The most innovative and intuitive leaders of today and tomorrow will help us explore the benefits--and challenges--of integrating some of today's most exciting technical advancements in our companies, industries, economies and our personal lives. Whether you are a lover of technology, all out accepting and absorbing all things new and innovative or if you a cautious skeptic always thinking of a practical balance that these fast-changing technologies should bring, based on principles and ethics, you'll find the speakers' candid approach on topics like AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and other headline trends to be refreshing. The Future of Technology Summit aims to bring innovators, investors, decision makers and consumers together to understand and discuss the ground-breaking future technologies, expand opportunities, build new relationships, find business partners, get capital and more. The organizers of the Future of Technology Summit have resolved to create a bridge between the autism community and technology leadership to jointly identify challenges to help improve the lives of people with autism around the world for a better future together. Future of Technology Summit is scheduled for the following cities in 2018 - Washington D.C, USA Abu Dhabi, UAE Tel Aviv, Israel New Delhi, India

For those of you who don't know, UAE just announced their first Minister of Artificial Intelligence. You heard that right, a Minister of Artificial Intelligence. In October, UAE appointed Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama as the country's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence as part of their cabinet reshuffle. The 27-year-old was appointed as Minister after Sheikh Mohammad announced the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, as a part of their UAE Centennial 2070 objectives. So this might come off as a strange account in the world of politics but apparently, UAE is taking their technology sector very seriously.

Learning a classifier with control on the false-positive rate plays a critical role in many machine learning applications. Existing approaches either introduce prior knowledge dependent label cost or tune parameters based on traditional classifiers, which lack consistency in methodology because they do not strictly adhere to the false-positive rate constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel scoring-thresholding approach, tau-False Positive Learning (tau-FPL) to address this problem. We show the scoring problem which takes the false-positive rate tolerance into accounts can be efficiently solved in linear time, also an out-of-bootstrap thresholding method can transform the learned ranking function into a low false-positive classifier. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show superior performance of the proposed tau-FPL over existing approaches.

There was no dominant theme. As for classics: basic smartwatches and trackers were barely there (those markets are too mature already), AR/VR seemed to be entering a new phase, with practical applications (mostly B2B, from surgery to manufacturing), and drones are… too 2015. Compared to previous years, most booth designs and brands looked neat. CES is the Consumer Electronics Show, but B2B was definitely on the rise. Products tend to be less flashy but address a true business problem. Note that "wow" products are not necessarily good business.

This guide to meant to help web developers, software engineers and other IT industry people to transition into analytics / data science industry. Last week, I was taking a guest lecture with one of the well known institutes in India. Rather (un)surprisingly, more than 60% of the students comprised of experienced IT Professionals. Most of them are facing a common problem, "I have been in IT / software / web development for more than a few years and want to up-skill myself in analytics. I have taken a few MOOCs and have tried using a few books / platforms. Still, I don't get it what should I do next?"

The price of oil has hit $70 a barrel for the first time since 2014. Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, jumped after the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said it would continue to limit supplies.

With CIOs grappling with data management in a multi-cloud environment, HPE's roadmap for 2018 is built around providing a flexible licensing model that helps CIOs make the most out of the cloud. The IT giant has set sight on harnessing new age technologies like AI, automation, and hyperconvergence to help CIOs figure out which data goes where. The company's game plan also targets the SME sector with an affordable flexible licensing model. A tête-à-tête with Som Satsangi, Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India, brings to light the company's drive to embrace new tech; its channel partner strategy for 2018, and how HPE ensures its partners are well-equipped to understand and deliver precisely what a CIO wants. Do you foresee this model making an impact in the SME segment?

This post was written by Ofir Press. Ofir is a graduate student at Tel-Aviv University's Deep Learning Lab. His main focus is on using deep learning for natural language processing. "Due to the recent achievements of artificial neural networks across many different tasks (such as face recognition, object detection and Go), deep learning has become extremely popular. This post aims to be a starting point for those interested in learning more about it. If you already have a basic understanding of linear algebra, calculus, probability and programming: I recommend starting with Stanford's CS231n. The course notes are comprehensive and well-written. The slides for each lesson are also available, and even though the accompanying videos were removed from the official site, re-uploads are quite easy to find online. If you don't have the relevant math background: There is an incredible amount of free material online that can be used to learn the required math knowledge. Gilbert Strang's course on linear algebra is a great introduction to the field. For the other subjects, edX has courses from MIT on both calculus and probability. If you are interested in learning more about machine learning: Andrew Ng's Coursera class is a popular choice as a first class in machine learning. There are other great options available such as Yaser Abu-Mostafa's machine learning course which focuses much more on theory than the Coursera class but it is still relevant for beginners. Knowledge in machine learning isn't really a prerequisite to learning deep learning, but it does help. In addition, learning classical machine learning and not only deep learning is important because it provides a theoretical background and because deep learning isn't always the correct solution. Geoffrey Hinton's Coursera class "Neural Networks for Machine Learn... covers a lot of different topics, and so does Hugo Larochelle's "Neural Networks Class".

Global consulting firm Accenture notes that stand-alone, AI-powered digital voice assistant devices are being used "for a range of consumer services such as playing music, turning the heat and lights on and off, and providing news, weather and sports scores." That's to be expected, of course - that's what they're for - but in an online survey of 21,000 consumers in 19 countries, Accenture discovered that digital virtual assistants are becoming "the central hub for home activities in Australia." Again, that's the whole point of digital assistants - they're meant to be the hub of your digital home, not just answering questions but helping you control your other connected devices, but naturally, it's always good to see this being confirmed by actual users. In addition, "three quarters (75%) of these owners said they use their smartphones less for entertainment, more than two thirds use them less for online purchasing and more than half for general information searches (71% and 55%, respectively)." David Sovie, global MD of Accenture's High Tech business said: "Digital voice assistant devices are challenging smartphones as the central hub for all activities in the home. "These low-cost devices deliver valuable and practical benefits and are relatively easy to use, and their rapidly growing popularity is one of the most striking trends in the high-tech industry." Accenture tells us its survey shows that "ownership levels of digital voice assistant devices in Australia are projected to increase more than five times this year, reaching 23% by the end of 2018 from 4% in 2017.