During the christmas vacation of 2015, I got a motivational boost again and decided try out Kaggle. So I spent quite some time experimenting with various algorithms for their Homesite Quote Conversion, Otto Group Product Classification and Bike Sharing Demand contests. The main takeaway from this was the experience of iteratively improving the results by experimenting with the algorithms and the data. I learned to trust my logic when doing machine learning. If tweaking a parameter or engineering a new feature seems like a good idea logically, it's quite likely that it actually will help.

Using a system built in house, Ocado is in the process of eliminating manual review and sorting of the more than 2,000 daily customer service emails it receives. British web grocer Ocado Group Plc. receives about 2,000 customer service emails a day on average. That number can easily double or triple during the holiday season or when other issues come up such as bad weather that may delay a customer's order, says Dan Nelson, head of data for Ocado, No. 23 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Europe 500. Nelson says the problem until recently is that retailer, which sells solely online and was launched in 2000, used to task its customer service staff with going through and sorting each email that came in. "A lot of customer service reps' time was spent filtering emails," Nelson says.

The miserable experience of fumbling for lost boarding passes and endless queuing at airports could finally be a thing of the past, as airports of the future will feature biometric tickets, virtual assistants and fast molecular security scanners. Designs for how airports could look in 25 years have been revealed - and they're not pie-in-the-sky because they include technology that is already being trialled and developed. The research shows how check-in - a major source of queues and frustration for travellers - will become an automated doddle by 2040. Visitors describe their experiences at Ireland's Killarney Park Vibrations from Route 66 road markings play'America the Beautiful' Here's a sneak peak of the Mediterranean Odyssey cruise Bizarre UFO-like object is spotted on NASA's satellite footage As well as online check-ins becoming far more common, passengers will be given a biometric token that will serve as their passport, boarding pass and ID for the journey, without having to keep hold of their separate documents, according to airport parking operator and retailer Airport Parking and Hotels (APH), who created the vision. In order to be issued with this token, each traveller will be scanned for biometric identifiers unique to them, such as iris patterns.

Lipreading is notoriously difficult, depending as much on context and knowledge of language as it does on visual clues. But researchers are showing that machine learning can be used to discern speech from silent video clips more effectively than professional lip-readers can. In one project, a team from the University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science has developed a new artificial-intelligence system called LipNet. As Quartz reported, its system was built on a data set known as GRID, which is made up of well-lit, face-forward clips of people reading three-second sentences. Each sentence is based on a string of words that follow the same pattern.

The news was revealed by two exchange operators who are planning to apply artificial intelligence tools to perform market surveillance in the coming months, and according to a Wall Street regulator, they are not far behind, Reuters reports. The intentions of the use of the software is to for instance search through chat-room messages to detect any "bragging or back slapping" around the time of the launch of a big trade. It will also be able to unravel complex issues more efficiently, such as incidents called "layering" where orders are rapidly sent to exchanges to then get cancelled in order to artificially move a stock price. Tom Gira, executive vice president for market regulation at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) believes that AI might even have the ability to detect new types of cicanery. "The biggest concern we have is that there is some manipulative scheme that we are not even aware of," he told Reuters.

Researchers are developing an app which could help to prevent suicides by flagging those most at risk. Using a computer algorithm, it records conversations, analysing what people say and how they speak. By picking up on a range of subtle verbal and non-verbal cues, it can correctly classify if someone is suicidal with 93 per cent accuracy. At the heart of the app is a machine learning algorithm which classifies the person based on their responses. In an earlier study, researchers enrolled a mix of 379 patients, who were suicidal, diagnosed as mentally ill, or neither.

Whether it is a phobia of spiders or a traumatic event in the past, the effects of fear can reverberate through a person's life. But with the right training we can rid ourselves of them, according to a study. Researchers have found a method for tricking the brain into letting go of specific fears, which they claim could lead to new treatments for phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By combining functional brain imaging with artificial intelligence, researchers have been able to zero in on memories related to fear and retrain them. For people suffering from phobias, a common course of treatment is aversion therapy, bringing someone into contact with their fear. In the case of spiders, a person could be gradually introduced to the arachnids through photos, images and eventually the real thing, learning that their fear is far greater than any actual risk a spider poses.

Two captive harbour porpoises called Freja and Sif have helped to reveal that porpoises --and probably all cetaceans -- consciously adjust their heart rate to suit the length of a planned dive. By doing this, the animals optimise the rate at which they consume oxygen beforehand to match the intended depth and length of their dive. "Until now, we knew that the heart rates of porpoises and cetaceans in general correlate with different dive factors, such as dive duration, depth and exercise," says Siri Elmegaard of Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the research. "Now we can conclude that harbour porpoises have cognitive control of their heart rate." The discovery might also provide another explanation for how exposure to loud noise from shipping, sonar or subsea exploration harms cetaceans and possibly triggers strandings.

A Christmas Facebook scam appears to be too good true be true – and, of course, very much is. Just one of a range of malicious hoaxes appearing across the network encourages people to spend money on buying gifts with the promise that they'll get far more gifts in return. Except only one half of that actually happens – and it's the bit that involves someone taking your money. The "Secret Sister Gift Exchange" involves some variation on a message asking people to take part as a way of spreading joy. A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The new brain-computer interface enables HB to select letters on a computer screen using her mind alone, spelling out words at a rate of one letter every 56 seconds, to share her thoughts. SAN DIEGO--A wireless device that decodes brain waves has enabled a woman paralyzed by locked-in syndrome to communicate from the comfort of her home, researchers announced this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The 59-year-old patient, who prefers to remain anonymous but goes by the initials HB, is "trapped" inside her own body, with full mental acuity but completely paralyzed by a disease that struck in 2008 and attacked the neurons that make her muscles move. Unable to breathe on her own, a tube in her neck pumps air into her lungs and she requires round-the-clock assistance from caretakers. Thanks to the latest advance in brain–computer interfaces, however, HB has at least regained some ability to communicate.