This week Google South Africa announced major upgrades to its Google Translate function – used in 103 languages by more than 500 million users worldwide. For the first time since Google began in 1998, the Google Translate app will now include full isiZulu, isiXhosa and Kiswahili translation functionality. "Machine learning", Google's artificial intelligence team explained, is also being used to drastically improve existing Google search services. The major announcement, slipped in quite casually at a press conference held at Google's local headquarters in Johannesburg, was included in an explanation of machine learning by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, principal scientist for machine learning and artificial intelligence at Google. Aguera y Arcas steers a research team of 300 who are exploring the possibilities of emerging artificial intelligences.

For about thirty years, data analysis methods have largely demonstrated their effectiveness in the processing of data in many fields. Data reduction is one of these methods and part of the descriptive (or exploratory) statistics. It tries to summarize a sample of data using graphs or numerical characteristics. The main interpretation of data reduction is reducing the number of dimensions. This implies that data reduction is part of the multivariate exploratory statistics which seek to reduce the number of data dimensions by extracting a number of factors, dimensions, clusters, etc., which explain the dispersion of (multidimensional) data.

Instagram believes artificial intelligence could help fight trolls and junk messages. The photo-sharing service debuted Thursday two new tools it said would help it reduce the amount of spam it receives as well block offensive comments that appear on posts and live video. People can choose to have the automatic comment filter on or off. If an out-of-line comment still appears on a certain post with the filter on, people can still report it to Instagram as they would typically do. Instagram said that the comment filter is only available in English, but will debut in other languages at later dates.

Data science and machine learning for domain specific insights are at the core of Alibaba's strategy for global expansions. Apple's iPhone made its debut 10 years ago. Here's a look at how it has impacted business and the enterprise. 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).

Data science and machine learning for domain specific insights are at the core of Alibaba's strategy for global expansions. Apple's iPhone made its debut 10 years ago. Here's a look at how it has impacted business and the enterprise. 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).

In recent years, AI-based applications have increasingly been used in real-world domains. For example, game theory-based decision aids have been successfully deployed in various security settings to protect ports, airports, and wildlife. This article describes our unique problem-to-project educational approach that used games rooted in real-world issues to teach AI concepts to diverse audiences. Specifically, our educational program began by presenting real-world security issues, and progressively introduced complex AI concepts using lectures, interactive exercises, and ultimately hands-on games to promote learning. We describe our experience in applying this approach to several audiences, including students of an urban public high school, university undergraduates, and security domain experts who protect wildlife. We evaluated our approach based on results from the games and participant surveys.

Delegates at Newsweek and International Business Times' data science in capital markets event were mesmerised by a video of shoe box-sized satellites, known as "cube sats" being released into the earth's atmosphere. They were then shown the speeded up footage that was being captured: giant oil tanks with floating lids, rising like tides; ships being built from scratch in dry docks; burning flares from steel mills; a picture of the agricultural yields of the entire planet. Professor David Hand, chief scientific advisor, Winton, introducing the event, pointed out that the current AI summer is characterised by what he called "automatic data capture". He said: "Perhaps even more important than big data, we can now observe what people are doing all the time, like shopping for instance. Heterogeneous data is being produced constantly, as you sit here data about you is being captured by computers."

Next month, the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition will bring together high school teams from around the world. Taking place in Washington, DC, over 150 teams are set to participate. However, while the team from Afghanistan's robot will be there, the team itself won't because the US has denied their visa applications. The team is made up of six teenage girls who traveled over 500 miles to the US embassy in Kabul for their visa interviews. They actually made the trip twice in hopes that another round of interviews would help their case.

It's no secret that our lives have become more sedentary than our stone age ancestors. Exercise improves brain health, inducing the development of new brain cells, but the link between exercise and our brain's extends far back in history. New research suggests that the link between exercise and the brain is a product of our evolutionary history and our past as hunter-gatherers, and the same parts of the brain that are taxed during complex tasks such as foraging also benefit from exercise. Researchers argue that as humans transitioned from a sedentary, apelike existence to a more physically demanding, hunter-gatherer lifestyle about 2 million years ago, we started carrying out foraging tasks, which may explain the connection between the brain and physical activity. Two University of Arizona researchers who run a research program on exercise and the brain have developed an'adaptive capacity model' for understanding, from an evolutionary neuroscience perspective, how physical activity impacts brain structure and function.

Artificial Intelligence gets a bad rap in pop culture. Movies like Terminator (with its rebellious Skynet) and 2001 (with its murderous HAL 9000) portray a future where the robots get smart, and conclude that it is in their interests to try and destroy mankind. But the truth about AI is a lot more mundane, writes Kele Boakgomo, MD: financial services practice at Accenture in South Africa. Most of us use AI every day when we talk and interact with Siri or Google on our phones and AI is why Netflix knows what movies you'll like and what other products you'll want to buy on Amazon. And AI is poised to become a big deal in banking.