Most swiping for love on a dating app know the drill. Perhaps declare intentions: Looking for something serious? The dating app Mirchi presents another possibility: "Auntie made me sign up." The option is part joke, part knowing nod to its audience. Unlike the mainstream apps such as Tinder or Bumble, Mirchi is among the growing world of dating apps created by and catering to South Asians.

The world's workforce faced a massive upheaval the moment Uber came on the scene. Uber was not the creator of the gig economy, the gig economy had existed for as long as we can remember, but it did signify the "mainstreaming of gigs". Uber's disruption of the transportation industry was powerful not because it got drivers to do gigs, that was already possible. It was powerful because of its powerful use of AI and technology to connect random drivers with the riders via their powerful app. This signified the first most publicized foray of AI into the industry and it quickly became the norm.

It's easier to talk about people, companies, or events than to talk about ideas. But one idea worth discussing, despite its complexity, is how artificial intelligence could reorder hotel distribution. Some researchers are wondering if artificial intelligence could handle some of the more complex tasks of shopping and haggling. Could new algorithms and processes shrink the role of travel search engines and comparison apps? Could the cost of bringing buyers and sellers together shrink thanks to technical innovations?

The trial project is being led by U.K.-based Fetch.ai and Munich-based blockchain company Datarella and was just launched at one of the central Munich offices owned by Connex Buildings. The goal is to control the pricing and use of the building's parking spaces dynamically, and to disincentivize people from driving to work by rewarding them with public transit passes for all the time they aren't using the parking garage. "It could say okay if you park closer, you're going to be charged more; if you park farther away, you'll be charged less," says Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai. "We reward you for doing certain actions and we discourage you from doing certain actions." Sheikh says that if the trial program is expanded to parking garages citywide, it could cut car usage by 10% annually, resulting in a reduction of more than 37,000 tons of CO2 emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from the annual energy use of nearly 4,000 homes.

A multifunctional special operations team infiltrates into the Ad Dali' Province of western Yemen as part of a coalition effort that supports the UN recognized government of President Mansour Hadi, based in the southern capital of Aden. The team is one of several that have begun to infiltrate the tribal areas within the span of control of the Houthi rebel army that is based in Sana'a. The purpose of these specialized teams is simple: foment rebellion within the Yemeni tribes against their Houthi oppressors and return control of their tribal areas to the legitimate government as directed by the UN. The team leader for the team that has infiltrated into Ad Dali' is Captain Adam MacDonald of the British Army, who is leading part of his team into the ruined home of Sheikh Abdul Jaleel al-Hudaifi, in the war torn village of Najd al-Mukalla, in the al-Harsha district, just outside of the Ad Dali' provincial capital. The previous Saturday, on February 12, 2025, militia fighters operating under the al-Houthi movement blew up the primary home of the tribal leader of the al-Harsha district using dynamite.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Minister of Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry on Friday lauded the United Arab Emirates' plans to launch the world's first university of artificial intelligence, expressing Islamabad's interest in collaborating on the project. Earlier this month, Abu Dhabi announced the opening of the first dedicated AI university. The Mohammad Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) will open its doors on September 2020. Chaudhary said Pakistan also had a center of excellence on artificial intelligence and "would like to join hands with the UAE university to enhance the capabilities of our people in the field". "UAE was the first country which established a proper ministry for artificial intelligence in 2017," the minister told Arab News in a phone interview from China where he is on a six-day official visit.

ProSper is a python library containing probabilistic algorithms to learn dictionaries. Given a set of data points, the implemented algorithms seek to learn the elementary components that have generated the data. The library widens the scope of dictionary learning approaches beyond implementations of standard approaches such as ICA, NMF or standard L1 sparse coding. The implemented algorithms are especially well-suited in cases when data consist of components that combine non-linearly and/or for data requiring flexible prior distributions. Furthermore, the implemented algorithms go beyond standard approaches by inferring prior and noise parameters of the data, and they provide rich a-posteriori approximations for inference. The library is designed to be extendable and it currently includes: Binary Sparse Coding (BSC), Ternary Sparse Coding (TSC), Discrete Sparse Coding (DSC), Maximal Causes Analysis (MCA), Maximum Magnitude Causes Analysis (MMCA), and Gaussian Sparse Coding (GSC, a recent spike-and-slab sparse coding approach). The algorithms are scalable due to a combination of variational approximations and parallelization. Implementations of all algorithms allow for parallel execution on multiple CPUs and multiple machines for medium to large-scale applications. Typical large-scale runs of the algorithms can use hundreds of CPUs to learn hundreds of dictionary elements from data with tens of millions of floating-point numbers such that models with several hundred thousand parameters can be optimized. The library is designed to have minimal dependencies and to be easy to use. It targets users of dictionary learning algorithms and Machine Learning researchers.

KARACHI: Pakistan has introduced the first-ever business robot journalist, Dante, who writes and publishes a comprehensive report on stocks traded at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) within a few seconds after the market's closure. "The Pakistan Stock Exchange is closed at 3:30pm (from Monday to Thursday and at 4:30pm on Friday) and it gets the daily report published before it is 3:31pm," said the award-winning tech startup, baseH Technologies, Founder and CEO Anisuddin Sheikh. TheRoboJournalist, also called Dante, had been writing the reports for the past few days, he said at a signing ceremony to get seed money from the Elahi Group of Companies for the project at the National Incubation Centre (NIC) at NED University on Saturday. Simultaneously, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based content writing software develops a video on share trading and gets it uploaded at YouTube, Sheikh said. The robot journalist is capable of doing sports and weather reporting as well.

Big, big data is needed to power worthy AI predictive models, but that is still a work in progress, says a former lead investor in Google DeepMind. Humayun Sheikh does not dispute the fact that Google DeepMind is a leading light in artificial intelligence research and its application for positive impact. As a former lead investor in the company, who exited when Google snapped it up in 2014 for a reported $500-million, that would be a bit ungrateful. After all, Sheikh had the opportunity of working alongside Demis Hassabis, the British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, top gamer and entrepreneur, who co-founded what is today recognised as a world's most innovative AI company. What he does dispute, however, is whether new technologies like AI, machine learning and blockchain are truly able to deliver commercial value to small and large companies alike.

Big, big data is needed to power worthy AI predictive models, but that is still a work in progress, says a former lead investor in Google DeepMind. Humayun Sheikh does not dispute the fact that Google DeepMind is a leading light in artificial intelligence research and its application for positive impact. As a former lead investor in the company, who exited when Google snapped it up in 2014 for a reported $500-million, that would be a bit ungrateful. After all, Sheikh had the opportunity of working alongside Demis Hassabis, the British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, top gamer and entrepreneur, who co-founded what is today recognised as a world's most innovative AI company. What he does dispute, however, is whether new technologies like AI, machine learning and blockchain are truly able to deliver commercial value to small and large companies alike.