JOHANNESBURG – At first, the drone took some explaining. Anxious villagers buzzed with rumors of a new blood-sucking thing that would fly above their homes. The truth was more practical: A United Nations project would explore whether a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, could deliver HIV test samples more efficiently than land transport in rural Malawi. Once understanding dawned and work began, young students and their teachers would spill out of the nearby school, cheering, each time they heard the drone approaching. "It was very exciting," UNICEF official Judith Sherman said. As drones quickly pick up momentum around the world in everything from military strikes to pizza delivery, Africa, the continent with some of the most entrenched humanitarian crises, hopes the technology will bring progress.

You might not be campaigning to be America's next president, or have any desire to hold such a demanding office (bless you, Hillary), but wouldn't it still be nice to be treated like POTUS when you travel? Or, at least spend a few days in the presidential suite feeling like one of the world's most … Election jokes are i Saturday Night Live' /i s bread and butter, so it should come as no surprise that the cast took aim at Donald Trump's hot mic scandal. But host Lin-Manuel Miranda also got a chance to shine in his opening monologue. Below, we've rounded up the must-see moments from last night's /b … Humans may live longer and longer, but eventually we all grow old and die. This leads to a simple question: Is there an intrinsic maximum limit to human lifespan or not?

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

Humans may live longer and longer, but eventually we all grow old and die. This leads to a simple question: Is there an intrinsic maximum limit to human lifespan or not? There are two equally simple answers. Either there is a limit or there isn't. Soft pretzels are one of the best things to come out of concession stands, but homemade pretzels are a million times better.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or tables, and the simpler the story, the better. The story that has ruled our world in the past few decades is what we might call the Liberal Story. It was a simple and attractive tale, but it is now collapsing, and so far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum. Instead, we get Donald Trump. The Liberal Story says that if we only liberalize and globalize our political and economic systems, we will produce paradise on earth, or at least peace and prosperity for all.

In this latest University of Sydney'Open for Discussion' episode our host Dr Chris Neff speaks with Dr Michael Harre, lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies and artificial intelligence aficionado about where AI really is and how it is affecting our lives. Michael Harre will be appearing at Raise the Bar, Tuesday 18th October. Chris Neff: Welcome to Open for Discussion. Joining me today is Dr Michael Harre from the University's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies. Michael is an artificial intelligence aficionado, try saying that 3 times fast, and lecturer in complex systems. Chris Neff: Can I ask first, what is artificial intelligence and secondly, what got you into artificial intelligence? What was your background, how did you come to this? Ahh.. There's no straight forward answer in the sort of...general definition but usually it's something that runs on a computer that;s trying to do something kinda human like but perhaps not being very..very good at it. Because my understanding is mostly a star trek, star wars aahhhh... Will Smith movies and other kind of.. Dr Michael Harre: Ah yeah there's some great movies out there and the movies out there umm..they portray a combination of robot and ah..robots with some form of human like intelligence but umm..what you see in the robots is a bit more like um..what we think of as human behaviour and sort of expressing our human mind ah..but that's not what we are able to do at all with artificial intelligence yet.

IBM Research is engaged in a research program in symbiotic cognitive computing to investigate how to embed cognitive computing in physical spaces. This article proposes 5 key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing.  We describe how these principles are applied in a particular symbiotic cognitive computing environment and in an illustrative application.  

While the South African market has become more aware of machine learning – as well as its capabilities and the value it can add to a business – machine learning uptake and local industry development lags behind several developed markets (not by months, but years). This is according to DataProphet MD Frans Cronje who highlights that tertiary courses promoting machine learning have only recently become available in South Africa. "It will therefore take time to develop the talent required to'catch up' with competing markets such as the United States," he says. As a subset of artificial intelligence which explores the development of algorithms that learn from available data, machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Having been in the market for more than two years and with a growing team specialising in producing bleeding-edge machine learning solutions, DataProphet is one of the most well-established companies purely focused on developing and implementing machine learning solutions in the country.

The United Nation's Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which last week chose to ban all commercial trade of pangolins, will come to a close today. The pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has been poached to near extinction. Wildlife conservationists hope the ban will help restore the species, which is harvested for meat and scales. But others say trade sanctions aren't enough – that a coordinated effort between governments, businesses, conservationists, and communities will be necessary to save this maligned mammal. "Hopefully this will be followed by increased resources and attention being devoted to saving this well armored – but utterly defensive – and wholly unique species," Jeff Flocken, North American regional director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.

It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being. Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday. The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning. In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.