Bio: Ahmed Gad received his B.Sc. degree with excellent with honors in information technology from the Faculty of Computers and Information (FCI), Menoufia University, Egypt, in July 2015. For being ranked first in his faculty, he was recommended to work as a teaching assistant in one of the Egyptian institutes in 2015 and then in 2016 to work as a teaching assistant and a researcher in his faculty. His current research interests include deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, digital signal processing, and computer vision.

Water balance models (WBMs) are often employed to understand regional hydrologic cycles over various time scales. Most WBMs, however, are physically-based, and few employ state-of-the-art statistical methods to reconcile independent input measurement uncertainty and bias. Further, few WBMs exist for large lakes, and most large lake WBMs perform additive accounting, with minimal consideration towards input data uncertainty. Here, we introduce a framework for improving a previously developed large lake statistical water balance model (L2SWBM). Focusing on the water balances of Lakes Superior and Michigan-Huron, we demonstrate our new analytical framework, identifying L2SWBMs from 26 alternatives that adequately close the water balance of the lakes with satisfactory computation times compared with the prototype model. We expect our new framework will be used to develop water balance models for other lakes around the world.

We encourage everyone who is interested to apply. Application is open to all, including students, post-doctoral candidates, research staff, industries, startups: to people from across Africa and the world. We are particularly looking for people with a passion for machine learning and who are committed to our mission of strengthening machine learning in Africa. What is the Deep Learning Indaba? The Deep Learning Indaba 2018 will be held over 6 days, from the 9th to the 14th of September at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

CREATIVITY: IT'S AT THE HEART OF WHO WE HUMANS ARE… WE HUMANS ARE SPECIAL, RIGHT? Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? OVER SOME 40,000 YEARS, HUMAN CREATIVITY HAS EXPLODED – FROM DRAWINGS ON CAVE WALLS THROUGH THE GREAT ART OF CENTURIES TO COME…. NOW, SCIENTISTS -- AND ARTISTS –ARE ASKING CAN A ROBOT TRULY IMAGINE AN ORIGINAL MASTERWORK? COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY IS LEADING US TO ASK NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT HUMAN CREATIVITY. IS THIS ESSENTIAL HUMAN TRAIT TRULY UNIQUE? WILL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BE A COMPETITOR? OR CAN IT BE A COLLABORATOR, HELPING US TOWARD STILL UNIMAGINED CREATIONS? SCHAEFER: My first guest is a member of Google Brain's Magenta team. He is currently working on neural network models of sound and music and recently produced a synthesizer that designed its own sounds. SCHAEFER: Also with us, is an Assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He focuses on several surprising creative domains including the culinary arts and fashion and the theoretical foundations of creativity. SCHAEFER: Also with us is an Associate Professor of psychological and brain science at Dartmouth College. He's interested in the neural basis of imagination and in the evolution of human creativity. A former research fellow at MIT's Media lab and artist in residence at Google, please welcome Sougwen Chung.

SAN FRANCISCO: There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by hundreds of thousands of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework _drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into machine learning'' algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world _ even in the U.S.

Rael wanted to combine his years of knowledge in the finance world with advertising. He quit his job soon afterwards and after contacting Dr. Jun Wang who had papers on the very same subject, they both decided to co-found MediaGamma. Rael Cline shares with me how MediaGamma is helping companies harness the power of their customer data to drive better customer-centric products. Hi Rael, thanks for agreeing to share your story on YHP. Can you give us some background information about yourself?

The autonomous vehicle division of Google's parent company will start hauling cargo using self-driving trucks, capping a busy week for next-generation shipping technology. Waymo, the driverless vehicle unit of Alphabet, announced a pilot programme that will have self-driving big rigs transport cargo to the company's data centres in Georgia. Several companies are vying to dominate the nascent self-driving vehicle industry, believing the technology will reshape how humans and goods travel. Waymo has already extensively tested autonomous cars intended to ferry people around. "Now we're turning our attention to things as well", the company said in a blog post, noting that driverless trucks pose unique tech challenges.

– I wish you all a very happy New Year 2017. Payments especially Digital-Payments look really easy; which is why innovation is so hard. In last few years we have seen tsunami kind of disruption in payments services, which led eCommerce, wallet services, Digital-Payments, and remittances to just explode. Artificial intelligence with its subsets like Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Neural Networks made this industry almost to an explosion point. Artificial Intelligence and any discussion around on how this has gotten to so much deeper in Fintech and what benefits it has provided; unfortunately beside Digital-Payments discussion rest of the points will remain out of scope for this post and we will discuss about AI and its merger with FinTech in other posts in later year.

A group of nongovernmental organisations called on the Trump administration to clarify its policy on drone use, saying they are concerned about reported changes to US rules and a lack of transparency in the decision-making process. "We are deeply concerned that the reported new policy, combined with this administration's reported dramatic increase in lethal operations in Yemen and Somalia, will add to an increase in unlawful killings and in civilian casualties," a joint statement said. The organisations include Amnesty International, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU and others. President Donald Trump signed the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act in December. The act funds the US military but also requires Trump to make known to Congress any changes to previous drone policies by March 12.

What a confused hairball of a book. Yet somehow, out of the terrible writing, forests of typo's, vast swaths of formatting errors, splatter-shot jumps of topic (from the minutiae of one company's website to settlement patterns of ancient Madagascar), SOMEHOW out of all the NOISE and IRRELEVANT and DISTRACTING signals, the errors, the garden paths, the red herrings,the level jumps, and general mayhem in this horrific mishmash of a "book", some kind of ... INSIGHT... may begin to organically ... EMERGE... and may contribute to a careful and well-seat-belted reader's useful and possibly even ultimately coherent .... INTUITION ... about Deep Learning.