The UK government is to fund a trial of drone-based deliveries of blood and other medical supplies in Tanzania. The goal is to radically reduce the amount of time it takes to send stock to health clinics in the African nation by road or other means. The scheme involves Zipline, a Silicon Valley start-up that began running a similar service in Rwanda in October. Experts praised that initiative but cautioned that "cargo drones" are still of limited use to humanitarian bodies. The Department for International Development (Dfid) has not said how much money will be invested in the Tanzanian effort or for how long.

Despite a century of remarkable labor-saving automation, the fraction of U.S. adults who work at a job has risen almost continuously for the past 125 years. This poses a paradox: our machines increasingly do our work for us: why doesn't that make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? This talk by MIT Economist David Autor addresses the paradox of why there are there still so many jobs. He explains how, even as machines displace rote human activity, they complement human expertise, judgment, and creativity. Autor lays out what this means for the future of work, and for the challenges that automation does--and does not--pose for our society.

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the "sculpting evolution" group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If the residents of Nantucket agree, Esvelt intends to use those tools to rewrite the DNA of white-footed mice to make them immune to the bacteria that cause Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. He and his team would breed the mice in the laboratory and then, as an initial experiment, release them on an uninhabited island. If the number of infected ticks begins to plummet, he would seek permission to repeat the process on Nantucket and on nearby Martha's Vineyard. More than a quarter of Nantucket's residents have been infected with Lyme, which has become one of the most rapidly spreading diseases in the United States. The illness is often accompanied by a red bull's-eye rash, along with fever and chills. When the disease is caught early enough, it can be cured in most cases with a single course of antibiotics. For many people, though, pain and neurological symptoms can persist for years. In communities throughout the Northeast, the fear of ticks has changed the nature of summer itself--few parents these days would permit a child to run barefoot through the grass or wander blithely into the woods. "What if we could wave our hands and make this problem go away?" Esvelt asked the two dozen officials and members of the public who had assembled at the island's police station for his presentation. He explained that white-footed mice are the principal reservoir of Lyme disease, which they pass, through ticks, to humans.

Businesses are beginning to see the benefits of using chatbots for their consumer-facing products, according to a survey by Oracle. The survey included responses from 800 decision makers including chief marketing officers, chief strategy officers, senior marketers, and senior sales executives from France, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK. When asked which emerging technologies they are already using and which they intended to implement, 80% of respondents said they already used or planned to use chatbots by 2020. Chatbots are interactive software platforms that reside in apps, live chat, email, and SMS and can behave in a human-like manner. Additionally, the survey shows that business leaders and decision makers are turning to the broader umbrella of automation technologies, which includes chatbots, for things like sales, marketing, and customer service.

A central problem of random matrix theory is to understand the eigenvalues of spiked random matrix models, in which a prominent eigenvector is planted into a random matrix. These distributions form natural statistical models for principal component analysis (PCA) problems throughout the sciences. Baik, Ben Arous and P\'ech\'e showed that the spiked Wishart ensemble exhibits a sharp phase transition asymptotically: when the signal strength is above a critical threshold, it is possible to detect the presence of a spike based on the top eigenvalue, and below the threshold the top eigenvalue provides no information. Such results form the basis of our understanding of when PCA can detect a low-rank signal in the presence of noise. However, not all the information about the spike is necessarily contained in the spectrum. We study the fundamental limitations of statistical methods, including non-spectral ones. Our results include: I) For the Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA achieves the optimal detection threshold for a variety of benign priors for the spike. We extend previous work on the spherically symmetric and i.i.d. Rademacher priors through an elementary, unified analysis. II) For any non-Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA is always suboptimal for detection. However, a variant of PCA achieves the optimal threshold (for benign priors) by pre-transforming the matrix entries according to a carefully designed function. This approach has been stated before, and we give a rigorous and general analysis. III) For both the Gaussian Wishart ensemble and various synchronization problems over groups, we show that inefficient procedures can work below the threshold where PCA succeeds, whereas no known efficient algorithm achieves this. This conjectural gap between what is statistically possible and what can be done efficiently remains open.

A network of computers fed a large image dataset can learn to recognize specific plant diseases with a high degree of accuracy, potentially paving the way for field-based crop-disease identification using smartphones, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. The technology could have particular benefits for producers in developing countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, who often do not have the research infrastructure or agricultural extension systems to support smallholder farmers, the researchers said. "Global food security is threatened by a number of factors, not the least of which is plant diseases that can reduce yields or even wipe out a crop," said study co-author David Hughes, assistant professor of entomology and biology, College of Agricultural Sciences and Eberly College of Science, Penn State. In addition, Hughes said, plant diseases can have disastrous consequences for smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on healthy crops. In the developing world, more than 80 percent of agricultural production is generated by smallholder farmers, and as many as half of hungry people live in smallholder farming households.

Egyptian fruit bats are widespread throughout Africa and often roost together in colonies of 1,000 or more individuals. With that many neighbors packed together, it's no wonder they're such a noisy bunch. And thanks to some exciting machine learning research from Tel Aviv University, we now understand a bit of what they're saying. The research, published Thursday in the journal, Scientific Reports, explains how they did it. First, the team spent 75 days recording two groups of 11 bats held in separate cages.

Or Meaningless New research offers insights into what gives work meaning -- as well as into common management mistakes that can leave employees feeling that their work is meaningless. GE's Big Bet on Data and Analytics This case study focuses on GE's "industrial internet" strategy. Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future In this report, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte explore how digitally savvy executives are aligning their people, processes, and culture with an eye toward long-term digital success. Data Sharing and Analytics Drive Success with IoT This MIT Sloan Management Review study concluded that obtaining business value from the internet of things depends on companies' willingness to share data with other organizations. Beyond the Hype: The Hard Work Behind Analytics Success This report by MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS found that few companies have a strategic plan for analytics or are executing a strategy for what they hope to achieve with analytics.

Behavioural change is a very tricky thing. We humans are so fickle. We see a bright shiny wearable device that can track our every move and we think it's our "silver bullet", a "ticket" to achieving our health and fitness dreams. Only for guilt to set in, as after a short time, the wearable device winds up in our top drawer. We knew the fitness data was great, but we really didn't know what to do with it. The truth is, behaviour change requires much more than data.

Data science, advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence will be centre stage technologies shaping business in 2017 and beyond. That's according to analyst firm, Gartner, which predicts that enterprise will see "intelligence everywhere" as new software-based systems, which are programmed to learn and adapt, permeate businesses within the next three to five years. As outlined by Gartner vice president and fellow, David Cearley, these intelligent trends will intertwine to form a'digital mesh', blurring physical and digital workspaces. Artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced machine learning (ML) are intelligent machines that can understand, learn and operate autonomously. "Applied AI and ML give rise to a spectrum of intelligent implementations, including physical devices such as robots, autonomous vehicles and apps and services such as virtual personal assistants and smart advisors," Cearley said.