The North Face wants its customers to get the perfect jacket for whatever they're doing - skiing in Vermont, ice skating in New York City or just trying to stay warm on the way home from work. So how do they give online customers that extra assistance and know-how? "The issue is that online shopping over the past two decades has been about a grid of products on a white background," said Cal Bouchard, senior director of e-commerce at The North Face. "That's how customers find their products. We've developed onsite search and navigation, but we still made the consumer do the work. We wanted to take the conversation you might have with an associate in a store and see if we could put that as a service online: 'Here's what I need. "We want to make it much more personal and much more intuitive," she added. "Consumers are going to get smarter and smarter and say, 'Really?

I describe here the projects that I worked on, as well as career progress, starting 25 years ago as a PhD student in statistics, until today, and the transformation from statistician to data scientist that occurred slowly and started more than 20 years ago. This also illustrates many applications of data science, most are still active. My interest in mathematics started when I was 7 or 8, I remember being fascinated by the powers of 2 in primary school, and later purchasing cheap russian math books (Mir publisher) translated in French, for my entertainement. In high school, I participated in the mathematical olympiads, and did my own math research during math classes, rather than listening to the very boring lessons. When I attended college, I stopped showing up in the classroom altogether - afterall, you could just read the syllabus, memorize the material before the exam and regurgitate it at the exam.

Yann LeCun invited me to speak at this week's inaugural symposium on "The Future of AI" at NYU. It's an amazing gathering of leaders in the field to discuss the state of AI and its continued advancement. Here's what I talked about -- how deep learning is a new software model that needs a new computing model; why AI researchers have adopted GPU-accelerated computing; and NVIDIA's ongoing efforts to advance AI as we enter into its exponential adoption. And why, after all these years, AI has taken off. For as long as we have been designing computers, AI has been the final frontier.

Moviemakers excel at recreating violence and gore on screen. But Will Self asks if we should view fictional violence with more caution. When I was younger I equated viewing such things (and viewing actors performing sexual acts) with some sort of liberty - an existential freedom to be the virile fellow I felt myself to be, and a universal freedom to witness human expression in all its polymorphous perversity. But with age - and possibly, I concede, declining virility - I began to see that pornography entailed the exploitation of vulnerable and mostly young people, while the depictions of violence which bedizen our ubiquitous screens aren't victimless crimes - no matter how enthusiastically those who stage them, may consent. A few years ago Stephen Pinker published a book in which he set out to show that the venerable Dr Pangloss (a character in Voltaire's Candide) was in fact completely right - we are living in the best of possible worlds, while every day, and in every way, things can only get better.

Artificial intelligence* is developing much faster than we thought. Just last month, Google's DeepMind AI beat Lee Sedol, a legendary Go player, at his own game in a defining moment for the industry. What enabled this win is a relatively new AI technique called deep learning, which is transforming AI. Until deep learning was introduced, even the best AI systems were always highly tuned for specific problems and required many rules to operate successfully. But deep learning has changed that, causing many researchers to abandon classical AI approaches.

A conference dedicated to a versatile computer chip is expected to draw thousands of researchers and hundreds of tech companies to San Jose next week for a look at advances in some of Silicon Valley's hottest technologies. Now in its seventh year, the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference opening Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center celebrates the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a chip that has become the Swiss Army knife of computing. Some industry observers credit the annual conference for helping spark the research that has led to recent leaps forward in artificial intelligence. Patrick Moorhead, a semiconductor analyst with Moor Insight and Solutions, said that the San Jose Convention Center conference -- now in its seventh year -- became a meeting ground for scientists, academics and developers. "What happened is that once you bring these researchers together in one place and get them focused on this whole notion of using graphics to do a compute engine, they find these new ways to use it. That's exactly what happened," Moorhead said.

In the very same week that Artificial Intelligence lost one of its greatest pioneers, Marvin Minsky, it saw major progress on a decades-old challenge of playing human-level Go. There is much to shout about, but also a lot of hype and confusion about what we just saw. With so much at stake as people try to handicap the future of AI, and what it means for the future of employment and possibly even the human race, it's important to understand what was and was not yet accomplished. Fact: The paper published yesterday in Nature by DeepMind represents major progress in getting AI to play Go, a game that has been notoriously difficult for machines. Confusion: The European champion of Go is not the world champion, or even close.

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have something in common, and it's not wealth or intelligence. They' re all terrified of the AI takeover. Also called the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover is a hypothetical scenario where artificially intelligent machines become the dominant life-form on Earth. It could be that robots rise and become our overlords, or worse, they exterminate mankind and claim Earth as their own. But can the AI Apocalypse really happen?

April 02--A conference dedicated to a versatile computer chip is expected to draw thousands of researchers and hundreds of tech companies to San Jose next week for a look at advances in some of Silicon Valley's hottest technologies. Now in its seventh year, the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference opening Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center celebrates the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a chip that has become the Swiss Army knife of computing. Some industry observers credit the annual conference for helping spark the research that has led to recent leaps forward in artificial intelligence. Patrick Moorhead, a semiconductor analyst with Moor Insight and Solutions, said that the San Jose Convention Center conference -- now in its seventh year -- became a meeting ground for scientists, academics and developers. "What happened is that once you bring these researchers together in one place and get them focused on this whole notion of using graphics to do a compute engine, they find these new ways to use it. That's exactly what happened," Moorhead said.

I went to school in Cambridge University in England, then went to Stanford to do my master's around 2000. I met up with Sergey Brin around then when Google was a tiny company and he invited me to join Google. So I started working part-time for Google. It was a fantastic time at the company--200 people, one building, and bright, idealistic, change-the-world kind of people. Naturally, when I finished my master's I joined full-time.