There are few bigger challenges than trying to solve world poverty. While there are plenty of initiatives going on in this area, one of the most intriguing is being carried out by researchers at Stanford University. Using a combination of satellite data and machine learning, they've developed a "poverty map" of Africa that could help direct aid to some of the world's most deprived areas. "One part of the problem when it comes to dealing with poverty is that we don't have very good data," Neal Jean, a Ph.D student in Machine Learning at Stanford, told Digital Trends. "If we want to help people, but we don't know exactly where they are, that makes it very difficult to do. Traditionally, the way data is collected on poverty is by going out into the field and having people conduct surveys. Our objective in doing this project was to come up with a cost-effective and scalable way of filling in some of these data gaps."

Can FinTech and AI solve the ESG data puzzle?

In this special guest feature, Rob Farber from TechEnablement writes that the Intel Scalable Systems Framework is pushing the boundaries of Machine Learning performance. The challenge of training a machine learning algorithm to accurately solve complex problems requires large amounts of data that greatly increase a system's computational, memory, and network requirements. Meeting this challenge with the right technology mix amplifies the ability of a system to train machine and deep learning neural networks to solve complex pattern recognition tasks. To help customers create systems run deep learning--as well as other HPC, Big Data, and visualization workloads--Intel introduced Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF). It provides a common framework that can support workloads running on everything from small workgroup clusters to the world's largest supercomputers and on-demand cloud computing.

The global economic crisis and increased competition have led to a situation where Indian IT companies have been forced to improve productivity and quote lower prices to win deals. This week, Infosys rubbished reports that it was laying-off 3,500 workers, after losing a key project to implement technology solutions for the Royal Bank of Scotland. While the debacle was triggered by Britain's exit from the European Union, it is important for India to prepare for a scenario where the IT and BPO industries will no more be the major job creators that they were in the past. New recruitment in the IT industry has fallen consistently from 2.35 lakh in 2013, and could be significantly less this fiscal compared to the 2 lakh jobs created in 2015-16. When India was at the cusp of the IT boom, the considerable labour arbitrage was an attractive draw for big companies to shift their back-end operations and low-grade coding, maintenance and testing functions to India.

America's return to manned spaceflight moved a step closer today as US astronauts installed a new'parking space' on the International Space Station. The two Americans, Jeffrey Williams and Kate Rubins, hooked up the docking port in just a few hours. SpaceX delivered this new gateway last month, packed in the trunk of a Dragon cargo capsule. NASA describes the gear as'a metaphorical gateway to a future' that will allow a new generation of US spacecraft - the first since the space shuttle program ended in 2011 - to carry astronauts to the space station. US astronaut Kate Rubins works on the docking port of the International Space Station.The adaptors will work with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon, two spaceships under construction that are planned to ferry astronauts to the space station.

During the 20th century, advances in fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming technology helped make it possible to feed a dramatically growing world population. Now, advocates say, the next big advance in agricultural technology may come from the digital world, as modern computer vision, precision sensors, and machine-learning technology help farmers use last century's advances more efficiently and precisely to grow healthier and tastier food. "We're at the cusp of this next wave of innovation in agriculture, which we call digital agriculture," says Mike Stern, the president of The Climate Corporation. "It has to do with, over the past five to seven years, the farm really digitizing, not unlike how our society has changed in terms of the tools and types of things we can do." The Climate Corp., which was purchased by agriculture giant Monsanto for roughly 1 billion in 2013, is one of several companies working to build a digital analytics hub for farmers, merging images from satellites, drones, and cameras, as well as readings for everything from soil thermometers to tractors' on-board computers.

It is surprising how much ink is spilled on theories that banking is about to be wiped out by a tsunami called fintech, resulting in the alleged mass closure of banks and unemployment of financial services professionals. Last time I was in New York, Wall Street was intact and thriving and specialized financial crime lawyers like myself were busier than ever. First, the law stands in the way of fintech displacing even one dollar of financial services. A fintech company is not a Brooklyn pizza stand – it cannot survive without being connected to the financial system, which requires a banking partner and a banking relationship. In other words, fintech cannot disrupt anything unless the banks and lawyers (as regulators) let them.

China is planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to build the next generation cruise missiles that will be tailor-made for specific combat situations, media reported on Friday. The multi-functional missiles will aid to future combat missions that will require weapons to be both cost-efficient and flexible. "We plan to adopt a'plug and play' approach in the development of new cruise missiles, which will enable our military commanders to tailor-make missiles in accordance with combat conditions and their specific requirements," Wang Changqing of the China Aerospace and Industry Corp told China Daily newspaper. Changqing added that for future combat, modular design based on AI will be a good solution. "Our future cruise missiles will have a very high level of artificial intelligence and automation," he was quoted as saying.

You can get a pretty good idea of a country's wealth by seeing how much it shines at night -- just compare the intense brightness of China and South Korea to the dark mass of North Korea that's sandwiched between them. But nighttime lights don't tell you which neighborhoods or villages within a large region are merely poor and which are home to people living in abject poverty. That's the level of detail policymakers need when they decide where to deploy their economic development programs. You could get that detail by sending legions of survey-takers into crowded slums and sparsely populated rural areas. But that would be hugely time-consuming and cost tens of millions of dollars or more.