Big-data is transforming the world. Here you will learn data mining and machine learning techniques to process large datasets and extract valuable knowledge from them. The book is based on Stanford Computer Science course CS246: Mining Massive Datasets (and CS345A: Data Mining). The book, like the course, is designed at the undergraduate computer science level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with further reading references.

Within the last week, the CIA, Obama administration and FBI have all agreed that Russian intervened in the presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. The White House went so far as to say that the cyberattacks were directed by president Vladimir Putin himself. The New York Times offers a detailed look at the Russian hack of the DNC which led to emails and other documents making it into the hands of WikiLeaks and other websites. Google wants to use AI to fight abusive behavior online. It may not work for bigger sites and services, but there's still potential to do some good.

And see also this great piece from Mashable on what manufacturers are up to next. In the near future, sensing algorithms will achieve super-human performance for capabilities required for driving. Automated perception, including vision, is already near or at human-performance level for well-defined tasks such as recognition and tracking. Advances in perception will be followed by algorithmic improvements in higher level reasoning capabilities such as planning. Beyond self-driving cars, we'll have a variety of autonomous vehicles including robots and drones. AI also has the potential to transform city transportation planning, but is being held back by a lack of standardisation in the sensing infrastructure and AI techniques used. Accurate predictive models of individuals' movements, their preferences, and their goals are likely to emerge with the greater availability of data. That last sentence is worth reflecting on for a while. It does indeed seem highly likely to happen, but that doesn't mean we have to like what it might mean for society.

Young adults are increasingly shunning romantic relationships, resulting in plunging birth rates and a declining population. It has reached the point that Japanese media has even come up with a name for it: sekkusu shinai shokogun--celibacy syndrome. To fill this intimacy void, a Japanese firm has come up with a holographic companion that allows its owner to "enjoy a life with someone while still retaining your freedom." Azuma Hikari, developed by Gatebox, offers similar services to virtual assistants developed by Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, but comes in a much more anthropomorphic form. Hikari's holographic projection resides in a 50cm glass tube and is described by Gatebox as a "comforting character that is great for those living alone."

A London-based startup has combined some of today's most disruptive technologies in a bid to change the way we'll build the future. By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes. When CEO and founder Daghan Cam was studying architecture, he noticed a disconnect between small-scale manufacturing and large-scale construction. "On one side we have a fully automated production pipeline," Cam explained at a recent conference in London. With the emergence of more efficient printing technologies, he thought there must be a better way.

David Tiltman, Warc's Head of Content, says, "2017 looks set to be the year that many brands take their first steps in artificial intelligence. Machine learning is already being applied to programmatic trading - and we've seen brands like Aviva in the UK improve their media efficiencies as a result. The next major application looks set to be chatbots, as marketers look to respond to a consumers' take-up of messaging apps."

Trains with a guard become driver-only trains, which then become driverless trains. That's the fear underlying Aslef's dispute with Southern railways and accounts for the rearguard action to prevent further job losses across the rail industry. There is also scorn for Southern's management, which has attacked drivers' basic terms and conditions, and there is anger at transport secretary Chris Grayling's anti-union stance. But, at its heart, the dispute is over the status and even the very existence of the job of train driver, which has been around for nigh on 200 years. Like most people, train drivers will have read the screaming headlines warning of a robot revolution that spells the end for millions of jobs.

This is the continuation of my mini-series on sentiment analysis of movie reviews, which originally appeared on recurrentnull.wordpress.com. Last time, we had a look at how well classical bag-of-words models worked for classification of the Stanford collection of IMDB reviews. As it turned out, the "winner" was Logistic Regression, using both unigrams and bigrams for classification. The best classification accuracy obtained was .89 So, bag-of-words models may be surprisingly successful, but they are limited in what they can do.

Christmas is right around the corner, but Santa's not the only one dropping from the sky with presents this holiday season. Amazon's Prime Air officially began service this week, when a drone made the service's first delivery in Cambridge, England. So the future of shipping has arrived ... for a handful of people in the English countryside. Many, many more Amazonians will be getting served, however, by Prime Video, now that the company has spun it out into a standalone service. At an introductory rate that's a third the cost of Netflix, the move creates serious competition for viewing dollars around the world -- though it only brings Amazon's original programming.

Warc's'Toolkit 2017', in association with Deloitte Digital, indicates that more than half of global CMOs said they expected the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on marketing and communications to be greater than the impact of social media. Machine learning is already being applied to programmatic trading and we have seen brands such as Aviva in the UK improve its media efficiencies as a result. The report, produced in association with Deloitte Digital, brings together the best of Warc's content over the past year – the latest ideas, research and examples. The result is a guide to current thinking in each area, and the implications for marketers. Warc's'Toolkit 2017', in association with Deloitte Digital, indicates that more than half of global CMOs said they expected the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on marketing and communications to be greater than the impact of social media.