the Middle East are powered in the cloud. Dr. Vogels expressed his excitement to announce that the company is building a presence in the Middle East, which will allow it to harness the power of technology to create a rich featured infrastructure platform for startups and big businesses in the region. Meanwhile, Mike Sutcliff, Group Chief Executive of Accenture Digital at his keynote address highlighted the role technology will play across the private and government sectors.

The ambush in Niger earlier this month that left four U.S. troops dead has been the subject of immense speculation, not only concerning President Trump's public response to the tragedy but also about what actually happened on the ground that day. Asked by Fox News on Capitol Hill if the administration has been forthcoming about the attack, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., replied, "of course not" and added, "it may require a subpoena." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the attack is under investigation. A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigerians, traveled 125 miles north of Niger's capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali, on Oct. 4. U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson was killed when his patrol was ambushed in Niger.

This article proposes a Bayesian nonparametric method for forecasting, imputation, and clustering in sparsely observed, multivariate time series. The method is appropriate for jointly modeling hundreds of time series with widely varying, non-stationary dynamics. Given a collection of $N$ time series, the Bayesian model first partitions them into independent clusters using a Chinese restaurant process prior. Within a cluster, all time series are modeled jointly using a novel "temporally-coupled" extension of the Chinese restaurant process mixture. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are used to obtain samples from the posterior distribution, which are then used to form predictive inferences. We apply the technique to challenging prediction and imputation tasks using seasonal flu data from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating competitive imputation performance and improved forecasting accuracy as compared to several state-of-the art baselines. We also show that the model discovers interpretable clusters in datasets with hundreds of time series using macroeconomic data from the Gapminder Foundation.

Twenty years ago, WIRED made a bold prediction: Cable modems are on the way out. "Things are looking bad for the cable industry: Careful study has shown that nearly the entire cable network would need to be replaced to make it suitable for two-way data traffic, and satellite services have been stealing away cable's television customers at an intolerable rate." Fast-forward to 2017 and ... cable modems are everywhere. Hey, points for journalistic confidence. Listen, predicting the future is thankless and hard and often ill-advised.

Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft flagship action-adventure video game series, is celebrating 10 years since it first hit stores. Altair, Ezio and their assassin friends -- the game characters -- have taken us through important focal points in history like the Italian Renaissance and American Revolution. The latest installment, Assassin's Creed Origins, marks the nineteenth game of this franchise including all spin-off series. A new live-action trailer for this much-awaited game was released Monday, along with a live-action trailer launch for another action behemoth, Call of Duty: WW2. The game hits the shelves after a one-year break between titles and this gap has heightened expectations among hard-core Assassin's Creed fans.

KAMPALA – As the toll rises above 300 from one of the world's deadliest attacks in years, the al-Shabab extremist group has sent a powerful signal that the international focus on extremism can't afford to overlook the African continent. Saturday's truck bombing on a crowded Mogadishu street showed that al-Shabab, targeted for years by U.S. airstrikes and tens of thousands of African Union forces, has once again made a deadly comeback. Pushed from Somalia's capital in recent years, al-Shabab has retreated mostly to rural areas of the country's south, where the fragile central government can't assert its authority and local fiefdoms are in charge. From there, Africa's deadliest Islamic extremist group has continued to plan guerrilla-style attacks like Saturday's truck bombing in the capital, Mogadishu. While demonstrating al-Shabab's resilience in the face of new military offensives by the U.S. and Somalia in recent months, the attack also highlights the shortcomings of U.S. drone strikes in a politically fraught country with a weak military and even weaker police, analysts told The Associated Press.

THE disruption of the financial services industry, which began as a trickle, is quickly turning into a flood as start-ups introduce innovative products and services designed for a new generation of consumers, and the established providers are forced to reinvent themselves. Robo-advice and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which use algorithms and machine learning to do the job of financial advisers, analysts and active fund managers, are expected to grow significantly in the coming decade. It is forecast that robo-advisers could manage about 10% of total global assets under management by 2020, according to a study by BI Intelligence. Gavin Smith, the head of Africa for deVere Acuma, an independent financial advisory firm, says: "Algorithmic trading automatically and immediately adjusts to new developments. Theoretically, robo-advisers should be able to constantly act to perform according to an investment mandate. "There are many advantages to the introduction of robo-advisers and AI into the financial services sector," Smith says. "It brings down fees, speeds up administration and saves time." However, what automated systems lack, he says, is the ability to liaise with you and understand the nuances of your requirements and changing circumstances. "When it comes to understanding your goals, specific circumstances, and blending these with your retirement, tax and estate planning, robo-advisers are nowhere near to replacing good financial advice," Smith says. As a result, some financial services providers are trying to marry the automated and personal approaches in an effort to get the best of both worlds. Last week, Personal Finance highlighted OUTsurance's new investment product, OUTvest, which relies on semi-automated investment advice. Below are four more recent innovations that are likely to contribute to the shake-up of the industry. NMRQL Research, the fintech company co-founded by Michael Jordaan, the former chief executive of First National Bank, this week launched South Africa's first unit trust fund powered by machine learning. The NMRQL SCI Balanced Fund, administered by the Sanlam Collective Investments platform, is a regulation 28-compliant collective investment scheme that invests in a diversified portfolio of domestic and international assets, where the asset allocation and stock selection are systematically managed using machine learning algorithms. The process looks for hidden patterns in underlying big data. These patterns can be exploited to forecast returns across asset classes and markets. Jordaan says: "As humans, we suffer from various cognitive biases.

Fujitsu today announces the addition of nVidia Volta Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence and support deep learning processing on its latest Primergy x86 servers. Available to customers in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa beginning December 2017, select Primegy models are certified for the new-generation of nVidia Tesla V100 GPU accelerators. AI and deep learning computing involves large amounts of raw data and highly demanding compute environments. Fujitsu is rising to this challenge by introducing native deep learning processing capabilities to select Fujitsu Primergy CX and RX server models. To achieve the highest possible levels of system performance, Fujitsu is introducing native support for NVIDIA GPUs via direct connection to the mainboard.