Noel Webb is cofounder and CEO of Karen.ai A veteran of business development and out-of-the-box thinking, Noel has been a leader in his roles over the years for several companies, including Bam Digital, SpeakFeel, and Agnition. During his career as a technology leader, Noel has developed a passion for products and innovations and has been the driving force behind products such as OOLYO, Tech & Design, and TeamHQ. In addition, Noel has been a strategic advisor for high-profile clients such as Torstar Digital, Syngenta, Toyota, and Modis and helped them to build a product-driven approach to business.

Karl Smith, CEO of Paradigm Interactions tends to think of himself as a futurist, he immediately see the possibilities of technologies as part of a much larger ecosystem than the one it is intended for. He looks for ways to test and assess "How we might Live" with the technology and how it will adapt our lives, our cultures and move humanity onwards to greater things. In our modern societies we have relieved ourselves of the burdens of the industrial age and are in the process of doing the same to the digital age. We had digitized the same old processes, making them easier to do, involving less time so we could use that time on other things, but we had not thought to remove them. That is the next stage in human and machine evolution, removing pointless interactions and processes.

Digital All Stars is a series of articles which aims to celebrate the best of South African digital. The articles, which will appear on Memeburn and Ventureburn, recognise and celebrate South Africa's best digital entrepreneurs, business people, advertisers, and media professionals among others. In this piece we take a look at some interesting African startups involved in developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. South African startup DataProphet last year received a significant investment of an undisclosed amount from Yellowwoods Capital Holdings to expand its international offering. As part of the deal, DataProphet will act as the advanced analytics partner for the group.

Machine Learning becomes Mainstream: How to increase your competitive advantage First there was big data – extremely large data sets that made it possible to use data analytics to reveal patterns and trends, allowing businesses to improve customer relations and...

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it – or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software – or bots – is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes. Bots are now undertaking much of the drudgery of business life – filling in forms, answering customer queries, compiling data and handling social media tasks. Proponents say this liberates staff to work on more creative and engaging work; bots are a new, cheap resource to be exploited. But is there a human cost and just how much should we expect from these new minion workers?

Roboticists need to have a solid understanding of hardware and software. The standard computer science education in the United States, however, tends to teach students only about software. To remedy this situation, we explore new ways of teaching them about hardware in a playful way. Realizing that pinball machines are simple robots, we have developed a pinball machine interface between a PC and a recent Lord of the Rings pinball machine, which enables students to implement pinball games and gain knowledge of hardware and interface programming in the process. This paper describes both our pinball machine interface and our experience developing it. As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone has managed to control an existing pinball machine completely.

The Digital Services Research Group and its predecessor groups and offshoots in Digital Equipment Corporation have been mobilizing leading-edge AI research to bear on real-life problems that face the corporation and its customers. The general strategy of the group is to explore emerging techniques relevant to service and support needs through developing rapid prototypes, deploying these prototypes, and incorporating feedback from users. With over 32 major projects undertaken during the past decade, we have worked on broad spectrum of problems and explored a variety of advanced AI techniques. This article describes the current AI activities in five areas: (1) enterprise advisory systems, (2) natural language processing and textual information retrieval, (3) largescale knowledge base management and access, (4) software configuration management, and (5) intrusion detection. We also list some future research directions.

Dennis O'Connor was one of Digital's first 400 employees and played a significant role in the growth of the company over the last 30 years. Standing Committees During his 30-year career with Digital, Dennis O'Connor held senior In the early days of Digital's history, Dennis was involved in the Dennis was the founder and director of Digital's Artificial Intelligence Dennis O'Connor was instrumental in the development of visionary Dennis led Digital's involvement with MIT, Carnegie-Mellon,

In 1980, Digital Equipment Corporation began to use a rule-based system called R1 by some and XCON by others to configure VAX-11 computer systems. In the intervening years, R1's knowledge has increased substantially and its usefulness to Digital continues to grow. This article describes what is involved in extending R1's performance during the four year period.

R1 is a rule-based program that configures VAX-11 computer systems. Given a customer's purchase order, it determines what, if any, substitutions and additions have to be made to the order to make it consistent and complete and produces a number of diagrams showing the spatial and logical relationships among the 90 or so components that typically constitute a system. The program has been used on a regular basis by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization since January of 1980. R1 has sufficient knowledge of the configuration domain and of the percliarities of the various configuration constraints that at each step in the configuration process, it simply recognizes what to do; thus it requires little search in order to configure a computer system.