Access to Kurdish medicine brochures is limited, depriving Kurdish-speaking communities of critical health information. To address this problem, we developed a specialized Machine Translation (MT) model to translate English medicine brochures into Sorani Kurdish using a parallel corpus of 22,940 aligned sentence pairs from 319 brochures, sourced from two pharmaceutical companies in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). We trained a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) model using the Moses toolkit, conducting seven experiments that resulted in BLEU scores ranging from 22.65 to 48.93. We translated three new brochures to improve the evaluation process and encountered unknown words. We addressed unknown words through post-processing with a medical dictionary, resulting in BLEU scores of 56.87, 31.05, and 40.01. Human evaluation by native Kurdish-speaking pharmacists, physicians, and medicine users showed that 50% of professionals found the translations consistent, while 83.3% rated them accurate. Among users, 66.7% considered the translations clear and felt confident using the medications.

Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink. After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and a hospital ethics board. The company is developing a device called a brain-computer interface. Musk has said that Neuralink's ultimate goal is to "achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence," but for now he's starting with a far more modest aim: allowing paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with their brains. In a brochure about the study, Neuralink says it is recruiting participants with quadriplegia, or paralysis in all four limbs, due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and that are at least 22 years old.

A new spy-in-the-sky camera which identified 15,000 cases of drivers using mobile phones could also catch motorists eating, drinking, or not wearing a seatbelt, its makers say. Smart cameras linked to a new, automated system using artificial intelligence (AI) are being trialled on an undisclosed motorway - ahead of a blanket ban on holding a mobile device while driving which comes into force in early 2022. The cameras instantly analyse high-definition photos taken through the windscreen of passing cars, and Jenoptik, the enforcement technology firm testing the cameras in the UK, believes they will be crucial in providing evidence to prosecute offenders. The pilot scheme has been running since spring and it is hoped a wider rollout across the country will be possible next year. But Acusensus, the Australian firm who designed the cameras, admits that they can be used to catch motorists doing anything from eating, drinking, smoking, adjusting the radio or using navigation devices in a holder.

The RCMP awarded a new social media monitoring contract Sept. 2 to a U.S. company that uses artificial intelligence to track what's said on the web. Virginia-based Babel Street says its software can instantly translate between 200 languages and filter social media content by geographic areas and by sentiments expressed. We can't let journalism fade away. Contribute to The Tyee so we can add to our team. Two lucky Tyee readers will win an all-access ticket to this annual literary event.

Automatica 2018 is one of Europe's largest robotics and automation-related trade shows and a destination for global roboticists and business executives to view new products. It was held June 19-22 in Munich and had 890 exhibitors and 46,000 visitors (up 7% from the previous show). The International Symposium on Robotics (ISR) was held in conjunction with Automatica with a series of robotics-related keynotes, poster presentations, talks and workshops. The ISR also had an awards dinner in Munich on June 20th at the Hofbräuhaus, a touristy beer hall and garden with big steins of beer, plates full of Bavarian food and oompah bands on each floor. From left: Stefan Lampa, CEO, KUKA; Prof Dr Bruno Siciliano, Dir ICAROS and PRISMALab, U of Naples Federico II; Ken Fouhy, Moderator, Editor in Chief, Innovations & Trend Research, VDI News; Dr. Kiyonori Inaba, Exec Dir, Robot Business Division, FANUC; Markus Kueckelhaus, VP Innovations & Trend Research, DHL; and Per Vegard Nerseth, Group Senior VP, ABB.

If I'd believe all emails that end up in my spam folder, I would be a billionaire: a Nigerian prince promising to reward me in tenfold if I just help him out with a small amount now. I also miraculously won a foreign lottery (without even actively participating!). I only need to send my personal data and a small fee, and the money will be transferred to my account shortly. Luckily most of us know this is the work of scam artists and we don't fall into these kinds of traps. We know people can pretend to be someone else on the other side of the internet.

AI could reboot industries and make the economy more productive; it's already infusing many of the products we use daily. But a new report by more than 20 researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the same technology creates new opportunities for criminals, political operatives, and oppressive governments--so much so that some AI research may need to be kept secret. Included in the report, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, are four dystopian vignettes involving artificial intelligence that seem taken straight out of the Netflix science fiction show Black Mirror. An administrator for a building's robot security system spends some of her time on Facebook during the workday. There she sees an ad for a model train set and downloads a brochure for it.

AI could reboot industries and make the economy more productive; it's already infusing many of the products we use daily. But a new report by more than 20 researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the same technology creates new opportunities for criminals, political operatives, and oppressive governments--so much so that some AI research may need to be kept secret. Included in the report, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, are four dystopian vignettes involving artificial intelligence that seem taken straight out of the Netflix science fiction show Black Mirror. An administrator for a building's robot security system spends some of her time on Facebook during the workday. There she sees an ad for a model train set and downloads a brochure for it.

A hotel room automatically adjusting to the tastes of each guest, virtual reality headsets as brochures: the tourism sector is starting to embrace new technologies, hoping to benefit from lucrative personal data. In a prototype of the hotel of the future on display at Madrid's Fitur tourism fair, receptionists have disappeared and customers are checked-in via a mirror equipped with facial recognition. Once the client is identified, the room adapts itself automatically to all demands made at reservation: temperature, lighting, Picasso or Van Gogh in the digital frames hanging on the walls. "Technology will allow us to know what the client needs before he even knows he wants it," says Alvaro Carrillo de Albornoz, head of Spain's Hotel Technology Institute. Some hotels already offer such experiences at a more basic level.

In a prototype of the hotel of the future on display at Madrid's Fitur tourism fair, receptionists have disappeared and customers are checked-in via a mirror equipped with facial recognition. Once the client is identified, the room adapts itself automatically to all demands made at reservation: temperature, lighting, Picasso or Van Gogh in the digital frames hanging on the walls. "Technology will allow us to know what the client needs before he even knows he wants it," says Alvaro Carrillo de Albornoz, head of Spain's Hotel Technology Institute, which promotes innovation in the sector. Some hotels already offer such experiences at a more basic level. But the room prototype put on show by French technology consultancy Altran, aimed at luxury hotels, has incorporated cutting-edge speech recognition technology, allowing for instance a guest to order a pizza in 40 languages.