One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.

It's time to get over your Comcast X1 envy, Dish Network subscribers. Now you can stop changing channels with your finger like a sucker and start using voice commands instead, as Dish recently announced that 30 Voice Remote accessory is now available. The new remote only works with Hopper 3 DVRs and 4K Joey mini set-top boxes. The handheld unit can be used to control navigation, search, and content selection, as well as basic channel changes and DVR recordings. And you don't need to bark bizarre, stilted commands into the thing; Dish says you can use natural language when you search with the remote.

Last year, mobile operators lost 38 billion ( 28bn) of their revenue to fraud, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association's 2015 survey. International crime rings are successfully and profitably using highly sophisticated techniques to bulldoze through phone companies' anti-fraud defences. However, emerging big data machine learning applications are beginning to turn the tide. Padraig Stapleton, vice president of engineering at Argyle Data provides insights on how mobile operators are deploying big data and AI to protect themselves and their consumers. Mobile operators face an increasingly complex battle against sophisticated global cybercriminals.

We've all been there: That moment when your cellphone call drops out, or your mobile webpage stops loading, because you've hit a dead zone in coverage. To address that issue, AT&T says it someday intends to launch aerial drones that can provide signal where it's otherwise lacking, or where crowds are putting a great deal of strain on the existing cell network. The drones would add extra capacity, freeing up your phone to access the Web and in some cases make voice calls. The idea is like a more-localized version of what Google and Facebook have been dreaming of doing for the rest of the world: beaming Internet access down to the ground from hovering platforms in the sky above. Although LTE coverage is already plentiful in most cities, drone-based data connections could also play a role in responding to emergencies and natural disasters.

Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, customer turnover, or customer defection, is the loss of clients or customers. Banks, telephone service companies, Internet service providers, pay TV companies, insurance firms, and alarm monitoring services, often use customer attrition analysis and customer attrition rates as one of their key business metrics (along with cash flow, EBITDA, etc.) because the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one. Companies from these sectors often have customer service branches which attempt to win back defecting clients, because recovered long-term customers can be worth much more to a company than newly recruited clients. Churn prediction is one of the most popular Big Data use cases in business. It consists of detecting customers who are likely to cancel a subscription to a service.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The use of machine learning to identify suspicious online activity is a new and important capability in securing the network, but privileged users were the weak point until now.

Just consider the analogy of landlines vs. mobile phones. Our cell phones free us from the limiting wired technology we used for over one hundred years, which connected us to the earth -- but tethered us to it, as well. In the same way wireless phones freed us from that wired tether, self-flying transportation could free us from the massive limitation of cars and highways. It would require no roads, signs or signals. You could travel in a three dimensional fashion, with massively more opportunities to avoid accidents.

Sentiment analysis is a useful service for just about any business. It is always valuable to know whether your customers are saying positive or negative things about you. This gives you more flexibility to start with their sample and then tweak it to your needs. Then you would deploy it yourself and call it yourself.

The benefits of machine learning continue to trickle down to smartphones and gadgets, and chipmaker Qualcomm wants to help speed up the process. The company is launching a new software development kit for its "machine intelligence platform" Zeroth. This SDK will make it easier for companies to run deep learning programs directly on devices like smartphones and drones -- if they're powered by one of Qualcomm's chips, of course. Right now, you're probably using all sorts of deep learning programs you don't know about. Companies like Google and Facebook use this sort of software for things like image and voice recognition, but usually, this process happens in the cloud, with the results beamed to your phone.

SoftBank Group Corp. CEO and Chairman Masayoshi Son said Wednesday he will continue to lead the telecom giant for five to 10 more years, saying there are things he still wants to do. The remarks come a day after SoftBank abruptly announced the company's group president, Nikesh Arora, whom Son had chosen as his successor two years earlier, would be stepping down from the post after Wednesday's annual shareholders meeting. "I was planning to invite SoftBank executives and my friends to my 60th birthday party and just when we would make a toast, I wanted to announce that I would pass the torch on to Nikesh from the next day," Son, 58, said during the meeting in Tokyo. Arora wanted to take the helm in a few years but, "I've made a commitment to lead the company at least five more years or maybe 10 more years," said Son, adding he feels "deeply sorry" about changing his plans and causing trouble for Arora. For his part, Arora told shareholders, "This is a decision I respect and even support because he is too young in his heart and his mind to not continue to lead this great company."