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Nest's outdoor facial recognition camera is available in Europe

Engadget

Nest released the weather-ready version of its facial recognition-equipped camera, the Cam IQ outdoor, last fall in the US. The device would theoretically notify you only if it recorded someone it hadn't seen before, so your kids playing in the yard wouldn't trip the alarm. Now, half a year later, the camera is headed to Europe. The Cam IQ outdoor has impressive specs to aid its facial recognition tech, with a 4K digital sensor, HDR and 1080p HD video and the ability to zoom in 12x. It's IP66 weather-certified to endure rain, snow and wind; It needs to be constantly plugged in, but at least you won't have to worry about running out of battery.


Cambridge Analytica tries to shoot down Facebook data sharing claims

Engadget

Cambridge Analytica is facing incredible pressure over the Facebook data sharing scandal -- and not surprisingly, it's determined to share its version of events before Mark Zuckerberg testifies in congressional hearings. The company has posted a "series of facts" that challenge some of the allegations made against the company. Not surprisingly, it started by insisting that it didn't do anything illegal: GSR "legally obtained" the data about Facebook users, and "did not illegally or inappropriately" scoop up and share data. Later on, it maintained that it "only collects data with informed consent." After that, Cambridge Analytica jumped into specifics.


It ain't Artificial Intelligence: In demand, tech CXOs write own cheques

#artificialintelligence

NEW DELHI: Barun Gorain joined Hindustan Zinc Ltd as chief technology and innovation officer two months ago, moving from Barrick Gold in Canada, one of the many CXO-level hires that Indian companies have been making in the buzzing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the Internet of things (IoT) and robotic process automation (RPA). Other recent instances of Indians returning home with domain knowledge in these emerging technologies include Raghuram Velega, who left his job at a San Francisco-based cognitive computing company to join Reliance Jio Infocomm as vice-president, head, big data and analytics. Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive Santanu Bhattacharya joined Bharti Airtel as chief data scientist and Ayush Sharma moved from Silicon Valley to join Reliance Jio as senior vicepresident of engineering and technology. Search firms like Korn Ferry, EMA Partners, Transearch and Hunt Partners say there's a paucity of experts in these fields, leading to a jump in salaries of new hires by as much as 50%, most of them from overseas. Salaries for such executives are at Rs 1-2 crore annually but can be even higher.


Here's how the US needs to prepare for the age of artificial intelligence

#artificialintelligence

Written on 06 April 2018. But what would a good AI plan actually look like? Politicians worldwide are stealing one of the US government's best ideas by drawing up ambitious plans to make the most of advances in artificial intelligence. These AI manifestos, penned in Paris, Beijing, and elsewhere, follow the example of the Obama administration, which released a report on the technology toward the end of its tenure. This report did not include funding, but it made it clear that AI should be a key focus of government strategy.


Johnson Center conference addresses cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence - Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs

#artificialintelligence

Most companies are not very well prepared for the weaponizing of cyberspace by foreign governments. That was part of an assessment of the current state of cyberspace by Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet, Inc. and CEO of Google. Schmidt gave the remarks during his keynote address at the two-day annual conference of the Yale Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which kicked off on April 6. This year's conference, "Understanding Cyberwarfare and Artificial Intelligence," drew both academics and practitioners. This was the seventh annual conference of the Johnson Center, which was made possible by Dr. Henry Kissinger's donation of his papers to Yale and a generous gift from Charles B. Johnson '54 and Nicholas F. Brady '52.


Hyperparameters and Tuning Strategies for Random Forest

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The random forest algorithm (RF) has several hyperparameters that have to be set by the user, e.g., the number of observations drawn randomly for each tree and whether they are drawn with or without replacement, the number of variables drawn randomly for each split, the splitting rule, the minimum number of samples that a node must contain and the number of trees. In this paper, we first provide a literature review on the parameters' influence on the prediction performance and on variable importance measures, also considering interactions between hyperparameters. It is well known that in most cases RF works reasonably well with the default values of the hyperparameters specified in software packages. Nevertheless, tuning the hyperparameters can improve the performance of RF. In the second part of this paper, after a brief overview of tuning strategies we demonstrate the application of one of the most established tuning strategies, model-based optimization (MBO). To make it easier to use, we provide the tuneRanger R package that tunes RF with MBO automatically. In a benchmark study on several datasets, we compare the prediction performance and runtime of tuneRanger with other tuning implementations in R and RF with default hyperparameters.


When optimizing nonlinear objectives is no harder than linear objectives

arXiv.org Machine Learning

However, many objectives of practical interest are more complex than simply average loss. Examples include balancing performance or loss with fairness across people, as well as balancing precision and recall. We prove that, from a computational perspective, fairly general families of complex objectives are not significantly harder to optimize than standard averages, by providing polynomial-time reductions, i.e., algorithms that optimize complex objectives using linear optimizers. The families of objectives included are arbitrary continuous functions of average group performances and also convex objectives. We illustrate with applications to fair machine learning, fair optimization and F1-scores.


A review of possible effects of cognitive biases on interpretation of rule-based machine learning models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper investigates to what extent do cognitive biases affect human understanding of interpretable machine learning models, in particular of rules discovered from data. Twenty cognitive biases (illusions, effects) are covered, as are possibly effective debiasing techniques that can be adopted by designers of machine learning algorithms and software. While there seems no universal approach for eliminating all the identified cognitive biases, it follows from our analysis that the effect of most biases can be ameliorated by making rule-based models more concise. Due to lack of previous research, our review transfers general results obtained in cognitive psychology to the domain of machine learning. It needs to be succeeded by empirical studies specifically aimed at the machine learning domain.


LEARNING PATH: R: Machine Learning and Deep Learning with R

@machinelearnbot

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Deep Learning is the next big thing and a part of machine learning. Its favorable results in applications with huge and complex data is remarkable. R is one of the most popular programming languages among the data science professionals. So, if you're a data science professional who wants to learn machine learning and deep learning with R, then go for this Learning Path.


Researcher warns that sex robots could 'change humanity forever'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A computer scientist featured in a new documentary is claiming that sex robots could forever change humanity by making sex too accessible. The documentary is called'Sex Robots and Us', and in it Noel Sharkey warns of the damage these robots, which are growing in popularity, can do to society. In the film Sharkey cautions that the machines could make sex'too easy' and'change humanity completely'. Computer scientist Noel Sharkey has expressed concern over the negative consequences of sex robots in a new documentary called'Sex Robots and Us'. He claims that the technology will make sex easier to obtain and permanently change society.