Africa
White House Releases Limited Data on Civilian Casualties From Drone Strikes
Between 64 and 116 civilians have died in U.S. drone strikes against foreign terrorists in places like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, according to new numbers released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Strikes in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan were not included in these newly released numbers, as the Department of Defense has its own procedures for releasing such information in active U.S. war zones, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday, shortly before the information's release.
Python Developer - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/API - London - July-01-2016 (EnoZq)
Python Developer - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/API Python Developer urgently needed by the fastest growing healthcare startup in Europe for a brand new team building an incredible new product which will be used to predict illness and risk factors for their customers. The Python Developer who join this team will be building their new predictive engine to help them analyse future risk and illness. Data will be taken form a variety of sources like wearables and test results. This will be achieved through a combination of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. There may also be some work on their Back End microservices environment so any API exposure would be a bonus.
AP sources: Obama to reveal civilian deaths from drones
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is expected to disclose as early as Friday the number of civilians killed in U.S. military and CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since he took office and will issue an executive order that makes protecting civilians a more integral part of planning U.S. military operations, according to activists and other individuals familiar with the report. The White House is to disclose the casualties with a range of numbers indicating that an estimated 100 civilians have been inadvertently killed by 500 drone strikes since 2009. The estimate is said to cover drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. It does not cover ones in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria where U.S. forces have conducted thousands of air attacks. The individuals spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to disclose the information.
Missing Data Estimation in High-Dimensional Datasets: A Swarm Intelligence-Deep Neural Network Approach
Leke, Collins, Marwala, Tshilidzi
In this paper, we examine the problem of missing data in high-dimensional datasets by taking into consideration the Missing Completely at Random and Missing at Random mechanisms, as well as the Arbitrary missing pattern. Additionally, this paper employs a methodology based on Deep Learning and Swarm Intelligence algorithms in order to provide reliable estimates for missing data. The deep learning technique is used to extract features from the input data via an unsupervised learning approach by modeling the data distribution based on the input. This deep learning technique is then used as part of the objective function for the swarm intelligence technique in order to estimate the missing data after a supervised fine-tuning phase by minimizing an error function based on the interrelationship and correlation between features in the dataset. The investigated methodology in this paper therefore has longer running times, however, the promising potential outcomes justify the tradeoff. Also, basic knowledge of statistics is presumed.
Three-Word Phrases---anda Map---Can Find Anyone Anywhere Search
According to the UK-based company What3words, I live at offers.reform.curve in Brooklyn. I work for Condé Nast, which has offices in downtown Manhattan at words.artists.names--but Afterward, I'll be drinking at trick.pills.prompting. These little word-salads are cute, but you might be wondering: Why do I need a new address? If you live in the developed world, you probably don't; Google Maps knows where you live, and so does the mail carrier.
Washinton engineers design locust-inspired robotic 'nose' to be used to find terrorists
Dogs may be man's best friend when it comes to sniffing out bombs at airports, but they could one day be replaced by cyborg'insects'. Engineers hope to exploit the locust's incredible sense of smell to create robotic'noses' inspired by the insects that could be used by homeland security officers. The system would be capable of picking out certain smells from a jumble of other scents, just like locusts can do. To come up with a man-made equivalent of the locust's sense of smell, the experts will monitor neural activity from an insect's brain while it's exploring its surroundings and work out how it decodes the smells present As a swarm increases in size, the locusts in it are more likely to stay on course. In a small group, the researchers found that locusts don't really interact.
NLP in the Cloud: Measuring the Quality of NLP APIs
Natural Language Processing seems to have become somewhat of a commodity in recent years. More than a few companies have sprung up that offer basic NLP capabilities through a cloud API. If you'd like to know whether a text carries a positive or negative message, or what people or companies it mentions, you can just send it to one of these black boxes, and receive the answer in less than a second. Superficially, all these NLP APIs look more or less the same. Textrazor, AlchemyAPI, Aylien, MeaningCloud and Lexalytics all offer similar services (named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic identification, etc.), and do so through similar interfaces.
President Obama's militant kill list
Since taking office, President Obama has sent U.S. troops into action on land or in the skies of seven countries on two continents. Obama's administration has authorized Navy SEALs to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and approved the fatal drone strike on an American cleric in Yemen. Here is a look at targeted killings under the Obama administration. Mansour was killed when a drone strike hit his vehicle as he traveled in Baluchistan, Pakistan. Mansour, known for his mercurial leadership, had been in the U.S. military's crosshairs for years.
An Interview with Dr. Vivienne Ming: Digital Disruptor, Scientist, Educator, AI Wizard…
During the recent Consumer Goods Forum global summit here in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Vivienne about some of the issues confronting the digital disruption of this industry sector. [The original transcript has been edited for clarity and space.] Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Every once in a while I have the opportunity to discuss wide-ranging topics with an intellect that stimulates, is passionate and really cares about the bigger picture. Those opportunities are more rare than one would think. Although set in a somewhat unexpected venue (the elite innards of consumer capitalism) her observations on the inescapable disruption that the new wave of modern technologies are prescient and thoughtful. Ed: In a continent where there is a large focus on putting people to work, how do you see the challenges and disruptions resulting from AI, robotics, IoT, VR and other technologies playing out? These technologies, as did other disruptive technologies before them, tend to replace human workers with machine processes. Vivienne: There is almost no domain in which artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation will not have a profound and positive impact. Medicine, farming, transportation, etc. will all benefit. There will be a huge impact on human potential, and human work will change. I think this is inevitable, that we are well on the way to this AI-enabled future.
Why does FIFA still recognise Israeli settlement teams?
This week FIFA's senior representative, Tokyo Sexwale, will throw his hat into the ring as he attempts to resolve disagreements between Israeli and Palestinian football associations. The disputes are over Israeli restrictions placed on the movement of Palestinian players and the participation of at least five Israeli football clubs in Israeli leagues - two issues which Palestinians claim contravene FIFA's own rules. While progress has been achieved on movement for Palestinian players, the issue of settlement teams remains intractable. Their inclusion within Israeli leagues is the manifestation of a political process that seeks to normalise Israel's claim to the Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967. In this context, football has become a tool to legitimise the expanding settlements as an integral part of Israel.