Part of Microsoft Accelerator's batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way. "In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple's Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices," said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. "The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do."

Traditional disease surveillance can be augmented with a wide variety of real-time sources such as, news and social media. However, these sources are in general unstructured and, construction of surveillance tools such as taxonomical correlations and trace mapping involves considerable human supervision. In this paper, we motivate a disease vocabulary driven word2vec model (Dis2Vec) to model diseases and constituent attributes as word embeddings from the HealthMap news corpus. We use these word embeddings to automatically create disease taxonomies and evaluate our model against corresponding human annotated taxonomies. We compare our model accuracies against several state-of-the art word2vec methods. Our results demonstrate that Dis2Vec outperforms traditional distributed vector representations in its ability to faithfully capture taxonomical attributes across different class of diseases such as endemic, emerging and rare.

We introduce Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs), a natural generalization of convolutional neural networks that reduces sample complexity by exploiting symmetries. G-CNNs use G-convolutions, a new type of layer that enjoys a substantially higher degree of weight sharing than regular convolution layers. G-convolutions increase the expressive capacity of the network without increasing the number of parameters. Group convolution layers are easy to use and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead for discrete groups generated by translations, reflections and rotations. G-CNNs achieve state of the art results on CIFAR10 and rotated MNIST.

Tribune Publishing, the parent company that owns several storied and proud newspapers in the US including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, announced on Thursday that it would be changing its name to "tronc Inc." In a press release, the company said that tronc Inc would be "a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels". The name, according to the release, is a shortening of Tribune Online Content. "tronc pools the company's leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60m monthly users," the release continued, using the lower-case t despite the word coming at the beginning of the sentence. The release also announced the launch of "troncX", an "online curation and monetization engine" which utilizes artificial intelligence technology "to accelerate digital growth".

The overall goal is to target treatment specifically to each individual so that clinical outcomes for that individual are optimized. One direction of attack is to use patient data to discover decision rules which specify the treatment to use as a function of a vector of features from the patient. Regression and classification are important statistical tools for estimating such rules based on either observational data or data from a randomized trial, and machine learning can help with this because of its ability to artfully handle high dimensional feature spaces with potentially complex interactions.

As I write this, I'm listening to music written and performed by a robot that was built by Brain.fm to help me focus. I think it might be working, giving me a tiny buzz. It could of course be a placebo effect. In fact, the fact that I even wrote that last three-word sentence should tell you something about the attitude in which I approached Brain.fm's Brain.fm is a new audio startup out of Chicago that produces music written by artificial intelligence that promises to get your brain into one of several desired states, from deep sleep to focused work.

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has announced a three-year guidance program in which the country plans to increase the advancement of the nation's artificial intelligence (AI) sector. According to the NDRC, the plan - which was devised together with China's Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Cyberspace Administration of China - is expected to create new AI industries and economic growth which will result in a market value of over 15.26 million (100 billion Yuan) in the next three years. The three-year program for "Internet Plus" AI indicated that the move will eventually see China developing "platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation" by the year 2018. In the same year the country is expected to be at about the same level of the world's AI industry and technology, according to the NDRC website.

Social media and interplanetary mission -- what do they have in common? Well, they have in common the Mars Orbiter Mission, also known as'Mangalyaan'. It was launched on 5th November by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It generated a lot of interest across the globe among millions of people on Social Media networks. In this blog, we analyze how Twitterati reacted to this news. Asia was by far the most interested in the subject, covering 74% of all the tweets on'Mangalyaan'.

Parent robots can send their genomes through the Wi-Fi network to mate Eventually, they say, robots will'develop their bodies through evolution' What if robots could evolve? It's the question asked by a group of scientists in Amsterdam, whose radical new project aims to create smarter, more advanced robots through a process similar to sexual reproduction.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is soft science fiction and happy to be so. Between the god of thunder flying around in a cape, Scarlet Witch's magical mind control and telekinesis powers, and the giant green rage monster who can only be soothed by the touch of a beautiful woman, this is a fun summer action blockbuster from beginning to end. With that said, Marvel has not shied away from using fun summer action blockbusters as a means to explore ethical questions that society is already dealing with – or those that it might have to face in the future. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have said that during the development of Captain America: The Winter Soldier they heard about President Barack Obama's "kill list" of known terrorists, and it highlighted for them just how morally grey issues of security and freedom had become. "Cap is a representative of the Greatest Generation. The war, the conflict they were involved in, was very black and white,'" Joe Russo explained.