Africa has registered impressive economic growth over the past decade and a half, displaying remarkable resilience in the midst of volatility and turmoil in global markets. Time is now ripe for the continent to turn the chapter and embark on a journey towards a major economic transformation. For this, Africa needs a new economic growth model powered by the strength of the real economy, entrepreneurship and innovation. A new report from Intellecap explores the critical role emerging technologies can play in helping Africa address its age-old development challenges and achieve exponential growth over the next decade. They researched and interviewed a range of emerging technology specialists from around the world and experts with deep experience on the social entrepreneurship and impact space in Africa.

The Centre Valbio research station, a modern building of stone and glass set in the jungled hills at the edge of Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park, was starting to look like the third season of The Wire. Big tackboards lined the walls, each one covered with dozens of pinned-up photographs. Some images were grouped together in families, while others floated alone, unconnected. It was 2012, and Rachel Jacobs was using Detective McNulty-style tactics to sort out the associations in a very different kind of crew: the park's population of red-bellied lemurs. A biological anthropologist, Jacobs was studying how color vision evolved in lemurs, which meant keeping track of more than 100 animals.

MEMPHIS -- Amid the confusion and pandemonium that would follow a major earthquake, Memphis-area emergency-response officials plan to deploy drones to check for collapsed buildings and bridges, locate fires and guide rescue crews. Toward that end, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, a Memphis-based agency charged with helping prepare an eight-state region for temblors on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, has begun developing a network of licensed drone pilots to aid in quake-response efforts. This week, CUSEC will convene an initial meeting of prospective participants. "We're going to use their insights into determining how to build this (network)," said Jim Wilkinson, executive director of CUSEC. The use of drones following disasters is not new.

Samsung unveiled Thursday a new octa-core application processor that combines a custom CPU with a gigabit LTE modem and a separate processing unit for security applications, leading to speculation that it could be designed into the new flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone that the company is expected to launch soon. The Exynos 9 Series 8895 is already in mass production and Samsung expects the chip to be designed into smartphones, VR headsets, and automotive infotainment systems. The new processor chipset is the first from Samsung to use the 10-nanometer FinFET process technology that delivers up to 27 percent higher performance while consuming 40 percent less power when compared to earlier 14-nm technology, the company said. The octa-core processor combines four second-generation custom designed main CPU cores from Samsung with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores. It uses Samsung Coherent Interconnect (SCI) technology for cache coherency to deliver a heterogeneous system architecture that enables faster calculations for applications such as artificial intelligence and deep learning, Samsung said.

These days, even when I read news about India's state owned air carrier, as "New AI connectivity between cities X & Y", the first connection my (poor human) brain makes is to'Artificial Intelligence'. Only then it connects to Air India. This is because everyone (in my extended professional circle) is talking of Artificial Intelligence. Though I had done a short elective on AI in my computer engineering days (16 years back), done some basic LISP programming as part of it, had presented a paper on'Genetic Algorithms' in a seminar (again that long ago), and am an avid watcher of Sci-Fi movies around AI (and claim to have understood Matrix the first time I watched it -- with subtitles though, ha!), I realize that my knowledge of what AI is, is no better than a layperson (or worse, since half knowledge is more dangerous). This article is an endeavor to sort of unpack AI (and the associated words like ML -- machine learning, DL -- deep learning) for myself. And publishing it around to benefit others that are in a similar boat. And also to get feedback from others to correct my understanding. Without much dumbing down (or may be with), Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally anything that a computing machine does. Even the basic accountant calculator that does 2 2 4 is'artificial intelligence'. However, we do not consider them as'AI' because of what is called'AI effect' -- When we know'how' a machine does something'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. Tools we take for granted (pick any of your favorite app) are all'AI'. Anything that is'eaten by software' can be considered as Artificial Intelligence. And why is everyone talking about it?

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the launch of its latest premium application processor (AP), the Exynos 9 Series 8895. This is Samsung's first processor chipset to take advantage of the most advanced and industry leading 10-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology with improved 3D transistor structure, which allows up to 27% higher performance while consuming 40% less power when compared to 14nm technology. The new Exynos 9 Series 8895 is the first processor of its kind to embed a gigabit LTE modem that supports five carrier aggregation, or 5CA. It delivers fast and stable data throughput at max.1Gbps (Cat.16) The Exynos 8895 is an octa-core processor, comprising of four of Samsung's 2nd generation custom designed CPU cores for improved performance and power efficiency in addition to four Cortex -A53 cores.

IT is no longer news that Nigeria is in a serious recession with a very high misery index. So, as year 2016 Christmas approached, those living in the country were advised by experts in money management to conserve whatever little funds they had at their disposal. They particularly advised that folks should stay at home, travel less, spend less, cut out on luxury items and save more, as the economic headwinds in the country will continue well into 2017. So, I struggled to convince myself to stay put at home for the Christmas and New Year. However, the allure of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) was too strong for me to resist, thus compelling me to set out for the CES 2017, which is hosted annually in the city of Las Vegas, United States of America.

What can community managers learn from game designers? Game design isn't limited to the video game field. It's also one of the oldest practices in the world, and can teach us a great deal about building online communities. The practice of game design started with tabletop games, dating as far back as 3500 BC in Predynastic Egypt with the game of Senet. The first recorded sport was a footrace from the Olympic Games in 760 BC.

A team of researchers has developed a facial recognition system that can identify individual lemurs in the wild with high levels of accuracy. The plan is to use the technology to help radically improve the way the endangered species is tracked. LemurFaceID proved 97% accurate when comparing the faces of two different lemurs. The animals were named the world's most endangered group of mammals in 2012. The system was developed by a team of lemur experts and computer scientists.

With performance falling, investors fleeing and offices closing, hedge funds had a rough 2016. But San Francisco-based Numerai was just getting started. Instead of relying on the genius of a single person or small team, the firm uses encrypted data sets to crowdsource stock market prediction models built with artificial intelligence from 12,000 anonymous data scientists worldwide who compete to win bitcoin. And if that flew over your head, the main takeaways are that this hedge fund has orders of magnitude more data scientists trying to improve its investing strategy than the biggest name hedge funds today, and what makes the firm possible is a confluence of technologies that didn't even exist a few years ago -- primarily in cryptography and artificial intelligence. Now the one-year-old company, founded by 29-year-old South African Richard Craib (a Forbes 30 Under 30 designee) and funded by the likes of Union Square Ventures, is launching its own cryptocurrency, the Numeraire. It is the first virtual currency issued by a hedge fund and one of the first released by a company (rather than a group of developers or a non-profit).