LONDON – Drones delivering blood and medicine to rural areas of Tanzania could help to save the lives of many mothers and newborn babies in a country where one of the biggest causes of maternal deaths is blood loss during childbirth, the U.K. aid department said. The Department for International Development (DFID), which has given funding for the trial due to start early next year, said the drone deliveries could assist more than 50,000 births a year in the East African country. The drones will be able to carry up to 1 kg (2 pounds) of medical supplies and reduce delivery times to 19 minutes from the 110 minutes it takes on average by vehicle. "The U.K. is at the forefront of investing in cutting-edge technology to tackle the global challenges of today such as disease pandemics, medical emergencies and disaster responses," said Priti Patel, U.K.'s international development secretary. "This innovative, modern approach ensures we are achieving the best results for the world's poorest people and delivering value for money for British taxpayers," she said in a statement Thursday.

A plethora of networks is being collected in a growing number of fields, including disease transmission, international relations, social interactions, and others. As data streams continue to grow, the complexity associated with these highly multidimensional connectivity data presents novel challenges. In this paper, we focus on the time-varying interconnections among a set of actors in multiple contexts, called layers. Current literature lacks flexible statistical models for dynamic multilayer networks, which can enhance quality in inference and prediction by efficiently borrowing information within each network, across time, and between layers. Motivated by this gap, we develop a Bayesian nonparametric model leveraging latent space representations. Our formulation characterizes the edge probabilities as a function of shared and layer-specific actors positions in a latent space, with these positions changing in time via Gaussian processes. This representation facilitates dimensionality reduction and incorporates different sources of information in the observed data. In addition, we obtain tractable procedures for posterior computation, inference, and prediction. We provide theoretical results on the flexibility of our model. Our methods are tested on simulations and infection studies monitoring dynamic face-to-face contacts among individuals in multiple days, where we perform better than current methods in inference and prediction.

Remark Media's image and video recognition technologies are based on Deep Learning, a type of algorithm-based machine learning that is used to model high-level abstractions in data. In developing its technologies, Remark Media leveraged its extensive KanKan data platform to train its AI with tens of millions of supervised and unsupervised samples, developing models that extract facial features and recognize objects in images or videos such as branded logos, animals, airplanes, license plates, etc., with high precision. The KanKan Data Intelligence Platform is a growing global platform of over 1.3 billion socially active user profiles, over 15 billion posts, more than 10 billion images, and over 50 billion comments and reviews. In addition to providing its technology to Alibaba Cloud, Remark Media will provide its turnkey AI platform as a service to companies or individuals requiring assistance with integrating the technology into their own models. Additional information on this partnership can be found on Alibaba Cloud's website.

The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) have been a discussion point ever since the term was coined back in the 1950s, and it continues to generate both wonder and unease in equal measure. Stories about new applications of AI appear every day. The pace of change is so rapid that we do not have time to adjust to the new normal before the next advancement has been made and reported in the news, which contributes to the feelings of anxiety that this subject can generate. Many news stories focus on the fear of job automation, with some predicting that up to half of jobs will be computerized within the next 20 years. The fear of mechanization has existed since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but new industries and jobs have always previously been created that balance out the ones being disrupted.

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.

Meet YoloData, one of the latest DMV-area data analytics startups promising to make sense of millennials for businesses. The Ashburn, Va.-based startup provides data scientists and business developers with an aggregated data platform focused on how millennials might respond to a business. Co-founder and CEO Bryan Short said the platform collects financial and health data, mostly, from public government sources and a few private partnerships, but it also lets customers import their own private data for individual analysis. In January, the nine-month-old company will close its first round of $500,000 backed mostly by local angel investors who have previously invested in Short's previous ventures, including a few mobile apps. This raise will be used to prep YoloData's technology for beta testing in the spring.

And upon that sand a new God will walk." It may not quite be that bad. But a wall won't keep them out, a new work permit scheme won't stop their freedom of movement. The rise of the robots could be next year's big story. Ever since the Luddites smashed their first loom, mechanisation has been putting people out of work. But the process is speeding up, accelerating all the time and the next wave could be crashing down, near you, soon.

Facebook is warning people about a fake explosion in Bangkok, falsely suggesting that the entire city is at risk. The site has activated its "Safety Check" feature across Thailand's capital. That means that anyone it thinks is in the area will see a message informing them that there has been "an explosion", and encouraging them to mark themselves safe from it. But no such explosion actually happened and the fake alert seems to be the result of changes that the company has made to its Safety Check feature. It appears to have been activated by a minor incident, reported only in the local news, where a man took firecrackers to a government building in an apparent protest.

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.

Check out these smart home startups. A lot of these use AI behind the scene to get smarter over time.