Robots of all shapes and sizes took turns skiing, with varying degrees of success, down a course near Pyeongchang in what is believed to be the first robot skiing competition in the world. All entrants were required to measure more than 50cm in height, stand on'two legs', have joints resembling elbow and knees, an independent power system and use ski plates and poles.

Oracle is boosting its cloud platform with 12 new global regions and autonomous capabilities as it tries to regain ground following a disappointing quarter for Oracle cloud services and continues to lag behind Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. At its CloudWorld event in New York on Monday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that enterprises are not going to want to bring the same level of complication as their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, and that automation is going to help them simplify their IT investments by cutting down on labor costs and driving efficiency, following a broader trend among cloud services vendors who are using machine learning to capture more customers. Oracle executives were brought on stage throughout the keynote to demonstrate new capabilities in Oracle cloud services centered around automation, including expansion of its Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services beyond the Oracle Autonomous Database, which Oracle's Larry Ellison spoke about in September. He said the self-healing database, which automates patching cycles, could prevent companies from being the next Equifax. Oracle will expand on this offering with multiple autonomous services in 2018, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service for analytics, Oracle Autonomous Database OLTP for transactional and mixed workloads, and Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database.

Over the course of the next two weeks, there will be dizzying stunts, high-flying acrobatics, and record-breaking heights attained -- oh, and the Olympic athletes will compete, too. The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang opened in seriously impressive fashion, with more than 1,200 Intel Shooting Star drones serving as the stars of the show. The 1,218 drones set a new Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, and Intel notes that its advanced drone technology will be making appearances and "enhance the Olympic Games through 2024." The Intel drones' performance marked the first-ever time that a Winter Olympics' saw a drone light show, and also won recognition as "most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously." While the world record flight was actually prerecorded for the event, it doesn't lessen the impressiveness of the feat.

Summary: How about a deep learning technique based on decision trees that outperforms CNNs and RNNs, runs on your ordinary desktop, and trains with relatively small datasets. This could be a major disruptor for AI. Suppose I told you that there is an algorithm that regularly beats the performance of CNNs and RNNs at image and text classification. Well there is one just announced by researchers Zhi-Hua Zhou and Ji Feng of the National Key Lab for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. This is the first installment in a series of "Off the Beaten Path" articles that will focus on methods that advance data science that are off the mainstream of development.

Japanese millennials are apathetic about romance, and everyone knows it. But according to Hirokazu Nakamura, chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Tokyo-based startup Eureka Inc., young people are not losing interest in love itself. It is just too much hassle for young people," Nakamura said at a business conference this month organized by Eureka, the developer of Japan's popular dating app Pairs. "They have been placed in a situation where finding love is too difficult. They just have too many things that they want to prioritize." While the surge in people remaining single may seem unstoppable, online dating apps have become increasingly popular among young Japanese, who are more inclined to pursue better kosupa (cost-performance) in finding love. Eureka's Pairs is just one of many dating apps aimed at making the process of finding a soulmate as easy as tapping and swiping on a smartphone screen. When you open Pairs, a list of photos and profiles of other registered members appears on the screen. A user who finds someone attractive can send that person a "like." If it is accepted, the pair become a "match" and start an online conversation. Registration is free but male participants must pay a monthly fee of ¥3,480 if they want to exchange unlimited messages. Between its launch in 2012 and this month, the app has been accessed by more than 7 million registered users, and some 4,000 every month enter a relationship, according to the company. About 80 percent of users are in their 20s to 30s. Taishi and Ayumi Kobayashi, both 29, are one such couple. They married after becoming a match in Pairs in July 2015. Although skeptical about online dating at first, Taishi, who works in the financial sector, said that meeting someone via software turned out to be easy and effective as it increases the chance of finding someone "attractive." "Even if you want to have a relationship with people around you, like in the same school or in the same circle, it's always difficult to find someone who shares the same values," he said. With the app, "I could meet someone who I had absolutely no chance of meeting before." Ayumi also said match-making apps fit well with young people's lifestyles, as it makes finding love "efficient." "I often used the app during my free time.

Mark Hammond will speak on industrial applications of reinforcement learning at the AI Conference in Beijing, April 10-13, 2018. Hurry--early price ends March 9. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Mark Hammond, founder and CEO of Bonsai, a startup at the forefront of developing AI systems in industrial settings. While many articles have been written about developments in computer vision, speech recognition, and autonomous vehicles, I'm particularly excited about near-term applications of AI to manufacturing, robotics, and industrial automation.

Loom Systems Ltd. is joining the growing ranks of companies applying artificial intelligence to the task of making sense out of the mass of data that overwhelms security professionals. The company today is announcing an operational analytics platform for real-time detection and resolution that reads log files and looks for anomalies. The Tel Aviv-based company says it does this by mathematically modeling the ways in which humans analyze such data, and then simulating the process via machine learning. It correlates each metric to baseline patterns in order to detect anomalies and predict future trends. The result is what the company claims is a 45 percent reduction in mean-time-to-resolution and a 93 percent reduction in log file clutter.

NEW DELHI: The ministry of electronics and IT has formed four committees to prepare a roadmap for artificial intelligence for the country, said Ravi Shankar Prasad, union minister of electronics and IT on Friday. The committees will be headed by IIT director and industry experts from bodies such as Nasscom he added. The four committees will be for Citizen Centric Services; Data platforms; Skilling, reskilling and R&D; Legal regulatory and cybersecurity. Prasad said that the ministry will conduct high level research in these areas. "We must learn new dimensions of AI," he said.

Amazon has started designing a custom artificial intelligence chip that would power future Echo devices and improve the quality and response time of its Alexa voice assistant, according to a report today from The Information. The move closely follows rivals Apple and Google, both of which have already developed and deployed custom AI hardware at various scales. AI tasks, because they are so computationally intensive, often need custom-designed chips for the devices themselves and even custom-designed servers for data centers where AI algorithms are often trained, developed, and deployed from the cloud. While Amazon is unlikely to physically produce the chips, given its lack of both fabrication experience and a manufacturing presence in China, the news does pose a risk to the businesses of companies like Nvidia and Intel. Both companies have shifted large portions of their chipmaking expertise to AI and the future of the burgeoning field, and both make money by designing and manufacturing chips for companies like Apple, Amazon, and others.

While crowdsourcing has become an important means to label data, crowdworkers are not always experts---sometimes they can even be adversarial. Therefore, there is great interest in estimating the ground truth from unreliable labels produced by crowdworkers. The Dawid and Skene (DS) model is one of the most well-known models in the study of crowdsourcing. Despite its practical popularity, theoretical error analysis for the DS model has been conducted only under restrictive assumptions on, e.g., class priors, confusion matrices, and the number of labels each worker provides. In this paper, we derive a minimax error rate under more practical setting for a broader class of crowdsourcing models that includes the DS model as a special case. We further propose the worker clustering model, which is more practical than the DS model under real crowdsourcing settings. Note that the wide applicability of our theoretical analysis allows us to immediately investigate the behavior of this proposed model. Experimental results showed that there is a strong similarity between the lower bound of the minimax error rate derived by our theoretical analysis and the empirical error of the estimated value.