We are excited to announce our next MIIA event that will be hosted by PwC in V&A Waterfront, Cape Town on the 16th of August 2017 at 6pm. The theme of the event is "Data Science Applications to help businesses thrive in the Smart Technology Era" and we have speakers from PwC, Dimago, Cortex Logic and UCT. The Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA) has also recently partnered with the Africa Data Forum and will be participating in the upcoming All Things Data Conference at the Westin, Cape Town on 29-30 August 2017. MIIA has decided to join forces with the Africa Data Science Association and will also have Board representation in this non profit organization that aims to ensure alignment between the academia and corporates on data science curriculum. We are excited to have many of the MIIA community members also participating in the upcoming Deep Learning Indaba at Wits, Johannesburg from 10-15 September 2017.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post.

We have been in touch with the Metropolitan Police Department; they told us that they are doing what they can to find those teens,

When bigwigs like Google and Amazon begin to use the services of a seemingly inconspicuous Indian startup, it may be time to sit up and take notice. Launched around eight years ago, it offers cloud-based communications solutions to businesses in emerging markets. "Our platform uses AI to provide advanced telephony services to businesses," says CEO and founder of Knowlarity, Ambarish Gupta. "It enables them to deliver highly personalised messages to their customers while cutting down overall costs," he added. Headquartered in Singapore, Knowlarity claims that over 15,000 businesses across India, South-east Asia and the Middle East are currently using its services.

Just a year ago, proposing a concept like universal basic income could practically get me laughed off the stage at a tech industry conference. The idea that everyone should be guaranteed a minimum subsidy from the government seemed to go against every fundamental tenet of creative destruction: Don't reward the obsolete! If workers lose their jobs to automation, retrain them for new ones! From the perspective of Silicon Valley's executives, only a hippie or communist would suggest that people be given a livable wage simply for being alive. But to me, having just published a book about the lopsided returns of the digital economy, universal basic income seemed an obvious solution to a problem first posed in the 1950s by the inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener: What would happen when robots could till the fields, rendering human labor obsolete?

The comedian Dara Ó Briain has a funny routine about video games. He talks about how no other form of entertainment purposefully withholds content until it considers that you deserve to see it. There are no books that test you at the end of the chapter to ensure you have appreciated all the themes correctly; films don't end if you fail to spot a visual gag. But this is how most games work. Which makes reviewing a game a very different experience to reviewing a movie or a book.

In this July 17, 2017, photo, the Afghanistan team, left, walks past two of the team members from Burundi, at right in black shirts, during the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge in Washington. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Police have received reports that two of the Burundi teenagers listed as missing after an international robotics competition have been seen crossing the border into Canada. The whereabouts of their fellow team members remains unknown and the search for all the teens remains ongoing, but Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Aquita Brown stressed that police have no indication of foul play in their disappearance. The teens seen crossing into Canada were 16-year-old Don Ingabire and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi, Brown said. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18.

A few years ago, I wrote about a fascinating Italian project to use mobile phone data to predict the onset of bipolar disorder. The notion was that the sensors built into the average smartphone are ideal for picking up on the mood changes users undergo as they occur. For instance, the manic stage of the condition is typified by hyperactivity, which can manifest itself in rapid speech, high levels of movement, and excessive phone usage. People in depressive states, by contrast, tend to show similar behaviors, albeit at the other end of the spectrum. It isn't the only work utilizing AI to help those with bipolar disorder, as a recent paper from the University of Cincinnati outlined an approach to accurately predict treatment outcomes by using AI.

Don Ingabire (L), 16 and Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, members of a teenage robotics team from the African nation of Burundi, who were reported missing after taking part in an international competition and later spotted crossing into Canada, are seen in pictures released by the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. Photo by Metropolitan Police Department via Reuters Two of the six members of the Burundi robotics team, who participated in an international competition this week in Washington, D.C., were seen crossing into Canada and have been reported safe, police confirmed Thursday. D.C. police said they believe the two teens, identified as Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, and Don Ingabire, 16, left for Canada on their own accord, adding that there was no evidence of foul play. Authorities have not released any further details, the Washington Post reported. The other four members, including two 17-year-old girls and two boys aged 17 and 18, are also believed to be safe, authorities said. Police declined to provide further information, the Post reported.