Lily Xu is a PhD student at Harvard University, applying machine learning and game theory to wildlife conservation. She is particularly focused on the prevention of illegal wildlife poaching, and she told us about this interesting, and critically important, area of research. Green security is the challenge of environmental conservation under some unknown threat. The three domains that we focus on are illegal wildlife poaching, illegal logging and illegal fishing. Across all of these settings we have an environmental challenge, which is to preserve our natural ecosystems.

All the pieces are coming together: big data, advances in hardware, emerging powerful AI algorithms, and an open source community for tools that reduces barriers to entry for industry and start-ups alike. The result: AI is being propelled out of research labs and into our everyday lives, from navigating cities, ride shares, our energy networks, to the online world. In 2018 everyone is starting to see the business value of AI. It is being added to more and more things every year, and it is getting smarter and smarter – accelerating human innovation. But as AI becomes more powerful, more autonomous and broader in its use and impact, the unsolved issue of AI safety is paramount. Risks include: bias, poor decision making, low transparency, job losses and malevolent use of AI, such as autonomous weaponry.

While artificial intelligence has found a lot of use cases in many industries, another area that is witnessing a lot of traction is for Social Good. Many companies and organisations are either collaborating with not-for-profit organisations or are developing solutions that may help communities and society in general by integrating AI. AI is solving some of the pressing social issues. From detecting Zika virus to the Covid-19 pandemic, the use cases for AI for Social good is on the rise. Many global companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and government bodies are deploying AI for positive social initiatives.

Microsoft is looking for entrepreneurs to join its latest programme. Specifically social entrepreneurs as part of its recently launched Global Social Entrepreneurship programme, which has been made available in 140 countries, including South Africa. The programme forms part of the Microsoft for Startups initiative and aims to give entrepreneurs access to the necessary technology they need in order to get their socially-focused projects running. "The Global Social Entrepreneurship programme has benefits aimed specifically at elevating startups addressing an important social and/or environmental challenge through their products, services or operations," Microsoft explained regarding the announcement. "Solving global social and environmental challenges requires synergy of the right technology, partners, conducive environment and technology. When startups work together with investors, enterprises, governments, non-profits and communities, we are able to unlock new potentials," adds Microsoft4Afrika director, Amrote Abdella.

The Hawaiian poʻo-uli, a small bird from the honeycreeper family, was first discovered in 1973. Less than half a century later, it disappeared from the planet. Declared extinct in 2018, it is one of almost 700 vertebrate species that have been driven to extinction in the last 500 years. According to a United Nations report issued earlier this year to policymakers, one million species are at risk of extinction: Human actions threaten more plants and animals than ever before. Although the precise number of species on the planet is difficult to calculate, recent estimates put it at around 8.7 million.

In the last two decades, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown from a very small community of data scientists to something that is woven into many people's daily lives. Machine learning, computer vision, and other AI disciplines--supported by the cloud--are helping people achieve more, from mundane tasks, like avoiding a traffic jam, to revolutionary breakthroughs, like curing cancer. Over the past year, Microsoft has been on a journey to apply these transformative technologies to the world's biggest environmental challenges. On July 12, 2017, Microsoft launched AI for Earth as a $2 million program in London, with a goal of providing AI and cloud tools to researchers working on the frontlines of environmental challenges in the areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity, and climate change. Since that time, AI for Earth has grown into a $50 million over five-year program, with 112 grantees in 27 countries and seven featured projects.

A new study from PwC and the World Economic Forum examines how AI can help transform how society addresses climate change, delivers food and water security, reduces risk from disasters, protects biodiversity and bolsters human well-being. "Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for the Earth", examines how AI can be put to work for the planet's greatest environmental challenges. The study is the latest in a series of reports from the World Economic Forum's Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth initiative, designed to accelerate progress of the development and use of emerging technology to benefit environmental challenges. The report focuses on the use of AI in the context of six critical global challenges: climate change; biodiversity and conservation; healthy oceans; water security; clean air; weather and disaster resilience. The report warns that, although AI presents transformative opportunities to address the Earth's environmental challenge, if left unguided it also has the capability to accelerate the environment's degradation.

Last year, Microsoft announced the formation of a new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, with over 5,000 computer scientists. At the time, the company said it intended to "build the world's most powerful AI supercomputer with Azure and make it available to anyone, to enable people and organizations to harness its power". Today, Microsoft revealed a new initiative to use its AI and machine learning capabilities in "solving some of the biggest environmental challenges of our time". "The scale and speed of the changes we see in our physical and natural world require new solutions," Microsoft said today. "But the latest innovative technologies often come with a price tag and require computational expertise that puts them out of reach for many researchers and nongovernmental organizations."

Soon scientists and the public will have the chance to easily test hypotheses about America's ecological challenges with the help of an ensemble of technologies, including artificial intelligence. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology will link their technology for systems thinking with IBM Watson and the Encyclopedia of Life at the Smithsonian. Scientists will then be able to use the information to create their own models about the environment and efficiently test them. The project is one of 10 "Big Data Spokes" announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF's 10 million initiative was created to improve the ability to solve the nation's most pressing challenges with the use of big data.

Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this first part of a two-part paper (titled IXI), we take a learning system perspective to the problem of consciousness and intelligent systems, an approach that may look unseasonable in this age of fMRI's and high tech neuroscience. We posit conscious intelligent systems in natural environments and wonder how natural factors influence their design paths. Such a perspective allows us to explain seamlessly a variety of natural factors, factors ranging from the rise and presence of the human mind, man's sense of I, his self-consciousness and his looping thought processes to factors like reproduction, incubation, extinction, sleep, the richness of natural behavior, etc. It even allows us to speculate on a possible human evolution scenario and other natural phenomena.