Lagos – Educationists, researchers and others have said that Nigeria must include relevant skills acquisition in its education curricula to remain relevant in the comity of nations. They made their views known in a communique they issued at the end of a three-day University of Lagos International Research Conference and Fair. The International Conference of the Humanities and Science which began on Wednesday had the theme: "Automation and Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities for 21st Research and Development''. The communique was signed by the Director, Academic Planning of the institution, Prof. Obinna Chukwu. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the conference – the 14th edition – was attended by more than 400 scholars, captains of industries and others from within and outside Nigeria. A total number of 168 oral paper presentations and 49 poster presentations were made the conference which had Air Peace and Access Bank as major sponsors. The participants observed that many countries suffered from significant skill mismatch due to inability of the education system to accurately reflect the demands of the labour market. The participants noted that technology, specifically, artificial intelligence, was rapidly changing trends and perceptions in different facets of life including education, employment, economy, communication and healthcare. They added that artificial intelligence would aid resource utilisation and development of smart cities. They urged that researches in the academia that cut across disciplines should be carrief out in partnership with industries to build required competencies. They also recommended that organisations in emerging markets should make investments in automation to bridge the gap between them and their counterparts in developed markets. "Higher education should help students compete in artificial intelligence age by including it in the curriculum.

Millions of people communicate using sign language, but so far projects to capture its complex gestures and translate them to verbal speech have had limited success. A new advance in real-time hand tracking from Google's AI labs, however, could be the breakthrough some have been waiting for. The new technique uses a few clever shortcuts and, of course, the increasing general efficiency of machine learning systems to produce, in real time, a highly accurate map of the hand and all its fingers, using nothing but a smartphone and its camera. "Whereas current state-of-the-art approaches rely primarily on powerful desktop environments for inference, our method achieves real-time performance on a mobile phone, and even scales to multiple hands," write Google researchers Valentin Bazarevsky and Fan Zhang in a blog post. "Robust real-time hand perception is a decidedly challenging computer vision task, as hands often occlude themselves or each other (e.g.

One astronomer had jumped the gun, tweeting ahead of an official announcement by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). The observatory had detected an outburst of gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime, and an orbiting gamma-ray telescope had simultaneously seen electromagnetic radiation emanating from the same region of space. The observations--which were traced back to a colliding pair of neutron stars 130 million light-years away--marked a pivotal moment for multimessenger astronomy, in which celestial events are studied using a wide range of wildly different telescopes and detectors. The promise of multimessenger astronomy is immense: by observing not only in light but also in gravitational waves and elusive particles called neutrinos, all at once, researchers can gain unprecedented views of the inner workings of exploding stars, galactic nuclei and other exotic phenomena. But the challenges are great, too: as observatories get bigger and more sensitive and monitor ever larger volumes of space, multimessenger astronomy could drown in a deluge of data, making it harder for telescopes to respond in real time to unfolding astrophysical events.

Artificial intelligence has a transformative power. AI changed business, banking, governmental processes, marketing, and any other industry you could think of. Technology has become an inevitable aspect of the way we approach the learning process. During UNESCO's Mobile Learning Week 2019, the participants focused on finding solutions to ensure equitable and inclusive use of AI in education. The organization is focused on offering equal learning opportunities to all people regardless of ethnicity, location, gender, and socio-economic status.

Like anything in life, the best way to learn about anything is to get your feet wet. Watch some TedTalks on YouTube, read some blog posts, find forums and groups on social media platforms, and read some books on the subject. But, ultimately, you must be realistic as to whether the subject actually interests you or not. Before you do decide to take the plunge, complete some free courses on the subject or if possible, paid ones and see if it really is for you. Another good piece of advice is to find someone who has done what you are intending to do. Pick their brains and find out how they did it, and whether they would recommend it or not.

Now is the best time to buy a laptop--even if you're not a student. Here's what you need to know to find the best deals! 'Tis the season for heading off to school for another year of higher learning. But at the very least, there are some cool back-to-school gadgets to get excited about – including high-tech devices to keep you organized, productive and entertained while in a dorm room. And the good news is you don't have to blow your budget to get some great gear.

As the leading authority on coding and technology bootcamps, the team at Course Report has been researching, tracking, and sharing updates on the coding bootcamp industry since 2013. Each year, we use our knowledge and expertise to curate a list of the top data science bootcamps and data analysis bootcamps around the world. Put simply, these are the data science schools we would recommend to our own family and friends. These bootcamps teach students the skills to become a data scientist or data analyst by teaching either Python and/or R, and covering skills like data visualization, machine learning, big data, natural language processing and more. Many data science bootcamps have rigorous admissions processes and require applicants to have a degree in STEM.

Naspers is looking to invest in machine learning as Africa's largest company seeks to expand following an Amsterdam listing of assets including a stake in Tencent Holdings. The South African Internet and technology group spent about US$3-billion on its various ventures around the world last year, including Indian food-delivery service Swiggy and Russian classifieds site Avito. Machine learning -- a subset of artificial intelligence -- is another area of interest, as is online education, executives said on Friday. "We are interested in investing in machine learning," CEO Bob van Dijk told shareholders at the AGM in Cape Town. "The amount of data is exploding -- last year we collected more data in the world than ever before."

My name is Jeffrey Wu, a Master's student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign studying information management. I did my undergrad in Taiwan majoring in computer science (if there is a chance, visit Taiwan! Before SAP Concur, I had several previous internship experiences as a software development engineer at IBM and a data analyst at Graybar Innovation Lab. This summer internship is my first exposure to the product management field, and I can't wait to share my product manager intern experience with everyone! The goal of my internship project was to create a structured way to evaluate machine learning/data science project ideas.