Today, businesses need to be able to predict demand and trends to stay in line with any sudden market changes and economy swings. This is exactly where forecasting tools, powered by Data Science, come into play, enabling organizations to successfully deal with strategic and capacity planning. Smart forecasting techniques can be used to reduce any possible risks and assist in making well-informed decisions. One of our customers, an enterprise from the Middle East, needed to predict their market demand for the upcoming twelve weeks. They required a market forecast to help them set their short-term objectives, such as production strategy, as well as assist in capacity planning and price control.

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

The number one goal in United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 is: eliminate poverty. Today, around 1 billion people, that's roughly one seventh of the world's population, live in extreme poverty by earning less than 1.90$ per day. Though studies reveal that global poverty is reducing, we are still a long way from our goal. To eradicate poverty, we first need the poverty distribution across the globe. The following diagram gives a rough estimate.

Emerging technology may help wildlife officials beat back traffickers. Antipoaching patrols like this team at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya may soon use AI technology to stay one step ahead of criminals. Poachers kill an estimated 96 African elephants every day, causing conservationists to warn that the iconic animals could disappear in our lifetime if the tide doesn't turn. But now scientists hope a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool could help wildlife officials get a leg up against poachers. PAWS, which stands for Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, is a newly developed AI that takes data about previous poaching activities and outputs routes for patrols based on where poaching is likely to occur.

A young elephant was saved from drowning in a manmade structure in a Zimbabwe national park by a team that is using drones to deter poaching. An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park. Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa. During an early morning scouting mission, Air Shepherd drone pilots Tom Lautenbach and Gift Kgadima were driving in Hwange, getting a feel for the land that they have been flying their drones over for the past few weeks.

People listen to the radio as the results of the presidential elections are announced in Kireka, Uganda, in February. Many rural Ugandans don't have Internet access, and the radio is a central source of news -- and platform for citizens' opinions. People listen to the radio as the results of the presidential elections are announced in Kireka, Uganda, in February. Many rural Ugandans don't have Internet access, and the radio is a central source of news -- and platform for citizens' opinions. Its omnipresence can make it easy to forget that making this technology has been really, really hard.

Jason Mars is an African-American professor of computer science who also runs a tech start-up. When his company's artificially intelligent smartphone app talks, he said, it sounds "like a helpful, young Caucasian female." "There's a kind of pressure to conform to the prejudices of the world" when you are trying to make a consumer hit, he said. "It would be interesting to have a black guy talk, but we don't want to create friction, either. First we need to sell products." Mr. Mars's start-up is part of a growing high-tech field called conversational computing.

Drones, initially developed for warfare, are being co-opted to provide revolutionary off-grid healthcare to those who live in the most remote parts of the world. The drone was developed by Vayu, a company founded by Daniel Pepper, which aims to bridge the gap between far-flung villages and healthcare that is so often centrally available, but out of reach for local inhabitants. He recognised it was a major challenge for patients to travel to hospitals because of weather conditions, transport and family traditions there, and so he created Vayu with funds from governments, healthcare organisations and NGOs. Vayu's drones, which took two years to develop, are used to serve and connect rural villages to central hospitals. The company hopes to enable the off-grid villages to diagnose and treat the conditions via drone-delivered test samples and vaccines, preventing unnecessary deaths and illnesses.

We haven't figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it's definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a human host, which ends up being a fatal mistake. When I say fatal, I mean for the virus. After all, Ebola is usually not highly efficient at sustaining infection or transmitting from human to human, and eventually that chain of transmission turns into a dead end. Every Ebola outbreak has ended, even the 2014-2015 West African epidemic.

Data scientists and data engineers, choose their own tools or flavor, work on their own. Learn how Data Science Experience can make data science a team sport, bringing data scientists and data engineers together to make data science and machine learning available to everyone. Presenter: Juergen Schaeck - IBM 2. Telco data stream simulation, processing and visualization Koen will discuss the development of a prototype for processing of data coming from cell towers, executed for a telco operator in the Middle East. The added difficulty was that the customer could not provide real data.In the end he developed a data generator in Scala/Akka, a data processor with Spark Streaming, and a visualization front-end with Node.js. Presenter: Koen Dejonghe - Eurocontrol 3. Hyperparameter Optimization - when scikit-learn meets PySpark Spark is not only useful, when you have big data problems.