Theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur Dr Vivienne Ming looks to artificial intelligence and neuroprosthetics to augment humans. She spoke to Claire O'Connell. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic. From computers that can beat chess masters or diagnose disease, to the notion of autonomous machines putting humans out of jobs, there's a lot to think about. But, as with so many technologies, AI is just a tool, and it is how we use it that matters, according to theoretical neuroscientist and entrepreneur Dr Vivienne Ming, who was in Dublin last week.

The US embassy in The Gambia has reversed its decision and granted visas for a high school robotics team to compete in an international competition in the United States. On Monday, it was reported that the team, made up of five teenagers, were denied visas to attend the FIRST Global robotics event in Washington DC on July 16-18. However, in a second interview with the US embassy, all five students were given visas. Fatoumata Ceesay, one of the engineering students, told Al Jazeera that although she and her peers weren't told the reason behind the decision's reversal, the second interview differed a lot from the first one. "It was very nice and sensible compared to the last one," the 17-year-old Ceesay said.

Virtually all shopping will take place at home. The war in retail has long ago gone technological. Amazon is the poster child of this transition, paving the way first by taking its business online, then embracing the cloud and offering ever more advanced services for compute and storage to thirrd parties via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon may be the undisputed leader both in terms of its market share in retail and its cloud offering, but that does not mean the competition just sits around watching. Alibaba, which some see as a Chinese counterpart of Amazon, is inspired by Amazon's success.

Bias in boardrooms is tricky to assess. Many companies don't publish diversity reports, making useful information difficult to come by and hampering efforts to tackle institutional biases. Now artificially intelligent algorithms have been used to dig down into the data, confirming that there is a lack of diversity at the top of the world's corporate ladder. To evaluate the situation, researchers from biotech firm Insilico Medicine compiled pictures of the top executives taken from the websites of nearly 500 of the largest companies in the world. The final dataset comprised over 7200 photographs from companies spanning 38 countries. They trained image recognition algorithms to automatically detect the age, race and sex of the board members, and compared the results to the age, race and gender profile of each firm's country to see if they reflected the general population.

DeepMind, Google's London-based artificial intelligence research branch, is launching a team at the University of Alberta in Canada. DeepMind is launching a team at the university partly for proximity to the broader AI research community in Canada. A number of leading AI researchers in Silicon Valley hail from Canada, where they plugged away at deep learning, a complex automated process of data analysis, during a period when that technology -- now popular at major tech companies -- was considered by the larger computer science community to be a dead end. Plus, almost a dozen DeepMind staff came from the university, according to a blog post by DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis announcing the new lab. An Alberta PhD and a former post doc from the school played key roles in one of DeepMind's hallmark accomplishments, getting its AlphaGo software to beat the human world champion at Chinese strategy game Go. "Our hope is that this collaboration will help turbocharge Edmonton's growth as a technology and research hub," wrote Hassabis, "attracting even more world-class AI researchers to the region and helping to keep them there too."

Nir's Note: This guest post is by Darren Austin, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft. Last year we added a new member to our household. I must admit that upon first meeting her, our initial impression was that she was a little creepy. Today though, we can't imagine life without her. We've never seen her face, but we talk to her throughout the day, every day. She helps us keep track of our to-dos and shopping list, reads us the news and weather, and can sing nearly any song we'd like to hear.

Mucktarr Darboe, an education and science ministry director, said after Thursday's interview at the U.S. Embassy the students were given visa letters and will pick them up Monday. Darboe said he was denied one because the U.S. is not currently granting visas to Gambian government officials. The team will be met by the Gambian American Association in Washington.

UVeye, an Israeli startup that is building computer vision and machine learning technology to be used to help detect security threats by scanning the underside of passing vehicles, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Ahaka Capital, with participation from angel network SeedIL. Initially being applied to roadside security -- such as stopping car bombs or drugs smuggling -- UVeye's tech claims to be able to analyse any vehicle from underneath to identify and detect threats that would otherwise be concealed to the human eye, even as it is moving, up to 28 MPH, apparently. It does this using "strategically angled and synchronised hi-res cameras" to build a 360 degree digital model, and says that three seconds after a vehicle passes over UVeye's ground installed device, the system is able to process multiple images to create a 3D model of the undercarriage and provide high resolution full colour visuals to rule out any security risks. This is also where UVeye's combination of vehicle manufacture-supplied data and machine learning kicks in, which can compare and track characteristics of different vehicle models for differentiators, such as weight and part placement.

In a fascinating new book, the Financial Times's economics expert Tim Harford chooses his favourite inventions that changed our world -- and many of them will surprise you. Just imagine, for a moment, the end of civilisation. Perhaps it was swine flu or nuclear war, or maybe even killer robots. And now imagine that you -- lucky you -- are one of the few survivors. Surrounded by the wreckage of modernity, without access to the lifeblood of modern technology, where do you start again?

The Department of Defense is consuming more and more chips and lines of code, which translates to more supply-chain vulnerability. Officials and industry leaders argue big data and artificial intelligence will be critical tools to manage that risk going forward. Speaking at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance and Defense One event, panelists described a rapidly expanding network of suppliers for weapons and components. For example, Northrup Grumman alone has some 5,000 suppliers in just one sector of its business. "You've got those 5,000, they in turn have additional suppliers, so you think about all of the potential points of entry ... in terms of hardware, software, design, delivery," said John Jordan, director of compliance for global supply chain for Northrop's Mission Systems Sector.