From May to July 2016, over one thousand Kagglers competed in Facebook's fifth recruitment competition: Predicting Check-Ins. In this challenge, Kagglers were required to predict the most probable check-in locations occurring in artificial time and space. As the first place winner, Tom Van de Wiele, notes in this winner's interview, the uniquely designed test dataset contained about one trillion place-observation combinations, posing a huge difficulty to competitors. Tom describes how he quickly rocketed from his first getting started competition on Kaggle to first place in Facebook V through his remarkable insight into data consisting only of x,y coordinates, time, and accuracy using k-nearest neighbors and XGBoost. I have completed two Master programs at two different Belgian universities (Leuven and Ghent), one in Computer Science (2010) and one in Statistics (2016).

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Lovers of sandbox explorer game Minecraft will be able to lose themselves in its world of blocky graphics, as the game launches on the Oculus Rift. Global Xbox and PC users with the headset already playing the game will be able to get a free Windows 10 beta update to enter into the VR world. The game is one of the first big titles to launch on the much hyped Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, which is set for its European launch next month. Minecraft's developer, Mojang, trumpeted the game's arrival with an excited blog post: 'How's your face? Is it ready to have Minecraft right up in it? It'd better be: today we're releasing a free update to Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta which will enable you to play Minecraft on Oculus Rift.' Writing on Xbox Wire, the game's AR/VR developer Mike McGrath, said: 'For new and experienced players, we hope the VR experience in Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta will illuminate just how powerful, evocative, and utterly immersive VR can really be.'

Our VP of Business Development, Markus Zirn, discusses two of the biggest trends in tech – Slack and AI – and how Workato brings them together to create the future of work. According to the latest okta survey, Slack is the #1 fastest cloud application in enterprises with a 77% growth rate. Slack enables team communication by providing chat rooms, organized by themes, as well as offer private messaging and private group messages. In May 2016, it counted 3M daily active users. There's no question that Slack has become nothing short of a movement to bring team communication to the 21st century.

Using machine learning for early detection of eye diseases: this is what DeepMind, a division of Google, and London's Moorfields Eye Hospital are planning. The two partners are working on a five-year research project which aims to use algorithms to speed up the process for detecting eye diseases via scans carried out at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Ars Technica looked at the project in more detail. Data science is no longer fantasy but reality. Back in December 2015, we talked about an algorithm that can predict how sugar levels vary from one person to another after a meal.

SLOUGH, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global business outsourcing provider Arvato has entered a strategic partnership with Blue Prism to offer Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help councils deliver back-office transformation. The partnership will see Arvato use the cutting-edge automation software to provide local authorities with an end-to-end solution of identifying, designing, building and monitoring automated processes, providing RPA-as-a-service and consultancy and training. Arvato will use the innovative technology to help current and future clients in local government automate transactional back office functions, such as revenues and benefits, HR, payroll and finance, increasing process speed and efficiency while freeing up employees to deliver front-line services. RPA uses software to create an agile, virtual workforce which mimics human processing of repetitive labour-intensive tasks. It follows rule-based business processes and interacts with systems in the same way that people do.

Criteo is the world leader in performance Internet advertising. The Recommender System is at the core of its Engine. Real-time prediction: Everybody predicts clicks. But how do you accurately predict if the userâ s click on a product will generate a sale? Thankfully, you have billions of data points to help you.

Wine tasting is a fine art which enables classification of Wine. When it comes to classification of wine, the practice is quite varied based on region of origin and time. It is one of the most tasteful traditions which is also protected by law of its own in certain regions. The classification varies based on vintage, sweetness, appellation, vinification styles, varietal or blend. Is it possible to teach something about the classification of different variety of wines to Neural Networks? Well, I intend to do exactly that and get hands on with code as well.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not something that we will use in the future but something that's being used today by brands across world in their marketing efforts. It's an integral part of marketing efforts for brands to help build a better customer experience. FMCG brands are adopting AI to help recognise customer behavior, provide predictive customer service, integrate it as part of the product offering and in many other ways. A leading FMCG brand used AI technology to help recognise micro facial expressions of joy, anger and surprise in a focus group research for a fragrance to help predict whether the consumer liked the product or not. The AI technology developed by Emotient, a startup recently acquired by Apple was able to more accurately predict preferences of the focus group than surveys. Knorr used cognitive technology, a component of AI in its latest campaign Love at First Taste campaign - "Flavour Profiler".

This past spring, Google began feeding its natural language algorithm thousands of romance novels in an effort to humanize its "conversational tone." The move did so much to fire the collective comic imagination that the ensuing hilarity muffled any serious commentary on its symbolic importance. The jokes, as they say, practically wrote themselves. But, after several decades devoted to task-specific "smart" technologies (GPS, search engine optimization, data mining), Google's decision points to a recovered interest among the titans of technology in a fully anthropic "general" intelligence, the kind dramatized in recent films such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2015). Amusing though it may be, the appeal to romance novels suggests that Silicon Valley is daring to dream big once again. The desire to automate solutions to human problems, from locomotion (the wheel) to mnemonics (the stylus), is as old as society itself.