The San Francisco-based company's second-quarter revenue rose 63% from the prior year to $2.8 billion, while gross bookings, a measure of the overall demand for its ride and delivery services, jumped 41% to about $12 billion, according to a financial statement released by Uber. The company narrowed its loss to $891 million in the second quarter from $1.1 billion a year ago. The loss was, however, wider than the $550 million loss in the first quarter of this year, not including a $3 billion gain from the sales of its southeast Asian and Russian operations. The company is spending more money on new businesses such as food delivery and scooters, according to an Uber spokesman. Mr. Khosrowshahi, who replaced ousted Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick last August, has worked to cut expenses at the ride-hailing company in preparation for an initial public offering. This year, he has sold divisions such as the money-losing U.S. car leasing business to Fair.com and its southeast Asian operations to rival Grab Inc.

Following a particular news story online is an important but difficult task, as the relevant information is often scattered across different domains/sources (e.g., news articles, blogs, comments, tweets), presented in various formats and language styles, and may overlap with thousands of other stories. In this work we join the areas of topic tracking and entity disambiguation, and propose a framework named Story Disambiguation - a cross-domain story tracking approach that builds on real-time entity disambiguation and a learning-to-rank framework to represent and update the rich semantic structure of news stories. Given a target news story, specified by a seed set of documents, the goal is to effectively select new story-relevant documents from an incoming document stream. We represent stories as entity graphs and we model the story tracking problem as a learning-to-rank task. This enables us to track content with high accuracy, from multiple domains, in real-time. We study a range of text, entity and graph based features to understand which type of features are most effective for representing stories. We further propose new semi-supervised learning techniques to automatically update the story representation over time. Our empirical study shows that we outperform the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods for tracking mixed-domain document streams, while requiring fewer labeled data to seed the tracked stories. This is particularly the case for local news stories that are easily over shadowed by other trending stories, and for complex news stories with ambiguous content in noisy stream environments.

Reinventing the future of work can lead to shared prosperity. An artificial intelligence-driven career adviser, an industrial smart glove, freelance insurance, a tactile laptop for the visually impaired. The 12 European finalists of the global MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge are "improving economic opportunity for workers," according to the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. The challenge is the flagship program of the initiative, and this year the initiative launched a worldwide competition divided into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. "If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity," Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the initiative, said in a statement.

England's Grand National run at Aintree is gruelling. It has 30 fences, two with open ditches, in a distance of 2.25 miles that's completed twice. AI has just moved up the field in the eHealth equivalent. An AI project at London's Moorfields Eye Hospital with Google's DeepMind has accurately diagnosed eye conditions from scans. As ophthalmologists' workloads and their complexities increase, diagnostic imaging is expanding faster than specialists can interpret the results.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

Running high-resolution physical models is computationally expensive and essential for many disciplines. Agriculture, transportation, and energy are sectors that depend on high-resolution weather models, which typically consume many hours of large High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to deliver timely results. Many users cannot afford to run the desired resolution and are forced to use low resolution output. One simple solution is to interpolate results for visualization. It is also possible to combine an ensemble of low resolution models to obtain a better prediction. However, these approaches fail to capture the redundant information and patterns in the low-resolution input that could help improve the quality of prediction. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a strategy based on a deep neural network to learn a high-resolution representation from low-resolution predictions using weather forecast as a practical use case. We take a supervised learning approach, since obtaining labeled data can be done automatically. Our results show significant improvement when compared with standard practices and the strategy is still lightweight enough to run on modest computer systems.

And a pinnacle of success in the context of technological advancements is the field of artificial intelligence, also called AI. In current times, AI is utilized immensely in a variety of sectors such as health, e-commerce, retail, automotive, defense and security, chemical plants, packaging, construction, and BFSI. This indicates that AI has found immense potential in myriad applications, thus giving rise to the global artificial intelligence and cognitive computing market. Rising disposable incomes and changing lifestyles have primarily caused an increase in the demand for enhanced systems to exist in various walks of life. Such a high demand is propelling the market to experience extensive growth too. A phenomenal progress in the development of computers as well as internet facilities has primarily been responsible for improving different functions of systems, wherein a computer is highly needed.

Several statistical and machine learning methods are proposed to estimate the type and intensity of physical load and accumulated fatigue . They are based on the statistical analysis of accumulated and moving window data subsets with construction of a kurtosis-skewness diagram. This approach was applied to the data gathered by the wearable heart monitor for various types and levels of physical activities, and for people with various physical conditions. The different levels of physical activities, loads, and fitness can be distinguished from the kurtosis-skewness diagram, and their evolution can be monitored. Several metrics for estimation of the instant effect and accumulated effect (physical fatigue) of physical loads were proposed. The data and results presented allow to extend application of these methods for modeling and characterization of complex human activity patterns, for example, to estimate the actual and accumulated physical load and fatigue, model the potential dangerous development, and give cautions and advice in real time.

Identifying current and future informal regions within cities remains a crucial issue for policymakers and governments in developing countries. The delineation process of identifying such regions in cities requires a lot of resources. While there are various studies that identify informal settlements based on satellite image classification, relying on both supervised or unsupervised machine learning approaches, these models either require multiple input data to function or need further development with regards to precision. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for identifying and predicting informal settlements using only street intersections data, regardless of the variation of urban form, number of floors, materials used for construction or street width. With such minimal input data, we attempt to provide planners and policy-makers with a pragmatic tool that can aid in identifying informal zones in cities. The algorithm of the model is based on spatial statistics and a machine learning approach, using Multinomial Logistic Regression (MNL) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The proposed model relies on defining informal settlements based on two ubiquitous characteristics that these regions tend to be filled in with smaller subdivided lots of housing relative to the formal areas within the local context, and the paucity of services and infrastructure within the boundary of these settlements that require relatively bigger lots. We applied the model in five major cities in Egypt and India that have spatial structures in which informality is present. These cities are Greater Cairo, Alexandria, Hurghada and Minya in Egypt, and Mumbai in India. The predictSLUMS model shows high validity and accuracy for identifying and predicting informality within the same city the model was trained on or in different ones of a similar context.

Designing a reliable natural language (NL) interface for querying tables has been a longtime goal of researchers in both the data management and natural language processing (NLP) communities. Such an interface receives as input an NL question, translates it into a formal query, executes the query and returns the results. Errors in the translation process are not uncommon, and users typically struggle to understand whether their query has been mapped correctly. We address this problem by explaining the obtained formal queries to non-expert users. Two methods for query explanations are presented: the first translates queries into NL, while the second method provides a graphic representation of the query cell-based provenance (in its execution on a given table). Our solution augments a state-of-the-art NL interface over web tables, enhancing it in both its training and deployment phase. Experiments, including a user study conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, show our solution to improve both the correctness and reliability of an NL interface.