With respect to climate change, poaching, and encroachment on natural habitats, some animal populations have fared far worse than others. It's estimated that the populations of more than 4,000 species shrunk by 60% between 1970 and 2014, and a recent United Nations global assessment found that as many as 1 million species are at risk of extinction within the next decade. That's why Google has partnered with Conservation International and other organizations -- the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Map of Life, World Wide Fund for Nature, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Zoological Society of London, with support from Google's Earth Outreach program and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Lyda Hill Philanthropies. The goal is to help process one of the world's largest and most diverse databases of photographs taken from motion-activated cameras. As of today, the fruits of their labor is available through Google Cloud as a part of Wildlife Insights, an AI-enabled platform that streamlines conservation monitoring by expediting trap-camera photo analysis.

Local executives of iconic American computer company IBM said last week that Thailand will serve as the firm's hub for expanding into Indochina as they believe the subregion offers the potential for high growth and increasing revenues over the next three years. "We are studying how to enter the Indochina market in various areas including as business partners, and under a business model with consideration to regulations and laws for investment," said Patama Chataruck, managing director IBM Thailand. "Meanwhile, Thailand still has high potential." Known as Big Blue because of the color of its logo, International Business Machines (IBM) was once the world's leading computer manufacturer, but sold its personal computer business to Lenovo of China in 2005. It still manufactures super-computers, other hardware and has devoted tremendous resources to becoming a leader in solutions and software.

AI has a "black box" problem. We cram data in one side of a machine learning system and we get results out the other, but we're often unsure what happens in the middle. Researchers and developers nearly had the issue licked, with "explainable algorithms" and "transparent AI" trending over the past few years. Black box AI isn't as complex as some experts make it out to be. Imagine you have 1,000,000 different spices and 1,000,000 different herbs and you only have a couple of hours to crack Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret recipe.

CIMON (The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion 2) has been busy working with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The robotic assistant is now using a tone analyzer, detecting emotions during the current voyage. CIMON made its debut on the ISS in November of this year, with Space.com's "During the experiment, CIMON successfully found and recognized Gerst's face, took photos and video, positioned itself autonomously within the Columbus module using its ultrasonic sensors, and issued instructions for Gerst to perform a student-designed experiment with crystals. Weighing about 5 kilograms (11 lbs. on Earth), the 3D-printed robot designed jointly by the German space agency DLR, Airbus, and IBM works similarly to Apple's virtual assistant Siri or Amazon's Alexa. "If CIMON is asked a question or addressed, the Watson AI firstly converts this audio signal into text, which is understood, or interpreted, by the AI," explained IBM project lead Matthias Biniok in the statement. "IBM Watson not only understands content in context, [but] it can also understand the intention behind it." There is a great video here, of Gerst conversing with CIMON, and it shows the complexity of this fantastic technology. Especially regarding the amount of relevant information that it can store and relay to astronauts, making their jobs easier. The Watson team at IBM computing only added the tone analyzer to the standard set of Watson capabilities this week. However, CIMON 2 was added as a seventh crew member on SpaceX Dragon during a resupply mission last week. In addition to updated software, the robot also got a hardware upgrade, with enhanced sensitivity on its microphones, and a more advanced sense of orientation. The German Aerospace Center and Airbus are the other crew members for this CIMON project. "IBM is using its tone analyzer technology to analyze how CIMON converses with the astronauts.

Learning to Program An introduction to programming for those who have never programmed before, by Alan Gauld. It introduces several programming languages but has a strong emphasis on Python.

Andrew Ng is most of the world's most prominent AI scientist's and educators. On this episode of CxOTalk, he shares practical advice for adopting AI in the enterprise. Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI (Artificial Intelligence). He has helped two of the world's leading technology companies in their "AI transformation": He was Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led the company's 1300 person AI Group and was responsible for driving the company's global AI strategy and infrastructure. He was also the founding lead of the Google Brain team.

About a year ago, I wrote that mounting AI hype would likely give way to yet another AI winter. Now, according to the panelists at "the world's leading academic AI conference" the temperature is already falling. Most recent advances in AI have come through a pair of related technologies: Deep Learning and Neural Networks. The ideas beneath these, however, are more than 70 years old. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) opened the subject by creating a computational model for neural networks…The first functional networks with many layers were published by Ivakhnenko and Lapa in 1965, as the Group Method of Data Handling.

Look in the wrong place, and you'll get the wrong answers. Five years ago, Elon Musk said "With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we are summoning the demon". A report by the Brookings Institution's AI and Emerging Tech Initiative notes that fearful warnings about new technology like this are nothing new. When C. Babbage created the first "computer" in the mid-19th century: "The idea that God-given human reason could be replaced by a machine was fearfully received by Victorian England in a manner similar to today's concern about machines being able to think like humans." However, while Musk called for (preventive) "[r]egulatory oversight… just to make sure that we don't do something foolish", the report warns that regulation of AI would be meaningful only if it "focused on the tangible effects of the technology."

Sitting at the nexus of data science, computer vision, and machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) has the promise to provide insights from large, high-dimensional datasets that can stay otherwise hidden from traditional data analysis approaches. However, its application in materials science has been comparatively slower than some fields due to the specialized knowledge required to apply AI to physical systems, as well as the wide variety of problems and data types encountered. In an effort to push forward the state-of-the-art in materials science research, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) are establishing a collaborative Center of Excellence. The center will leverage the strengths of the two institutions to develop next-generation aerospace materials, establish a pipeline of research talent with both AI and materials science expertise, and advance the materials science field by integrating AI into materials research and design. The 5-year, $7.5M joint Center of Excellence, named Data-Driven Discovery Of Optimized Multifunctional Material Systems (D3OM2S), is supported by an award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate.