5G subscriptions are forecast to reach 20 million by 2022 in the Middle East and North East Africa, according to new research from tech giant Ericsson. Its Mobility Report for the Middle East and North East Africa also said mobile subscriptions are growing steadily across the region. They are expected to reach 690 million by the end of 2016, making up to 8 percent of the global […]
Photo Friends and family of the former N.F.L. player Joe McKnight gathered at the site of his fatal shooting in Terrytown, La., on Thursday. Credit Michael Democker/NOLA.com The Times-Picayune, via Associated Press The man held in the fatal shooting of the former N.F.L. standout Joe McKnight in Louisiana admitted to investigators that he had pulled the trigger, the authorities said, but he was allowed to walk free […]
Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz’s decision to step down is unlikely to hamper growth at the world’s biggest coffee chain as his successor Kevin Johnson is well suited to take the helm, analysts said. Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) said on Thursday that Schultz would step down as CEO on April 3 to focus on new high-end coffee shops, handing the top job to Chief Operating Officer Johnson, a […]
The notion of machine-powered facial recognition is one that predates today’s actual technology for it by many years, thanks to robot POV shots from sci-fi films such as The Terminator and Robocop. But while many advances have been made, facial recognition software is far from infallible, as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently found. Here are the details from a report in Quartz: Researchers showed they could […]
By Alastair Macdonald | BRUSSELS BRUSSELS Islamic State will attack Europe again, security chiefs warned on Friday, and may add car bombs, cyber and chemical warfare to its local arsenal as European militants drift home after reverses in Syria and Iraq. Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, said it was impossible to know for sure how many militants were already in Europe plotting. A report […]
ABU DHABI // “Building nations is not complete without safeguarding heritage,” Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed told the Safeguarding Cultural Heritage Conference in the capital on Friday. The deputy chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Council was addressing the first day of the conference, where attendees heard reports of past atrocities as a prompt to forging meaningful outcomes for the future. The conference concludes Saturday, with the adoption of […]
December 2, 2016 by: Maggie Fick, West Africa correspondent Voters in the tiny nation of Gambia appear to have unseated their president of more than two decades, who had pledged to rule for “a billion years”, an unexpected result after a year of elections that have cast doubt on the state of democracy in Africa. The Gambian electoral commission on Friday declared that Adama Barrow, the main […]
Symantec After four years of investigation, Europol, and other agencies have moved against the prominent Avalanche botnet platform which acted as a hub for malware campaigns worldwide. Europol publicly disclosed the operation on Thursday, made possible through partnerships with the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the German Public Prosecutor’s Office Verden Eurojust and technology firms including Shadowserver and Symantec. Law enforcement agencies moved 30 November […]
An independent English-language news site in Qatar accused the Gulf state of censorship on Thursday, saying two internet service providers had blocked access to its website. The Doha News, which stirred a debate about the limits of tolerance in the conservative country in August with an opinion column on gay rights in Qatar, said the two internet firms had simultaneously barred access to its website on Wednesday. […]
MIT researchers have developed a computational model which aims to capture the human elements of facial recognition and implement it in our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems. On Thursday, MIT revealed the research, conducted at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers designed a machine learning system which implements the new model and they have […]
India, China and Russia on Thursday held their first round of consultation on Asia-Pacific Affairs which included regional security architecture, coordination within regional and multilateral fora, anti-terrorism and other regional issues, according to PTI as reported by The Statesman. The consultation was attended by representatives from Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and Ministry of External Affairs of India, an Indian […]
A terrorist cell formed by a group seeking recognition from the ISIS terror network is already operating and planning a big attack in Manila. This comes as the Philippine capital was placed on its highest terror alert for the first time in 16 years following the arrest of two alleged militants over a makeshift bomb planted near the US Embassy on Monday. A senior police officer, who […]
President-elect Donald Trump has made a reputation of being very vocal, to say the least, on Twitter, with his tweets certainly getting its fair share of reach and criticism. A report by New York Magazine reveals that Trump, once he is sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2017, will gain access to a system that will allow him to send unblockable text messages to all Americans, a fact that […]
Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has broken out the number of FttN premises ready for service, providing a temporary level of increased transparency into the NBN rollout numbers that usually lump fibre to the node (FttN), fibre to the basement (FttB), and fibre to the premise (FttP) technologies into a single total. With the number of ready for service FttN premises overtaking the number of brownfields FttP premises […]
Tomaso Poggio, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, has long thought that the brain must produce “invariant” representations of faces and other objects, meaning representations that are indifferent to objects’ orientation in space, their distance from the viewer, or their location in the visual field. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT researchers and their […]
Tax compliance gets easier for companies, but new data highlights post-filing challenges across the world JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, December 1, 2016/ Economies around the world continue to make progress in simplifying and reducing the burden of tax compliance on business, according to the latest edition of Paying Taxes 2017, a report by the World Bank Group and PwC (www.PWC.com ). Released today, the report finds that the Total […]
There is no association between a mother having flu anytime during her pregnancy and an increased risk of giving birth to a child with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This was the finding of a recent study that analyzed more than 196,000 children born between 2000 and 2010. The research, published in the online journal JAMA Pediatrics, Nov. 28, was conducted by Ousseny Zerbo, Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente […]
By James Pearson | SEOUL SEOUL Impoverished North Korea is not known for a bustling manufacturing industry but has earned a reputation in some African states for a highly visible export – its huge socialist-style statues. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions aimed at cutting North Korea’s annual export revenue by a quarter in response to its fifth and largest nuclear test in September. […]
Saudi Arabia’s aviation agency was attacked last month by an aggressive computer virus intended to disrupt high-profile government targets, officials and experts said on Thursday. The attack, which experts say emanated from outside the country, used a version of Shamoon, malware used to target the Saudi energy sector four years ago. Similar kinds of data-clearing software were used in 2014 against the Las Vegas Sands and Sony. […]
Probability matrices in MMSBM. Credit: Antonia Godoy-Lorite et al. PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.1606316113 The internet is rife with recommendation systems, suggesting movies you should watch or people you should date. These systems are tuned to match people with items, based on the assumption that similar people buy similar things and have similar preferences. In other words, an algorithm predicts which items you will like based only on your, and […]
Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what’s broadly defined as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we’re not talking about, which is human-level AI […]
By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen | COPENHAGEN COPENHAGEN Maersk Line, the world’s biggest shipping company, is to buy smaller rival Hamburg Süd, joining a wave of M&A in the industry just over two months after the Danish company revealed plans to bolster its transport operations. The deal, announced by parent A.P. Moller-Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) on Thursday, is the group’s first full takeover in more than a decade and highlights a […]
Just in time for winter, we’re getting our first look at Game of Thrones: Season 7. HBO’s “Coming in 2017” preview, which aired on TV and has not officially been posted online, debuted the first footage of Season 7 (via Watchers on the Wall). It’s fairly innocuous, but still an exciting tease of some changes that are already afoot. Check out screenshots of the three scenes featured below. […]
It’s a new world: Donald Trump’s world. As 2017 hits, we’re going to see the US government’s attitude towards a range of technologies change, whether it be about a lighter touch on regulation or a harsher look at companies that import heavily from China. I hate making stock predictions. I’m going to try to stick to what I think you should expect and do, as […]
