The Pepper robot looks up at a delegate at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Thursday 24 May, 2018. Billionaire Masayoshi Son is facing a tough challenge in growing his robotics business in Europe. His conglomerate Softbank bought French robot maker Aldebaran in 2013 for $100 million. Two years later it released a waist-high robot named Pepper. With a high-pitched voice and doe-eyed, friendly gaze that follow's your own as you move around it, Pepper exudes cuteness, building off Aldebaran's expertise in building machines that can pick up on human emotions.

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen. My lecturer is a full-time Applied Math and CS professor at the Technical University of Denmark, in which his research areas are logic and artificial, focusing primarily on the use of logic to model human-like planning, reasoning and problem solving.

An attendee inspects a P20 Pro smartphone, manufactured by Huawei Technologies Co., during its unveiling in Paris, France, on Tuesday, March 21, 2018. AI is rapidly changing the way we think about photography. Just a couple of years from now, most advances in the photo space will be AI-centric, and not optics or sensor-centric as before. The advancement in photography technology will, for the first time ever, be untethered from physics, and will create a whole new way of thinking about photography. This is how it's going to happen.

Concerns over technology could see Las Vegas ground to a halt. The membership of the Culinary Union, which represents workers in the city's casinos, have voted to strike if a deal cannot be reached over the increasing use of technology in their workplaces as well as increases in wages and the strengthening of language around sexual harassment. On June 1 the contracts of 50,000 union workers expire, raising the possibility of the first casino worker strike in Vegas since 1984. That one lasted 67 days and cost more than $1 million a day. "We support innovations that improve jobs, but we oppose automation when it only destroys jobs," Culinary Union secretary-treasurer Geoconda Argüello-Kline said.

As I'm passionate about shaping a better future in the Smart Technology and specifically to help transform Africa through Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain technologies, it was a privilege to participate as invited AI expert at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland on 15-17 May 2018 as well as the AI: Current Policy Reflections and Future Strategies on 18 May 2018 at the United Nations. As mentioned here as well as this post, this was also an opportunity to represent the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA), Cortex Logic (as one of the sponsors) and the African perspective on the use of these technologies with respect to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. In this post I would like to share some links, feedback, perspectives and outcomes of the AI for Good Global Summit. I also share my presentation on Health, Water, Smart Education & Smart Technology Services for African Smart Cities. In a separate post, I'll do the same for the AI: Current Policy Reflections and Future Strategies conference.

A new study by a team of international researchers has shown for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) performs better than most dermatologists at detecting skin cancer. The study, published Monday on the journal Annals of Oncology, trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN), a form of AI, to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas as well as benign moles. They then compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists. On average, human dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of melanomas from a set of 100 images, while the CNN algorithm detected 95 percent of melanomas, according to the study. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists," said Holger Haenssle, first author of the study and a professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

It sounds like a script from the Netflix futuristic dystopia Black Mirror. Chatbots now ask: "How can I help you?" The reply typed in return: "Are you human?" "Of course I am human," comes the response. "But how do I know you're human?" The so-called Turing Test where people question a machine's ability to imitate human intelligence is happening right now.

The creation of narrow artificial intelligence which performs better than humans on specific tasks raises a host of ethical issues. Clearly, it is important to ensure that the algorithms do not harm humans. As AI algorithms start to play an increasingly large role in future healthcare systems, taking on cognitive work with social dimensions it will become increasingly important to develop AI algorithms that are not just powerful and scalable, but also transparent and open to inspection--to point out just one of many socially important properties. This morning I attended a breakfast meeting organized by a federal organisation which represents the German Digital Economy (BVDW). Wolfgang Gründinger--a talented author, analyst and lobbyist for the Digital Transformation--invited a diverse group to discuss digital ethics.

A game developer said it would pull the planned'Active Shooter' video game after backlash. A game developer and digital distribution company has announced, after facing harsh criticism, that it will pull a video game that allows players to simulate a school shooter. Valve Inc. announced Tuesday it would pull "Active Shooter" from its online gaming platform, Steam, after learning that the game's publisher and developer has a "history of customer abuse" that was uncovered as a result of the controversy surrounding the game, Variety and other news outlets reported. "This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously been removed last fall when he was operating as '[bc]Interactive' and'Elusive Team,'" Valve said. His subsequent return under new business names was a fact that came to light as we investigated the controversy around his upcoming title.

Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.