In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Madagascar natives as the most endangered mammals on the planet. But a team of researchers have developed a system called LemurFaceID, which uses facial-recognition software to spot lemurs in their natural habitat. "The original inspiration for developing LemurFaceID was a desire to develop a noninvasive tool that would help us ID and track lemurs," Stacey Tecot, University of Arizona assistant professor and senior researcher of the project, told Digital Trends. To minimize invasiveness, Tecot and her colleague, George Washington University's Rachel Jacobs, decided not to capture or tag their subjects, but soon found that such a hands-off approach made collecting sufficient datasets difficult. "I'd explored using dye via a gentle water gun, but didn't get very far with that," Tecot said.

Facial recognition technology used to identify criminals can also identify lemurs with a near perfect level of accuracy. The system, called LemurFaceID, is a facial recognition system that works by identifying individual lemurs based on photographs of them. The system can facilitate the long-term research of known individual lemurs, which could help with understanding how lemurs evolve and how to best conserve them. The LemurFaceID system scored 98.7 per cent accuracy after 100 trials of using the system. Amateur photographers took photos of the lemurs in Ranomafana National Park (RNP), a rainforest in southeastern Madagascar.

AI is about to go mainstream. It will show up in the connected home, in your car, and everywhere else. While it's not as glamorous as the sentient beings that turn on us in futuristic theme parks, the use of AI in fraud detection holds major promise. Keeping fraud at bay is an ever-evolving battle in which both sides, good and bad, are adapting as quickly as possible to determine how to best use AI to their advantage. There are currently three major ways that AI is used to fight fraud, and they correspond to how AI has developed as a field.

This kind of question has been on IQ tests for years and the answer, it turns out, depends a good deal on which era you live in. Back in the down-home, cotton-spinning, 19th century you'd be right in thinking you use dogs to hunt rabbits. Shift forward to the glass-fronted skyscrapers of the 20th century Information Age and there was a new right answer; they are both mammals. But, as humans leapfrog into the 21st century of Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots and machine learning, is there an even newer answer? And if so, what is it?

Boeing Company has announced that it will partner again with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, to host the fourth annual Machine Learning and Data Analytics Symposium (MLDAS) in Qatar. The event, to be held at the Qatar National Convention Centre on March 13 and 14, will feature top global experts discussing the latest solutions in the fields of machine learning, data mining, applied machine learning techniques and data analytics solutions. This year's event will focus on the growing use of deep learning and its potential impacts on the human condition, such as through autonomous vehicles and medical advances. Bernard Dunn, president of Boeing Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said, "Boeing is proud of the partnership with QCRI as we are congregating expertise from around the world to help elevate the already high benchmark being set in Qatar in the field of data analytics and machine learning. "In an increasingly digitised and automated world, bringing together such expertise will only continue to inspire innovation and regional talent." Dr Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director, QCRI, said the symposium had enjoyed an extraordinary response from the scientific community in the past three years and the research institute looked forward to working with Boeing to expand its success. "The event is a huge success for Qatar and the region and we are grateful for the outstanding role that Boeing has played.

It is not every day that young Saudis wander down the street dressed as the Hulk or Doctor Doom. But for three days over the weekend, some 20,000 Saudis decked out in costumes and face paint queued to get into the kingdom's first-ever Comic Con, where robots, video games and giant anime figures filled a tent in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The global comics expo was held under the auspices of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, which has hosted a series of festivals, comedy shows and concerts this year. Saudi Arabia is trying to boost its entertainment sector as part of an economic and social reform drive aimed at creating jobs and weaning the country off its dependence on oil. "The level of entertainment has risen so much from previous years. There used to be no public places like this for families, there was no gender mixing, there was no entertainment, there were no shows," said Modah Al-Bakheet, a Jeddah resident.

John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He spent four years fighting, blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold, until one day the inevitable happened: he was seriously injured, treading on a landmine while he was on morning patrol. "I stepped on it and it exploded," he recalled. "It threw me up and down again – and then I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot." His comrades carried him back to base camp, but there was hardly any medical care available. It took 25 days before he received proper treatment, during which time he developed tetanus down one side of his body.

AI is about to go mainstream. It will show up in the connected home, in your car, and everywhere else. While not as glamorous as sentient beings that turn on us in futuristic theme parks, the use of AI in fraud detection holds major promise. Keeping fraud at bay is an ever-evolving battle where both sides, good and bad, are adapting as quickly as possible to determine how to best use AI to their advantage. There are currently three major ways that AI that is used to fight fraud, corresponding to how AI developed as a field.

February 18, 2017 --Observing lemurs in the jungles of Madagascar is no easy task. "We find the group," explains Stacey Tecot, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's School of Anthropology, "and then we watch them for a little bit, we get our bearings ... and then we start to collect our data." Doing so is an all-day process of recording each individual, more or less continuously. But lemurs typically live in "troops" of up to 15 individuals. To get solid data, Dr. Tecot tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview, "you really have to know that who you're watching is who you think you're watching."

Lual Mayen, a 24-year-old software engineer, is determined to do what he can to bring change to South Sudan, a country ripped apart by civil war. Through the use of board and video games, he wants to promote unity and spread his message of peace throughout the world. "After the conflicts that started in 2013, I saw the horrible effects mass displacement could have with my own eyes. I witnessed it in IDP and refugee camps, but also online," Mayen told Al Jazeera. "These social clubs, both online and offline, were turned into sites for social evils and I could see the conflict brewing among various tribes that were crammed together. I knew that these scenarios could turn political and even physical, with people wanting revenge for what was happening to them."