Neil Prakash, an Australian recruiter for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS), was arrested somewhere in the Middle East after surviving drone attacks by the FBI, the New York Times reported Thursday. The 25-year-old, who was linked to militant plots in Australia and had appeared in several ISIS propaganda videos, was believed killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in April. According to the Times, which cited an unnamed senior American military official, Prakash was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year but survived. Another senior U.S. military official reportedly said the former Melbourne resident was arrested some time in the last few weeks by an unidentified Middle Eastern government. Prakash, who converted to Islam from Buddhism and took the name Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, left Australia in 2013 and has been recruiting fighters for ISIS since then.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is booming, with nearly every major player in the enterprise space vying for a foothold. IBM, Amazon, GE, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, SAP, HPE, Verizon--you name it, anybody and everybody, even folks who used to sell hardware--are actively working on and/or want to stake a claim in a piece of the AI pie. What encompasses the AI market? Machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), voice recognition and image processing, application and geography are what we're looking at, with mobile devices and cloud being the enablers. And just what will the AI market be?

Banking and financial-services providers have more data than any other industry at their disposal – it's time to make the most of this, for the benefit of customers themselves. Digital transformation is changing the way banks talk to customers, but forward-looking financial institutions in the region are looking at how they can deploy artificial intelligence and automation to transform the customer experience, says Danny Drew, Avaya's Managing Director for South Africa. When was the last time you actually visited your bank branch? For most people, the answer is likely to be somewhere in between the last time you had to do a major financial transaction, such as applying for a loan or a mortgage, and… you just can't remember. The way consumers interact with banks has fundamentally changed over the past few years as trends like mobile and online banking have become increasingly important.

Earlier in November, Careem launched Dubai's first female chauffeur service for women, called Ameera. When it comes to startup success stories in the UAE, ride-hailing service Careem is undoubtedly in the driving seat. Every week thousands of people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region download the Careem app to their phones and order a car for the first time. Last week, it announced a new partnership with Apple whereby app users can order rides through Siri, the voice command service on iOS. In just about four years, Careem has become a basic tool for those in need of transportation in 25 cities across 10 countries.

American surveillance drones have been flying over the Tunisia-Libya border to tackle threats by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said late Tuesday. He said that the drones will use his country's military bases for Tunisia's benefit. In a local television interview, Essebsi said that the U.S. drones were unarmed and they were flying over the border on Tunisia's request. It remained unclear that whether the aircraft flew across Libyan territory. Last month U.S. government sources told Reuters that American drones have started flying missions into Libya from a Tunisian air base.

Facial recognition software is most commonly known as a tool to help police identify a suspected criminal by using machine learning algorithms to analyze his or her face against a database of thousands or millions of other faces. The larger the database, with a greater variety of facial features, the smarter and more successful the software becomes – effectively learning from its mistakes to improve its accuracy. Now, this type of artificial intelligence is starting to be used in fighting a specific but pervasive type of crime – illegal fishing. Rather than picking out faces, the software tracks the movement of fishing boats to root out illegal behavior. And soon, using a twist on facial recognition, it may be able to recognize when a boat's haul includes endangered and protected fish.

Machine Learning is a subfield of computer science by which computers have the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning is a method used to develop complex models and algorithms that lend themselves to prediction. Machine learning is deployed where the system deals with large scale of data. Deployments of machine learning leads to improved speed and accuracy of the functions performed by the system. Machine learning is majorly deployed for solving classification and regression problems.

I can't run a starship with twenty crew. WESLEY: You've got a great job, Jim. All you have to do is sit back and let the machine do the work. One clear message from the presidential election is that the dream of good factory jobs still resonates in America's rust belt. Despite the push for students to pursue STEM careers or move into the service sector, Americans still want to make stuff.

Robots are taking over your job…and there's nothing you can do. By Amro Zakaria Abdu Human advancement throughout history can largely be credited to our ability to invent machines that increase our productivity and efficiency. Those tools allowed us to overcome the physical limitations of the human body and that of the animals we used, and as a result, territories were conquered, societies reshaped, and the dream of economic prosperity became a reality for millions. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. was a nation of farmers--39 percent of the population earned their livelihood through farming. The tractor was then introduced, resulting in profound changes such as the total replacement of work animals, consolidation of farms as seen in the increase in the average farm size from 60 to 200 hectares by the 1940's. Furthermore, the percentage of the population working in farming dropped to under 2 percent by the end of the century.

Wildlife advocates began testing an advanced system this spring to better identify and apprehend poachers. They say the technology has led to dozens of arrests that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Brian Heath, chief executive of the Mara Conservancy in Kenya, believes expanding the use of the technology throughout Africa could significantly improve anti-poaching efforts. "Our rangers now feel completely disadvantaged and blind without it," Heath said. "They get a huge amount of reassurance by having it and the ability to [better] see and identify people and animals." Heath, in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, relies on a thermal imaging camera that uses artificial intelligence to identify animals and poachers up to a kilometer away.