Their antibodies may combat venom from some of the world's deadliest species. There are over 300,000 venomous snakebites reported in sub-Saharan Africa every year. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most of today's snakebite antivenoms are far from perfect. Typically manufactured from animal blood plasma, the antidotes often remain expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale across multiple snake species .

The co-founder of a fast-growing conversational AI start-up attributes its ongoing success to the commitment to building a diverse and trusting company culture almost as much as to the quality of the technology it is offering. Andrei Papancea is CEO of conversational AI specialist NLX, which has expanded from five to 25 staff in a little over a year. The small team is geographically spread across the world, from New York to Seattle to Queensland, and Berlin, and speaks 19 different languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish. Andrei says that his mission is to combine the best of AI with the best of human support to create extraordinary, memorable self-service experiences for users by building the world's go-to platform to create human conversational AI applications. "In all the jobs I had throughout my career, I always disliked it when good people – my colleagues, my peers, and my friends – quit. They always left for one of three reasons: they weren't paid well, they didn't feel heard or respected, or they didn't have interesting and engaging work to do. In building NLX, I've done the best I can to avoid losing good people because of these three reasons," explains Andrei.

AI is increasingly becoming a business imperative. Nine in 10 Fortune 1000 companies are not only investing in AI, but are increasing those investments, with 92% reporting measurable business benefits from their current AI use -- up from 72% in 2020 and just 28% in 2018, according to a 2022 NewVantage Partners executive survey. Still, only 26% of companies say their AI initiatives have actually moved into widespread production. Cultural barriers, with executives 11 times more likely to say culture is the greatest impediment to AI success than to cite technology limitations as the biggest barrier. And the cultural challenges have actually gotten worse, with 92% of executives citing cultural factors this year vs. 81% in 2018.

My holiday reading this year was Gregory Zuckerman's The Man Who Solved the Market, which I finished in one long sitting on Christmas Eve. It tells a fascinating story of the legendary Jim Simons and his secretive hedge-fund firm, Renaissance Technologies. Without a doubt, Simons has an extremely successful career. Simons started a side project on the mathematical analysis of stock trading strategies when he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) as a Cold War codebreaker. After the IDA fired him for publicly speaking out against the Vietnam War, Simons joined the faculty at Stony Brook University, where he recruited top talents from across the country and built a world-class math department.

Society is shaped by humans' unique capacity to take on another person's perspective - which might be the reason why modern societies have such extraordinary levels of cooperation. Writing for the Conversation, Arunas L. Radzvilavicius, a Postdoctoral Researcher of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Pennsylvania explains that social norms can shed light on why people display altruistic behaviour. Humans are far more likely to be kind to individuals they see as'good', than they are to people of'bad' reputation. But, he says, if everyone agrees that being altruistic toward other cooperators earns you a good reputation, cooperation will persist. A person who appears'good' to someone might seem like a bad individual from another person's perspective.

A modern contact center relies on its knowledge base to streamline its operations. When a new type of issue has been successfully resolved, the challenge is to make the relevant information readily available across the organization. By automatically generating textual descriptions of objects or issues identified within images, computer vision platforms make it easier for everyone to search the company system and find exactly the solution they need. For example, an insurance agent can simply type "fender bender" or "cracked windshield" into the search bar and instantly find relevant images of similar incidents, enabling them to estimate the cost of the damage in no time flat.

Perhaps you remember the iconic theme of the globally popular Kung Fu Panda movies, "You are the secret ingredient!" This meant that self-belief is important and with it great things can be achieved--Po, for example, became the Dragon Warrior. My meaning here is that computer science is both a powerful enabler of rapid advances in all intellectual fields and a disruptor driving furious revolutions in commerce and society worldwide. Computer science is more important and potent than ever! Computing is driving unprecedented rapid change.