A secret spy plane operated by the US Marshals hunted drug cartel kingpins in Mexico. A military contractor that tracks terrorists in Africa is also flying surveillance aircraft over US cities. In two stories published last week, BuzzFeed News revealed the activities of aircraft that their operators didn't want to discuss. These discoveries came not from tip-offs from anonymous sources, but by training a computer to recognize known spy planes, then setting it loose on large quantities of flight-tracking data compiled by the website Flightradar24. Here's how we did it.

LONDON, July 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A new technique using artificial intelligence to predict where deforestation is most likely to occur could help the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) preserve its shrinking rainforest and cut carbon emissions, researchers have said. Congo's rainforest, the world's second-largest after the Amazon, is under pressure from farms, mines, logging and infrastructure development, scientists say. Protecting forests is widely seen as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce the emissions driving global warming. But conservation efforts in DRC have suffered from a lack of precise data on which areas of the country's vast territory are most at risk of losing their pristine vegetation, said Thomas Maschler, a researcher at the World Resources Institute (WRI). "We don't have fine-grain information on what is actually happening on the ground," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Aramex, the Dubai-based international logistics and transportation company, on Monday launched its new artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot on Facebook Messenger. Named "Aramex Bot", the service enables personalised, scalable conversations with customers about shipment-related queries and different service offerings. "Aramex Bot provides users with a convenient way to easily find Aramex nearest locations, track shipments and share preferred delivery location. It also offers enables customers in the UAE to schedule a delivery for personalised shipments and e-commerce parcels.," "The chatbot service will soon be available to all Aramex customers across the Middle East."

The world around us is changing at a furious pace. It's left many established businesses shaken, with executives questioning their organisations' longevity. To participate in a digital future, business transformation is critical and increasingly urgent. A strategic approach is essential. To help businesses chart the way forward, Accenture has partnered with the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) to provide insight into digital technologies and the future of business. Click Here to view the complete white paper.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. From wacky talking Einsteins to clumsy security'bots, from speedy drones to the underwater operations at Fukushima, it's been another busy month. So let's kick off our July review with a look at robots in action! You'd be forgiven for missing this first one.

Information Technology is a very dynamic discipline which has over the years contributed so much to the way we live. Gone are the days when we used to solely rely on the noisy landlines for communication. Nowadays, we can send text, voice, audio and video data seamlessly using smart phones which most people never ever dreamt of. We are now in the Machine Learning era, which I believe presents lots of opportunities for Zimbabwe. Our society is quickly changing from an industry based society to an information based society.

A friend recently confided in me about his fertility problems. His physician had told him his sperm were small and malformed, to the point that he might struggle to get his wife pregnant. In an effort to make him feel less bad, perhaps, she added that male fertility problems were currently at "epidemic" levels in the UK. Recent articles in several major news outlets told this same worrisome tale. For instance, one BBC headline screamed, "sperm count drop'could make humans extinct'".

Capturing the effects of Low-Probability, High-Impact "Black Swans" in the existing stochastic and deterministic models is tremendously Important. On this page, I would like to share with the members an open access, peer reviewed published research findings of my PhD thesis on how to capture the effects of Low-Probability, High-Impact Events in our existing economic and financial models. I shall begin with the incorporation of fat-tailed effects of the underlying assets probability distribution in the popular LOGIT and PROBIT MODELS. INTRODUCTION The Global financial markets have experienced series of financial and economic crises right from the inception and from generation to generation. Banks, Companies and the world economy experienced catastrophic deterioration and serious corporate failures by systemic risk effect.

The topic of machine learning-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining increasing visibility in the world of investment management. Of particular interest is the application of AI to the development of smarter robo-advisers that some hope, while others fear, will yield'intelligent' and cost-effective investment management advice. This topic was raised by investment professionals during the recent CFA Institute travelling conference that went to Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. AI has also been the subject of a recent European Commission (EC) consultation document, to which CFA Institute submitted a response. For the uninitiated, some quick defining of terms could be helpful.

Both industry and community must develop effective mechanisms to filter bias as well as negative sentiment in the data that AI learns from - ensuring AI does not perpetuate stereotypes. Users build a relationship with AI and start to trust it after just a few meaningful interactions. With trust, comes responsibility and AI needs to be held accountable for its actions and decisions, just like humans. Technology should not be allowed to become too clever to be accountable. We don't accept this kind of behaviour from other'expert' professions, so why should technology be the exception.