Here are 110 upcoming meetings and conferences, for June 2017 and beyond. You can also find the latest list on KDnuggets Meetings page Color code: Business-Oriented meetings in Blue, Research meetings (with calls for papers and program committee) in green Top countries: India, France, Australia: 3 For the second month in a row, London is the top city: Washington DC, New Orleans, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta: 3 June 2017 Jun 1-2, Deep Learning in Finance Summit. Mention "KDNuggets" and save 18% on tickets. Use code KDNUGGETS to save 15%. Use code KDNUGGETS_DSC17 to save.

Mark Twain famously said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Maybe if Mark Twain were alive today, he'd add "alternative facts" to that list. BusinessWeek in the article "Lies, Damn Lies, and Financial Statistics" reminds us of the management challenges with statisticians or "data scientists" who manipulate the data to create "pseudo-facts" that can lead to sub-optimal or even dangerously wrong decisions. My University of San Francisco class recently did a hackathon with a local data science company. It was insightful for all involved (and I learned of a new machine learning tool – BigML – which I will discuss in a future blog).

Also on Thursday, Daimler and its Chinese joint venture partner BAIC Motor Corporation agreed to upgrade the Mercedes-Benz factory in Beijing to make electric cars. Baidu and Bosch will explore business models and accelerate the commercialization of technologies, Baidu said in a statement. The cooperation "will give the Chinese automotive

As space exploration geared up in the 1960s, scientists were faced with a new dilemma. How could they recognize life on other planets, where it may have evolved very differently--and therefore have a different chemical signature--than it has on Earth? James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, gave this advice: Look for order. Every organism is a brief upwelling of structure from chaos, a self-assembled wonder that must jealously defend its order until the day it dies. Sophisticated information processing is necessary to preserve and pass down the rules for maintaining this order, yet life is built out of the messiest materials: tumbling chemicals, soft cells, and tangled polymers.

There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit," then-Senator Barack Obama said in a 2006 commencement address at Northwestern University. "But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit." What we need, he said, was the ability to "see the world through those who are different from us." Since Obama's speech, the phrase "empathy deficit" has gained a foothold, appearing everywhere from academic journals to mainstream media outlets. Among the varied responses to the 2016 United States presidential election were calls for a greater general empathy. Many liberals tried to peer across party lines to understand the motivations of Donald Trump voters, for instance interviewing Republican constituents and reading books about rural poverty (think J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy or Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land). But these efforts didn't alleviate tension between parties, which might be because empathy-building efforts don't always work.

Race does not stand up scientifically, period. To begin with, if race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic distance between some groups within Africa is as great as the genetic distance between many "racially divergent" groups in the rest of the world. The genetic distance between East Asians and Europeans is shorter than the divergence between Hazda in north-central Tanzania to the Fulani shepherds of West Africa (who live in present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea). Armed with this knowledge, many investigators in the biological sciences have replaced the term "race" with the term "continental ancestry." This in part reflects a rejection of "race" as a biological classification. Every so-called race has the same protein-coding genes, and there is no clear genetic dividing line that subdivides the human species.

Amazon could drop off your package using a drone and parachute, a patent found by GeekWire shows. The patent, titled "Aerial Package Delivery System," was filed on Aug. 26, 2015, and was granted this week. The documents show Amazon is trying to safely deliver your purchased items using a drone without damaging them. "The system can comprise a label that includes a parachute to enable the packages to be dropped from the aerial vehicle, yet land at the package's destination without damage," the patent says. Here's a photo of the drone and parachute delivery included in the documents: Amazon patent shows delivery system using a drone and parachute.

Deep learning is affecting the way we interact with technology. Fortune's article, "Why Deep Learning is Suddenly Changing your Life", describes how deep learning is responsible for the immense improvements in many applications, from voice recognition to language translation. Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to learn by example. Deep learning models, trained by using a large set of labeled data and neural network architectures that contain many layers, routinely achieve impressive accuracy. The combination of large sets of labeled data and advances in computing power has enabled deep learning to impact many industries, from automated driving to medical devices.

A recent study by the CFA Institute (Chartered Financial Analysts) looks at the future of the investment profession. The CFA Institute is a global, not-for-profit organization and is the world's largest association of investment professionals. Currently, there are approximately 2 million workers in the investment industry, managing around $100 trillion in assets for clients. The report looked at the findings from a survey of 1145 investment industry leaders, looking at the trends that will impact the investment business in the future. Here are some of the more interesting findings, particularly those related to how the investment industry will have to adapt to changes in the marketplace.

Chinese Internet company Baidu announced two separate partnership deals on Thursday with top German auto suppliers Robert Bosch and Continental AG to co-develop autonomous driving technology and smart mobility services. The two deals underscore the wave of global partnerships being formed in the fast-moving autonomous vehicle sector, which requires both the competencies of traditional auto suppliers and those of technology companies seasoned in artificial intelligence, robotics and other highly technical software. The collaborations also point to the importance of partnerships between Western carmakers and automotive suppliers and companies based in China, the largest automotive market in the world. China issued a self-driving "roadmap" last year, aiming to have highly or fully autonomous vehicles for sale as early as 2021. Also on Thursday, Daimler and its Chinese joint venture partner BAIC Motor Corporation agreed to upgrade the Mercedes-Benz factory in Beijing to make electric cars.