If you're keeping score of who is pursuing the hottest trends in technology, don't overlook Salesforce. As part of Salesforce's Spring '17 celebration this week, the company announced the general availability of Einstein, which is Salesforce's core AI engine. It's something the company has been talking about for many months. Salesforce also introduced Einstein Vision, a set of new APIs that helps developers of all sizes "build AI-powered apps fast." This includes apps that leverage vast troves of images including photos and graphics.

It's 3/14, also known as Pi Day – a mathematics holiday to celebrate the irrational, transcendental number we learned in school, for the most part, to calculate the circumference or area of circles. While there are a number of fulfilling Pi(e) related activities you can indulge in, from feasting on scrumptious pies to chasing down the value of Pi (good luck!), it is also an apt moment to turn attention to where children across the world stand in mathematics achievement and other learning outcomes. While countries have made impressive gains in access to education, a recurring theme is that not nearly enough learning is happening. The 2018 World Development Report (WDR) takes on the learning crisis and its possible underlying factors. The report also takes stock of a growing evidence base to identify key principles and effective interventions to improve learning, challenges in taking successful interventions to scale, and strategies to overcome those challenges.

Shifting from the drone policy of the Obama administration, President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) new authority to conduct drone attacks against suspected militants, anonymous U.S. officials said. The new policy is in contrast to that of former President Barack Obama that limited the CIA's paramilitary role, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Under the Obama administration, the CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists and then the military conducted the actual strike. Although Obama pushed for the use of drones, he kept the military in place to conduct the actual strike. During Obama's two terms, a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen compared to 57 strikes under George W. Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Our social media guy David Dhannoo remains in Africa, following on from his article last week about the rise of FinTech on the continent. Dave's technology in Africa series now looks at how a startup in Southern Africa is using artificial intelligence to source news articles. Controvert Media from Zimbabwe has implemented the use of artificial intelligence to automatically write and post news articles. They caught my attention from when they trialled their AI idea at the recent African Cup of Nations which took place Gabon. The startup used an AI bot that puts together basic reports on final match reports, taking into account the match scores, player performance data, and so on.

Whenever i think about the impact that deep learning will have in Africa in the next 5–10 years from now, My curiosity and passion to understand and implements deep learning increases. Improving Agriculture yields in Africa with deep learning becomes my first focus. As a result of these reasons, it is now possible for anyone to apply deep learning techniques to real problems in a way that is both affordable and fast.

The matrix of anatomy, pathology and image observations on multiple modalities is huge. The supervised learning algorithms are hampered by the lack of annotated data sets for each cell in that matrix. The unsupervised learning methods will be hampered by the few examples of many of the rare cells of the matrix. Algorithms are typically developed one by one, i.e., this image observation in this disease setting (possibly in this population). Even after an algorithm is developed, it has to be'perfected' to high sensitivity and specificity because humans are very good at this task.

Now this is a story all about how Will Smith got flipped, turned upside down. The award-winning actor recently checked a 20-year-old item off his bucket list by bungee jumping off of Victoria Falls in southern Africa. The falls are one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, giving Smith quite the view on the way down. Between the sounds of whipping wind as the actor falls more than 350 feet, Smith proclaims, "This is going to be a cool shot!" Indeed it is. 'Alien: Covenant' faux advert shows you the birth of the robot apocalypse Charlize Theron kicks ass and takes names in the NSFW'Atomic Blonde' trailer A live-action'Little Mermaid' trailer surfaces – but not from Disney

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have a big role in Africa's eHealth strategies. An article in Wired says it's hugely successful at poker too. From the 1940s, chess was the test of AI. It's a game of structured rules that computers could learn. To succeed, it has to outmanoeuvre other players' bluffs and intuition and deal with only partial information about the state of each game too, which aren't structured or rule-based.