Master everything you need to transform data into action with our Learning Path: Machine Learning, a curated collection of lessons to take you from the basics to coding your own machine learning algorithms. 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 special two-segment episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Dafna Shahaf, assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her area of research is focused on tools and techniques for overcoming information overload, an area of increasing importance in an attention economy.

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

The Japanese government plans to grant highly skilled foreign people permanent residency after they live in Japan for at least one year, informed sources said Saturday. Currently, people such as researchers and corporate managers can become permanent residents if they stay in the country for at least five years. The government is now working to shorten the required period to basically three years, the sources said. But specialists in artificial intelligence, researchers in regenerative medicine, big investors and other people who satisfy special conditions will only need to reside in Japan for one year to gain permanent residency, they added. Calling it important to take in highly developed human resources for Japan's survival amid intensifying global competition, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe clarified in its growth strategy adopted in June a policy to make the immigration system attractive to highly skilled foreign professionals. As of the end of 2015, 3,840 such foreigners worked in Japan.

A robot testing facility, a robotics research center, a base for renewable energy and a memorial park -- these are some of the plans the irradiated town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, has in mind for rebuilding after the triple reactor meltdown at the nearby Fukushima No. 1 power plant in March 2011. But to pursue those plans, the town needs funds -- a gigantic amount. Namie is hoping to cover its funding needs with central government grants. But the two sides are still negotiating whether the municipality must shoulder a certain amount. Also, there is no guarantee that the grants will continue beyond fiscal 2020, when the central government-designated reconstruction and revitalization period ends.

Learn how intelligent automation in the cloud can enable you to transform your business, make your processes more flexible, reduce your security risk and lower your IT security OpEx 40-60%. Forrester's research shows that leveraging the cloud is difficult because of the cost and complexity of security compliance. Regulated industries like financial services (banking, investments, insurance), retail, and healthcare have to maintain compliance with industry standards (FFIEC, PCI-DSS, HIPAA). Forrester's recommendation is that IT automation is the only way to cost effectively leverage the cloud and deliver security compliance on-premise and in the cloud. Move workloads to the cloud while maintaining continuous security compliance Decrease security risk by removing vulnerabilities Provide evidence of compliance with industry standards (FFIEC.

The cloud market growth today is largely in public clouds. While there is a lot of spend in IT departments in virtualization, these aren't yet translating into a true "cloud" experience within the enterprise. What is stopping the growth of the "private cloud" market? What are the key differences between what is available in the public cloud and the early private clouds? He also introduced their approach to solving the problem - how do we get an enterprise to deploy a private cloud in minutes that can compete with any public cloud in terms of functionality, cost and ease-of-use?

When new technology becomes available to the public, it is often met with trepidation by those who feel it's unnecessary or even hindering. Typically, younger generations embrace technology while older people scorn it, but of course, this is not universal. The "Internet of Things" (IoT) or the growing trend to have internet connectivity in traditionally non-tech devices such as clothing, accessories, and home appliances, offers a lot of benefits to people of all generations. For example, being able to track your health data and fitness information is useful to young millennials trying to be fit, as well as older individuals who need to monitor specific health concerns. Despite the media's fixation on highlighting differences between generations, baby boomers and millennials have a lot in common, even when it comes to technology.

As Google learned, predicting the spread of influenza, even with mountains of data, is notoriously difficult. Nonetheless, bioinformatician and R user Shirin Glander has created a two-part tutorial about predicting flu deaths with R (part 2 here). The analysis is based on just 136 cases of influenza A H7N9 in China in 2013 (data provided in the outbreaks package) so the intent was not to create a generally predictive model, but by providing all of the R code and graphics Shirin has created a useful example of real-word predictive modeling with R. The tutorial covers loading and cleaning the data (including a nice example of using the mice package to impute missing values) and begins with some exploratory data visualizations. I was particularly impressed by the use of density charts (using the stat_density2d ggplot2 aesthetic) to highlight differences in the scatterplots of flu cases ending in death and recovery. Decision trees (implemented using rpart and visualized using fancyRpartPlot from the rattle package) Random Forests (using caret's "rf" training method) Elastic-Net Regularized Generalized Linear Models (using caret's "glmnet" training method) K-nearest neighbors clustering (using caret's "kknn" training method) Penalized Discriminant Analysis (using caret's "pda" training method) and in Part 2, Extreme gradient boosting using the xgboost package and various preprocessing techniques from the caret package Due to the limited data size, there's not too much difference between the models: in each case, 13-15 of the 23 cases were classified correctly.

IMAGE: This is a map of known and predicted bat hosts of filoviruses, showing hotspots in Southeast Asia. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Filoviruses have devastating effects on people and primates, as evidenced by the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For nearly 40 years, preventing spillover events has been hampered by an inability to pinpoint which wildlife species harbor and spread the viruses.

Japan's solid-fuel rocket Epsilon blasted off on September 14, 2013 on its maiden voyage carrying a telescope for remote observation of planets in a launch coordinated from a laptop computer-based command centre. Epsilon is scheduled for a follow up launch at the end of 2016. Uncertainties about U.S. policy in Asia will affect the security postures of allies in the region. Japan, for one, is going to tilt even more toward its own national security space ventures. As the country's defense minister Tomomi Inada urged recently, the time is ripe for Japan to reevaluate how best to protect itself.