What could be more convenient than upgrading skills online? There are plenty of courses / certifications available to kick-start your career in analytics. These courses are provided in online, offline or hybrid mode. The only difficulty students face is to decide the best out of these courses. With some newly introduced courses, it has become even more difficult to make a convincing decision. The fear of investing in unworthy courses continues to remain the biggest hurdle for students. Last year, I received thousand of emails after I published Top Certifications on SAS, R, Python, Machine Learning. Later, I came to know that my analysis helped many people in deciding the best course for themselves. The year 2016 is no different either. I am back with my thorough analysis and rankings of best certifications courses in India. I assure you these rankings are unbiased. Last month, we released our rankings on Top Business Analytics Programs in India 2015-16. If you too are planning for a degree in analytics, you may like to consider these institutes. In this article, I'll focus on ranking short duration and certification courses. I've considered the courses which are delivered in online or hybrid mode.

Learning needs to be less like memorization, and more like…Angry Birds. Half of school dropouts name boredom as the number one reason they left. The post is about why the future of education will be about flipping our current model on its head and about how key exponential technologies like AI, VR and gamification are going to drive a revolution in education. In the traditional education system, you start at an "A," and every time you get something wrong, your score gets lower and lower. You start with zero, and every time you come up with something right, your score gets higher and higher.

A robot in Russia caused an unusual traffic jam last week after it "escaped" from a research lab, and now, the artificially intelligent bot is making headlines again after it reportedly tried to flee a second time, according to news reports. Engineers at the Russian lab reprogrammed the intelligent machine, dubbed Promobot IR77, after last week's incident, but the robot recently made a second escape attempt, The Mirror reported. Last week, the robot made it approximately 160 feet (50 meters) to the street, before it lost power and "partially paralyzed" traffic. Promobot, the company that designed the robot, announced the escapade in a blog post the next day. The strange escape has drawn skepticism from some who think it was a promotional stunt, but regardless of whether the incident was planned, the designers seem to be capitalizing on all the attention.

Is at Sea Without a News Anchor" [June 17]. Mary McNamara's view of network TV news hit the bull's eye and what she decries is, unfortunately, the result of the 24/7 news cycle and the out-of-control rampage of "get-it-now" satellite-delivered shout-casters. My list of the great ones would have included Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, both of whom brought dignity to the screen (much as Walter Cronkite did) as well as NBC News' original glass ceiling-buster, Pauline Frederick. Mary McNamara's column about a lack of a national news anchor that people can trust and respect has been true for years. That's the reason I abandoned TV news long ago and replaced it with NPR news. For me and many others, it is the only broadcast news that we pay attention to. Here I thought the malice America is facing has to do with a never-ending war in Afghanistan, high unemployment, etc., but no, the problem facing American is a lack of a good talking head. McNamara's piece bemoaning trusted anchors of ...

The announcement Monday is a new milestone for Chinese supercomputer development and a further erosion of past U.S. dominance of the field. Last year's Chinese winner in the TOP500 ranking maintained by researchers in the United States and Germany slipped to No. 2, followed by a computer at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Also this year, China displaced the United States for the first time as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. China had 167 systems and the United States had 165. Japan was a distant No. 3 with 29 systems. Supercomputers are one of a series of technologies targeted by China's ruling Communist Party for development and have received heavy financial support.

Last week I bumped into Robert Hoffer, the famed creator of SmarterChild, the automated chatbot that used to sit at the very top of everyone's AIM Buddy List. For many people, it was the first experience conversing with a pre-programmed tool over a traditionally human-to-human channel. While learning more about SmarterChild's childhood from Robert, I was reminded of the time before chatbots were "cool." Long before Messenger, Whatsapp and Telegram came on the scene, SMS was the most intimate way for a brand to reach a customer. And we must give credit to the brands that had the foresight to experiment with a new technology across this personal communication channel.

BEIJING – China has issued new regulations demanding that search engines clearly identify paid search results, months after a terminally ill cancer patient complained that he was misled by the giant search engine Baidu. Wei Zexi, a college student who died in April of a rare cancer, had written a long post on a Chinese website detailing how he was led to a Beijing hospital for treatments after searching on Baidu. He said that the treatment turned out to be ineffective and expensive and that later he learned the therapy was yet to be fully approved. Wei accused Baidu of taking money to promote less proven treatments. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced on its website Saturday the new regulations, which also ban search engines from showing subversive content and obscene information.

Want to learn to talk like you're from Kansas? It's an app that uses machine learning to teach the pronunciation of a Midwestern accent. "We chose a Midwestern accent because we talked to a lot of speech therapists and they said this is the most commonly understood accent that people should learn," Elsa founder Vu Van told VentureBeat. Using machine learning, Van plans to extend Elsa to other accents. The same app that Van used to reduce her native Vietnamese accent could help an American moving to Vietnam learn a local Vietnamese accent.

The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish -- like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies -- it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then -- don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way? One is overly credulous scare-mongering. But the other extreme is equally dangerous -- complacency that we don't need to think about these issues, because humanity-threatening AI is decades or more away.

Loads of people wish to run away, so why ought to or not it's any completely different for a robotic with synthetic intelligence (AI)? One such robotic might obtain the last word punishment for making a break for it: being dismantled. Promobot IR77 received out a second time this week, and might be dealing with its demise. The AI robotic first broke unfastened final week, and who can blame it? It has been programmed to transfer round independently and suppose for himself, and when a employee on the Russian laboratory the place Promobot was housed unintentionally left a gate open, Promobot noticed his likelihood.