With frequent suicide bombings and assaults on Somalia's hotels and military targets, the armed group al-Shabab continues to threaten stability in the war-ravaged country. The emergence of fighters pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group can only make things worse. After vowing to target "radical Islamic terrorism", US President Donald Trump's administration plans to pursue wider military involvement in Somalia as current strategies, including drone attacks, are not enough, security experts say. Recommendations by the Pentagon sent to the White House would allow US special forces to increase assistance to the Somali National Army and give the US military greater flexibility to launch more preemptive air strikes. "The concern in Washington has been mounting for some time now. The Trump administration is simply reiterating what has been policy, with slight variations," said Rashid Abdi, a Horn of Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Tristan Fletcher, co-founder of London artificial intelligence startup Informed Actions, describes how evolving quantitative approaches are going well beyond finance to advance humanitarian goals in health care. The approaches are being used to improve ambulance services in South Africa and tackle pollution in China. Fletcher was speaking at Newsweek's Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in Capital Markets conference, in London, March 2.

With the growing popularity of chatbots, Facebook (FB) has set out on a bot search mission. The company is calling on IT (information technology) developers in the Middle East and Africa to participate in a challenge that would develop bots for its Messenger app (application). The company has lined up monetary and mentorship rewards for winners and finalists in the bot challenge, which begins later this year. Chatbots are particularly popular among Millennials and Generation Xers. According to Business Insider, 59.0% and 60.0% of US Millennials and Generation Xers, respectively, had tried chatbots as of late 2016.

Join NewVoiceMedia and Call Centre Helper as they discuss the effects of Artificial Intelligence on the contact centre. Artificial Intelligence has been threatening to transform the Contact Centre. But, how much of this talk is hype? And, how much is likely to happen? Could this lead to the decline of contact centres as we know it?

Predator drones will no longer haunt the sky above parts of the Middle East and Africa, though another type of drone will take their place. MQ-1 predators and other military drones have launched hellfire missiles in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other nations. The predator's been around for more than two decades. SEE ALSO: Video of'chubby' tigers taking down a drone may be way darker than you think The reaper drones that will take its place are faster, have better sensors and can carry more explosive power, according to the Defense Department. Reapers have been used in tandem with predators for a decade, but next year predators will give way to their more advanced counterparts entirely, allowing the military to eliminate training costs for the lesser of the two types of drones.

Recent American news events range from horrifying to dystopian, but reading the applications of our fast.ai I was blown away by how many bright, creative, resourceful folks from all over the world are applying deep learning to tackle a variety of meaningful and interesting problems. Their passions range from ending illegal logging, diagnosing malaria in rural Uganda, translating Japanese manga, reducing farmer suicides in India via better loans, making Nigerian fashion recommendations, monitoring patients with Parkinson's disease, and more. Our mission at fast.ai is to make deep learning accessible to people from varied backgrounds outside of elite institutions, who are tackling problems in meaningful but low-resource areas, far from mainstream deep learning research. Our group of selected fellows for Deep Learning Part 2 includes people from Nigeria, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Singapore, Israel, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Poland, Russia, and Turkey.

The village is poor, even by the standards of rural Kenya. To get there, you follow a power line along a series of unmarked roads. Eventually, that power line connects to the school at the center of town, the sole building with electricity. Homesteads fan out into the hilly bramble, connected by rugged paths. There is just one working water tap, requiring many local women to gather water from a pit in jerrycans.

The ocean is essential to the livelihoods and food security of billions of people around the globe. Shipping, tourism, transport, fisheries, oil and gas, renewable energy all depend on the sea. Two years ago, economists put a dollar value on what our oceans are worth and came up with $24 trillion. If it were a country, the sea would be the seventh-largest economy on the planet. "When you look at the blue economy, it has an asset value of $24 trillion and that's delivering something between $4-500bn each year in terms of the dividend to humanity," says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute.

At Piton de la Fournaise on the island of Réunion, every day is like a glimpse of our planet's violent youth: Chunks of boiling lava spew upward like molten fireworks, while rivers of fire cut across an ashen, constantly repaved landscape of gray. Sitting more than 400 miles off Madagascar's eastern coast, the volcano has been grumbling for 530,000 years, producing extremely fluid, basalt-rich lava flows. In modern times, it's been one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, earning its moniker "peak of the furnace." Since the 17th century, the 8,633-foot-tall peak has erupted more than 150 times. It's no surprise that the French-held island's 900,000 inhabitants treat the volcano with caution. But thanks to drone pilot and Your Shot photographer Jonathan Payet, we get to sneak a peek at the furnace in remarkable detail.

Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.