There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new… In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term "technological unemployment"… We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. There is a long Wikipedia article on technological unemployment, where you can learn that people have been concerned about it for centuries… long before we could even imagine robots and computers. It is a recurrent theme of western thought.

Digital means money -- that's a no-brainer. From traditional conservative companies to progressive enterprises, all are looking to leverage'digital' to compose their future. Over the next few years, new technologies, a changing workforce, and new consumer expectations will create significant change, opportunity and threat. These highly disruptive trends will not only affect us as individuals, they will also impact the organisations we work in and our overall society. The work that got us to the present won't get us to the future because the digital economy requires completely different skill sets and attitudes, as well as greater expectations.

AUC (Area under the ROC curve) is an important performance measure for applications where the data is highly imbalanced. Learning to maximize AUC performance is thus an important research problem. Using a max-margin based surrogate loss function, AUC optimization problem can be approximated as a pairwise rankSVM learning problem. Batch learning methods for solving the kernelized version of this problem suffer from scalability and may not result in sparse classifiers. Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the development of online or single-pass online learning algorithms that design a classifier by maximizing the AUC performance. The AUC performance of nonlinear classifiers, designed using online methods, is not comparable with that of nonlinear classifiers designed using batch learning algorithms on many real-world datasets. Motivated by these observations, we design a scalable algorithm for maximizing AUC performance by greedily adding the required number of basis functions into the classifier model. The resulting sparse classifiers perform faster inference. Our experimental results show that the level of sparsity achievable can be order of magnitude smaller than the Kernel RankSVM model without affecting the AUC performance much.

Few people picked up on one of the most interesting things that David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, said at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. In an offhanded comment, Marcus noted that users could book airline tickets and hotels through Hipmunk's new chatbot and that the experience was "pretty close to having a native app, and definitely better than mobile web." Just think about that for a second. Facebook launched its chatbot platform in April -- around the same time that we opened our Bot Shop. This generation of chatbots has only been around for about eight months, but in that short time they are already starting to surpass the mobile web.

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the "sculpting evolution" group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If the residents of Nantucket agree, Esvelt intends to use those tools to rewrite the DNA of white-footed mice to make them immune to the bacteria that cause Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. He and his team would breed the mice in the laboratory and then, as an initial experiment, release them on an uninhabited island. If the number of infected ticks begins to plummet, he would seek permission to repeat the process on Nantucket and on nearby Martha's Vineyard. More than a quarter of Nantucket's residents have been infected with Lyme, which has become one of the most rapidly spreading diseases in the United States. The illness is often accompanied by a red bull's-eye rash, along with fever and chills. When the disease is caught early enough, it can be cured in most cases with a single course of antibiotics. For many people, though, pain and neurological symptoms can persist for years. In communities throughout the Northeast, the fear of ticks has changed the nature of summer itself--few parents these days would permit a child to run barefoot through the grass or wander blithely into the woods. "What if we could wave our hands and make this problem go away?" Esvelt asked the two dozen officials and members of the public who had assembled at the island's police station for his presentation. He explained that white-footed mice are the principal reservoir of Lyme disease, which they pass, through ticks, to humans.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Many of us are off this week and hitting the road. Happily, the average price of self-serve regular gas in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area is at the lowest level in eight years. Pump prices in the region are down nearly $2 a gallon from the all-time highs reached in October 2012, when refinery outages and heightened fears of lower supplies in California sent prices soaring. Changes at the top: At least eight companies will be getting new chief executives this coming weekend.

Since 2014, $6B USD has been raised by 900 startups globally in AI, making it one of the hottest technology themes. AI is forecasted to generate $47B USD in annual revenues and replace 5 million jobs globally by 2020. From entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to tech giants like Facebook and Google, enormous resources and focus is being directed towards pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities and applications. What role can AI play in shaping India's economy and innovation culture? With over 200 startups leading the way, there is a real opportunity for every entrepreneur to make a mark in this sunrise sector.

Fast food restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) launched its first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cafe in Beijing, and said it plans to create more innovative and interesting dining experiences for customers. With the cooperation of Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine, KFC started its first smart restaurant in the Financial Street area in Beijing on Friday, the People's Daily reported on Sunday. At the cafe, customers are able to take pictures with a machine, which will recognise the diner's face, sex, age, mood and other features, then help to recommend suitable food and set meals and complete the ordering process. "If the consumer visits the store again and takes a picture with the machine, it will be able to recognize his or her face and show the previous purchase history, remember the customer's dining habits, and help to place an order faster," said Wu Zhongqin, Deputy Director of the Institute of Deep Learning of Baidu Inc, which helped to develop the technology. With another machine with an augmented reality, customers are able to interact with the machine, change facial expressions by shaking their heads in front of the machine, take photos, and save them to their phones.

The promise of machine learning has a science fiction flavor to it: computer programs that learn from their experiences and get better and better at what they do. So is machine learning fact or fiction? The global marketplace answers this question emphatically: Machine learning is not just real; it is a booming field of technology that is being applied in countless artificial intelligence (AI) applications, ranging from crop monitoring and drug development to fraud detection and autonomous vehicles. Collectively, the global AI market is expected to be worth more than $16 billion by 2022, according to the research firm MarketsandMarkets.[1] In the life sciences arena, researchers are leveraging machine learning in their work to drive groundbreaking discoveries that may help improve the health and wellbeing of people.

BEIJING: Fast food restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) launched its first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cafe in Beijing, and said it plans to create more innovative and interesting dining experiences for customers. With the cooperation of Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine, KFC started its first smart restaurant in the Financial Street area in Beijing on Friday, the People's Daily reported on Sunday. At the cafe, customers are able to take pictures with a machine, which will recognise the diner's face, sex, age, mood and other features, then help to recommend suitable food and set meals and complete the ordering process. "If the consumer visits the store again and takes a picture with the machine, it will be able to recognize his or her face and show the previous purchase history, remember the customer's dining habits, and help to place an order faster," said Wu Zhongqin, Deputy Director of the Institute of Deep Learning of Baidu Inc, which helped to develop the technology. With another machine with an augmented reality, customers are able to interact with the machine, change facial expressions by shaking their heads in front of the machine, take photos, and save them to their phones.