At the hub of this tech growth is an AI group, iCog Labs, co-founded in 2012 by a young Ethiopian roboticist, Getnet Aseffa Gezaw, and an American AI pioneer, Ben Goertzel. With a team of twenty five Ethiopian software engineers, iCog pursues full-on'Strong Intelligence,' the conviction that computers can potentially emulate the entire human brain, not just aspects of it. The ambitious lab has a bold mission: to create software that not only simulates the brain, but pushes the envelope of what the brain can do. The lab also focuses on a host of practical applications for clients around the world, including humanoid robots for Hanson Robotics, makers of the renowned Robot Einstein; AI-driven automated pill dispensers and elder-care robots for a Chinese company, Telehealth; and mapping the genetics of longevity for two Californian corporations: Age Reversal Incorporated and Stevia First.

It should be settling into senior citizenship, but the 65-year-old festival is reinventing itself this year. The programme has been mixed up by a host of guest curators – ranging from Gus Van Sant to Jim Jarmusch, and Mike Skinner to Apichatpong Weerasethakul. And as well as the usual core of new international features and documentaries, there are envelope-pushing new strands and events. Of the conventional features, highlights include Romain Gavras's awaited feature debut Our Day Will Come, a French skinhead tale that looks as confrontational as his music video work (which plays beforehand). David Hare presents his new MI5 thriller Page Eight, led by Bill Nighy (who'll also be giving an onstage interview); Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle buddy up in Irish cop comedy The Guard; and festival regular David McKenzie returns with apocalyptic art sci-fi Perfect Sense, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green.

Dr Milne, who has already climbed Carstensz Pyramid (Oceania) Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America) and Aconcagua (South America), will be the first mountaineer to use the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system. The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks - not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies. IM-PACs' foundations in artificial intelligence planning technologies supply a framework that encourages a methodological approach to any task and allows users to transmit and respond to information in ways that can adapt to the circumstances the expedition team finds itself in. During his ascent, Dr. Milne will be in regular contact with colleagues in base camp who will monitor his progress against his ascent plan. A laptop computer and satellite phone will allow details of his current status and progress to be sent over the internet to a support team in Edinburgh.

A new Twitter bot shows that not all them are bigots -some just want to make you smile. '@smilevector' was recently unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting predecessor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by turning their frown upside down. Using neural networks, this algorithm can plant unsettling smiles on celebrities with what seems to be impressive accuracy. '@smilevector was unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting processor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by making them smile. Created by Tom White, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in Wellington, New Zealand, this algorithm uses a generative neural net to manipulate faces.

Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe. As much as that data has the potential to provide invaluable information to humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and policymakers, there is too much of it to sift through in order to draw insights that could influence important decisions. A team of researchers from Stanford University, however, says it has developed an efficient way. By creating a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize signs of poverty in satellite images – such as condition of roads – the team sorted through a million images to accurately identify economic conditions in five African countries, reported the scientists in the journal Science on Thursday.

Contact centres have given a big thumbs-down to speech recognition, according to an IVR survey carried out by Call Centre Helper. Only 18% of contact centres (that fronted their calls with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system) used it in combination with speech recognition. The IVR survey was carried out on the Call Centre Helper website in February 2012 and had a total of 425 respondees. This seems to tie in with the latest figures kindly provided by Steve Morrell of ContactBabel from the latest Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide, showing an average of 10% of contact centres using speech recognition. The big problem seems to be the overall accuracy – particularly with regional accents.

The vast brainpower of IBM's supercomputer Watson is to be utilised in Africa to attempt to solve some of the continent's most pressing problems. Better agriculture, education and health are just three of the improvements the system could bring, said the firm. Watson uses artificial intelligence to analyse huge amounts of data and can also understand human language. Experts said such a system could help the African economy "leapfrog" others. The project dubbed, Lucy, after the earliest known human ancestor fossil which was found in east Africa, will cost $100m (£61m) and take 10 years to complete.

Venture Beat covered the closing ceremonies of the third summer session of the Singularity University. Matternet is the most technologically ambitious. In the first phase, it utilizes small-scale electric vehicles deployed with vertical take-off and landing capability, limited payload-bearing capacity and range. In the longer term, we will have a wide range of AAVs suitable for different payload capacity, flying range and weather conditions. Ground stations They create and use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to ferry medicine and other goods to remote places such as rural villages in Africa.

Projects that target aid toward villages and rural areas in the developing world often face time-consuming challenges, even at the most basic level of figuring out where the most appropriate sites are for pilot programs or deployment of new systems such as solar-power for regions that have no access to electricity. Often, even the sizes and locations of villages are poorly mapped, so time-consuming field studies are needed to locate suitable sites. Now, a team of graduate students at MIT and a social-service group of data scientists have come up with a way of automating parts of that evaluation process, by developing software that can identify houses and even types of houses from readily-available satellite imagery -- potentially saving considerable time that would otherwise be spent sending teams from village to village. Their findings have now been published in the journal Big Data. The multidisciplinary team came together in the course of discussions at MIT's Sidney Pacific graduate dormitory, explains team member Brian Spatocco: "We started talking about this problem, and we realized we all had skills that were relevant."

The annual MIT IDEAS Global Challenge awards ceremony awarded $79,500 on Monday night to 13 student-led teams to further develop inventions and ideas intended to solve pressing environmental and health challenges in developing countries. "Today marks an important opportunity for emerging entrepreneurs to take a big leap forward in their journey to improve the quality of life in communities around the world," Keely Swan, the Public Service Center's IDEAS Global Challenge program administrator, said in her welcoming remarks. Launched and run by MIT students, the winning ventures took home prizes of $10,000, $7,500, $5,000, and $1,500, to further support prototyping and field-testing, among other things. CleanData-CleanWater, a $10,000 winner last night, plans to use its earnings to manufacture 1,000 of its sensors, which gather previously unavailable data on water filter usage in developing countries. The sensors fit on a filter's tap and track how long the tap stays up or down, measuring the frequency and duration of use. The company plans to integrate the sensors into a new line of ceramic pot water filters being installed across Ghana by the company Pure Home Water, a previous IDEAS winner.