Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey--except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same. A new paper from a team at Stanford, published last week in Science, applies a trendy technique to this tricky problem. In order to make night lights more discerning, engineers and computer scientists fed a convolutional neural net--a standard type of artificial intelligence program--a series of data sets.

Are we ready for Ultron type intelligence? This is part of our special series on Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you are catching it for the first time I'd recommend that you start here for some instrumental background and here where I start building the bigger idea behind AI. In my high school years, I remember a brilliant classmate, Matthew (not quite his real name), who got the necessary points at Advanced Level to study law at a local university. I was proud to see him not long ago appearing in newspapers as a commanding Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer.

Can we use big data and artificial intelligence to foster future financial success in today's African youth? Having started with a series of surveys to understand practical behaviours throughout one's childhood that correlate with financial success, Yassi currently leads this initiative across Africa focusing on the creation of personalised data-led mechanisms to nurture those behaviours. Embedding new solutions amongst African youth in underprivileged communities, she will monitor whether via data and AI-enabled technologies such as chatbots, one can influence and maintain their existing drive and ambitions throughout their critical adolescent years. SXSW reserves the right to restrict access to or availability of comments related to PanelPicker proposals that it considers objectionable.

Apple wants you to know it already does great AI -- but it's'subtle' South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Polly.ai

Apple wants you to know it already does great AI -- but it's'subtle' South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Polly.ai

Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe. As much as that data has the potential to provide invaluable information to humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and policymakers, there is too much of it to sift through in order to draw insights that could influence important decisions. A team of researchers from Stanford University, however, says it has developed an efficient way. By creating a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize signs of poverty in satellite images – such as condition of roads – the team sorted through a million images to accurately identify economic conditions in five African countries, reported the scientists in the journal Science on Thursday.

Google is using AI to compress photos, just like on HBO's Silicon Valley Ai Weiwei Thinks'Sluggish' German Mentality Is to Blame for the Chris Dercon Controversy in Berlin South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing

Google is using AI to compress photos, just like on HBO's Silicon Valley South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing

Google is using AI to compress photos, just like on HBO's Silicon Valley South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Artificial intelligence start-up Octo.ai raises 200000

South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Artificial intelligence start-up Octo.ai raises 200000