I love to write about face recognition, image recognition and all the other cool things you can build with machine learning. Whenever possible, I try to include code examples or even write libraries/APIs to make it as easy as possible for a developer to play around with these fun technologies. But the number one question I get asked is "How in the world do I get all these open source libraries installed and working on my computer?" If you aren't a long-time Linux user, it can be really hard to figure out how to get a system fully configured with all the required machine learning libraries and tools like TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, OpenCV, and dlib. The majority of the issues that get filed on my own open source projects are about how to install these tools.

I am spending some cycles on my algorithmic rotoscope work -- which is basically a stationary exercise bicycle for my learning about what is and what is not Machine Learning. I am using it to help me understand and tell stories about Machine Learning by creating images using Machine Learning that I can use in my Machine Learning storytelling. Picture a bunch of Machine Learning gears all working together to help make sense of what I'm doing, and WTF I am talking about? As I'm writing a story on how image style transfer Machine Learning could be put to use by libraries, museums, and collection curators, I'm reminded of what a con machine learning will be in the future, and how it will be a vehicle for the extraction of value and outright theft. My image style transfer work is just one tiny slice of this pie.

Hedge fund Renaissance Technologies is looked upon by Wall Street with awe and envy in equal measure. Particularly, Medallion Fund, an employees only fund it runs. Bloomberg last year wrote the fund has returned more than $55 billion, making it more profitable than funds run by feted veterans such as George Soros. The Renaissance flagship fund, which will turn 30 next year, has returned more than 25% profits in most of its years of investing. Money doubles in a little more than three years at that rate. Medallion turned in 40% or thereabouts in 13 of its years; at that clip, money almost doubles in just two years.

Google is launching its rival to Amazon's Echo, the Google Home, in the UK as the battle for the living room hots up. The smart speaker, which can play music, control Internet of Things devices, and answer questions, will cost British customers £129, some £20 more than Amazon's Echo, when it launches in Britain on 6 April. Google first launched the Home in the US in November, alongside the introduction of the Pixel phone and Google Assistant AI. Google Assistant is a voice-controlled digital assistant that runs on phones, Google Home and even smart TVs, and can provide context-aware assistance, knowing what sort of environment it's in. Since the initial launch, Google Assistant has gradually come to more Android phones, as well as Android Wear-based smartwatches.

Feature hashing is a powerful technique for handling sparse, high-dimensional features in machine learning. It is fast, simple, memory-efficient, and well suited to online learning scenarios. While an approximation, it has surprisingly low accuracy tradeoffs in many machine learning problems. In this post, I will cover the basics of feature hashing and how to use it for flexible, scalable feature encoding and engineering. I'll also mention feature hashing in the context of Apache Spark's MLlib machine learning library.

Driverless vehicles operated by Uber Technologies Inc will be back on the road in Tempe and Pittsburgh on Monday after one of its self-driving cars crashed in Arizona, the ride-hailing company said.

THE world reeled when Lee Sedol – one of the great modern players of the ancient board game Go – was beaten by Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) program, AlphaGo. The AI managed to outmaneuver Lee at his own game, one which rewards players' strategic judgment and creative analyses. To achieve this, DeepMind provided AlphaGo with the basic framework of the game, recordings of previous games and made it play itself continuously. The software mimics the processes of human learning – and as it went along, AlphaGo learned to be a better player over time. The day of the face-off, AlphaGo beat Lee four games to one and was awarded the highest Go game-master ranking.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used as an unbiased judge, for matters ranging from insurance to economic efficiency. But can it ever truly be unbiased? When Remy Descartes first wrote the phrase cogito ergo sum –'I think therefore I am'– in the 1600s, he could not have been aware of the philosophical questioning that would erupt with the onset of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 20th and 21st century. Every Google search, every video suggested on YouTube and every Siri recommendation is built on machine learning algorithms designed to learn everything about your online habits, in a bid to offer targeted content that you might like. Even outside of consumer-level decisions, AI and algorithms are increasingly being used to root out hidden meanings in billions of lines of genetic code, in the hope of finding a cure to a disease or building machines that can talk for themselves.

Uber has suspended its self-driving car operations after one of its vehicles was involved in a crash in Arizona. The accident left one of the company's driverless Volvos on its side, but fortunately led to no serious injuries. A picture of the crash scene shows two other damaged cars sitting next to the Volvo, one of which has smashed windows and particularly bad dent marks, suggesting the accident happened at some speed. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as "Solti," after his favorite conductor. He couldn't see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that's longer than a football field but feels like a single room. "My desk is all the way at the other end," he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page.