Next up in our series on top Kagglers is the #1: Owen Zhang (Zhonghua Zhang). Owen comes from an engineering background and currently works as the Chief Product Officer at DataRobot. Back in 2011 I had just switched to analytics as a full time job (after several years working in IT), and was eager to improve my skills and to "prove myself". So it was fortuitous that Kaggle came along with the first Allstate competition. Being in the same industry I felt I had some advantage as well.

This is what has happened with Bitcoin mining (mostly in Tibet/China) since cost-differentiation between miners is no longer about who is using specialized hardware, but about who uses them most cheaply.

We're excited for tomorrow's online discussion about automatic text summarization! During the event, Mohamed AlTantawy, CTO of Agolo, will explain the tech behind their summarization tool. In this blog post, he describes how his team evaluates the quality of summaries produced by their system. Join us tomorrow to learn more and ask questions about the approach! Evaluating the quality of algorithmically created summaries is a very hard task.

When the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo defeated champion Go player Lee Sedol earlier this year, everyone praised its advanced software brain. But the program, developed by Google's DeepMind research team, also had some serious hardware brawn standing behind it. The program was running on custom accelerators that Google's hardware engineers had spent years building in secret, the company said. With the new accelerators plugged into the AlphaGo servers, the program could recognize patterns in its vast library of game data faster than it could with standard processors. The increased speed helped AlphaGo make the kind of quick, intuitive judgments that define how humans approach the game.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering's (IEEE) published "AI's 10 to Watch" – a list of 10 people who are doing phenomenal work in the field of artificial intelligence. A Pakistani researcher Haris Aziz, who had graduated from LUMS, had his name published in this prestigious list for his work in the field related to computational social choice, an intersection between artificial intelligence and economics. Its seems that was just the beginning of the road for Haris Aziz, who is now back in the news for solving an'unsolvable' mathematical situation. Who will get the larger share of the profit from a business? Shall it be equally allocated or otherwise? Perhaps its your child's birthday and its time to cut and divide the cake in a way that none of the children gets sad by his/her share?

Overwatch sounds like a game I shouldn't want to play: a hero-focused team shooter that seems aimed at players given to godlike acts of ballistic skill. But I should know better. This is Blizzard we're talking about, after all, a studio that turned a generic fantasy-verse born from a niche real-time strategy game into a global online roleplaying sensation. After chatting with Overwatch co-director Jeffrey Kaplan, I'm almost convinced it's a game for me--the sort of lapsed, Quake-era clanner who has lost interest in competitive shooters. Here, by way of our lightly edited conversation, is a rundown of why.

A certain type of person might look at the Cowa Robot Suitcase and say (with an irritated, world-weary sigh), "A smart suitcase? When will this Internet of Things end?" I am not that person, and if you are, I have some bad news for you. The Internet of Things (IoT) has no end. There is no product, however trivial, on the do-not-upgrade list.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

This weekend, I hopped on a train for my annual trek to Maker Faire, held this year at the San Mateo Events Center. Over 150,000 people attended this year's show, coming to check out new drones, 3D printers, robots and more. This particular event is the granddaddy of Maker Faires, started by Maker Media and its visionary founder Dale Dougherty. It bills itself as the greatest "Show and Tell on Earth." I've long been following the Maker Movement as a part of my overall interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.

My mother enrolled in a high school physics course in 1968. This wouldn't be especially notable except for the fact that it was the first time in her school's history that girls were permitted to take physics. In prior years, boys were allowed to study physics while girls were expected to enroll in home economics. While my mother acknowledges she was not destined for a career in physics, there were women of her generation that did aspire to enter the scientific field: Dr. France Córdova, Director of the National Science Foundation; Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Persis Drell, former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, are just a few of the women who not only studied physics, but excelled and built their careers in the field despite the barriers of their generation. Women have progressed significantly since 1968.