When most people picture a drone, they probably either think of military-style behemoths or hobbyist quadcopters. But what if you couldn't tell a drone from something you expect to be in the sky, like a bird? That's the question raised after reports of what appears to be a bird-shaped unmanned aerial vehicle going down in Somalia. The alleged drone looks like it has a crudely welded metal body that would resemble a bird of prey if viewed from the ground. Pictures of the craft were shared on the Twitter account of someone who identifies himself as Adam A. Omar, who said the drone crashed in Mogadishu's Waabari district.

Artificial intelligence is usually associated with futuristic sci-fi movies and the rise of the machines against humanity. What many people don't realise is that it's commonplace today, and something you've probably not noticed has become a critical part of your life. The intelligence Facebook uses to make friends suggestions or how Google photos recognises faces and places are both examples of AI, and machine learning, in action. AI is also being used in organisations worldwide to augment and assist human employees to do their jobs better and smarter. In South Africa, Stellenbosch-based CLEVVA has developed an AI platform that enables companies to rapidly and easily deploy Virtual Advisors across every aspect of their businesses.

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.

The next member of your company's IT team might be a robot. Not the kind you'd typically see working on a factory assembly line, but a software tool that performs multiple digital tasks in an automated way. The market for robotic process automation (RPA), in which a software "robot" replicates the actions of humans such as entering data into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, is slowly emerging as organizations look for ways to improve efficiencies and cut costs. Companies can configure RPA software to capture and interpret the actions of their existing applications used in a variety business processes. Once the software has been "trained" to grasp certain processes, it can automatically manipulate data, communicate with other systems, and process transactions as needed.

Images have emerged of a strange drone shaped like a real bird that was found crashed in Somalia, leading to claims it was being used to spy on targets. The metal bird, which is shaped to mimic a large bird of prey with'feathered' wings, is reported to have been recovered in an area of the capital, Mogadishu. According to local reports, the unmanned vehicle, which has two propellers attached to its wings, may be a surveillance craft used by the Somali intelligence agency, NISA. The drone is reported to have crashed in Mogadishu, Somalia earlier this week. Low quality images show it to resemble a large bird of prey.

Scientists are hoping to use Big Data and machine learning to prevent further outbreaks of Ebola, by identifying the likelihood of various bat species carrying the virus. Ebola is what's known as a filovirus, which are long filament-shaped viruses whose genome is encoded on a single strand of RNA. Ebola is the most famous example, but there are others which are just as deadly, such as the Marburg virus that takes its name from an outbreak in the city of Marburg, Germany, in 1967. Ebola, like Marburg, is spread when people come into direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons. The most infamous outbreak of Ebola occurred just two years ago, in West Africa in 2014, where 11,310 people died from the disease, the World Health Organization says.

A bird-shaped robot crashed in Mogadishu earlier this week. It was covered in dirt and grime, with signs of heavy wear, shoddy construction, or both. The bird-bodied drone looked tired, if it's possible for a machine to look tired. Within hours, observers on Twitter noted that the crashed bird-drone looked a lot like a prototype floated by the U.S. Air Force Research Lab in 2010, though the existence of a U.S. prototype doesn't mean all future designs are derived from it. Local reports associate this drone, which came down on May 1st, with Somalia's National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA).

A team of scientists has developed a model that can predict bat species most likely to transmit Ebola and other filoviruses. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Filoviruses have devastating effects on people and primates, as evidenced by the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For nearly 40 years, preventing spillover events has been hampered by an inability to pinpoint which wildlife species harbor and spread the viruses.

It is no surprise that data analytics and machine learning are fast becoming key components of every innovative company's toolkit, given the massive increase in the amount of data that companies are generating. Because of the sheer volume and complexity of data being created, it is often beyond human capacity to find relevant trends or insights within what has been tagged as'Big Data'. Notably, one of the big differences between machine learning and computer-assisted analysis (where humans are involved) is that the recent breakthroughs in machine learning enable computers to teach themselves how to solve problems. So previously, when humans were directing computers, they were limited to very direct questions and answers (for example, "what is my top selling item?") and required the person using the machine to dictate which method to use to the solve the problem. Now, machine learning enables computers to find answers in ways that are unguided by human intervention.

Many organizations are interested in using the increasingly large amount of data they collect for social good. However, making sense of so much data and then turning those insights into actionable decisions is a difficult task. To streamline this path from data to insights to decisions, organizations in the public and private sector are beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI). AI involves the use of computers to perform complex tasks typically performed by humans. In particular, advances in machine learning--a branch of AI that focuses on designing computer programs that can automatically and iteratively build analytical models from new data without having the solution be explicitly programmed--are helping organizations analyze massive amounts of data to better understand complex problems, predict outcomes, and prescribe solutions.