In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.

How big should data be to be called'big'? Big data talk usually centers around those four V's: We say that data is big if it has volume, variety, velocity and veracity. It means a lot and lot of data; much, much more data than what a single server's disk can hold. That means not just numbers (Tendulkar's test and ODI scores), but also text (all that prose and poetry in praise of Tendulkar), video (Tendulkar's straight drive) and audio (Tendulkar exclaiming "Ailaa!"). Data on the trajectory of a launch vehicle, data on the growing spread of the Ebola virus, data about how rapidly some song is going viral on the Internet. Data that is valid, accurate, verifiable, not manipulated and trustworthy. What do you do with all this big data? You use this data to find associations, insights or connections.

Robots have been working at factories, hospitals, schools--and on April 30, 2016, a "handful" of robots named Pepper will join Costa Cruises, a branch of Carnival, as the newest crew members. Pepper is a 4-foot humanoid robot built by Aldebaran, a SoftBank company based in Paris, that is designed to read human emotions. While it is not the first robot seen on a cruise--there have been robo-bartenders, and a small robot named Mel was used at Costa for entertainment--it is the first to interact with vacationers in a broader way, providing directions, information about destinations, entertainment, and general assistance. The world's smartest cities: What IoT and smart governments will mean for you Intelligent cities are at the forefront of the next wave of the Internet of Things. The goals are to streamline communication and improve the lives of citizens. And save a little money along the way.

It's easy to imagine robots as job-stealing nemeses that will ultimately unseat human workers. In an interview with Computerworld Thursday, Tom Davenport, co-author of the forthcoming book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, made the case for seeing artificial intelligence and robotics not as a threat in the workplace but as an advantage. As more organizations begin to adopt AI and robotic systems, workers who regard these new technologies not as murderous Cylons to be feared but as tools designed to make them more productive and efficient at their own job will fare best. "I think that in many cases, we'll be working with these machines as colleagues," Davenport told Computerworld. "I think the people who prosper will be the ones who like working with machines." This is where Computerworld trotted out the obligatory eyebrow-raising statistics: The Bank of England warned about robots assuming half of all U.S. and British jobs during the coming 20 years, leaving 95 million people unemployed.

A panel comprised of government tech leaders and healthcare experts is set to scrutinise the work of Google DeepMind's healthcare team at an upcoming meeting, which could be held within the next month. DeepMind, a British AI startup acquired by Google in 2014 for 400 million, is processing NHS data through a new division called DeepMind Health. The London-based AI lab says its technology has the potential to improve the way patients are diagnosed and treated but it acknowledges that working in healthcare requires regular and independent oversight. As a result, it set up a reviewer board for DeepMind Health when it launched the unit in February. DeepMind states on its website that the board will meet four times a year but Business Insider understands that an official meeting between the nine individuals on the board is yet to take place.

ClickSoftware, a leading provider of field service management solutions for the enterprise, today introduced Click Field Service Edge, a new cloud-based, mobile workforce management platform designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding field service providers. Adoption of the cloud has more than doubled over the past two years and, with that, cloud-based software solutions have become entrenched in the business world. Recognising the technological benefits for field service companies, ClickSoftware's first, cloud only, SaaS-based solution delivers field service management in an entirely new way. With patented artificial intelligence, Click Field Service Edge connects enterprise customers with automated real-time insight and intelligent decision-making tools that provide a new level of productivity and efficiency to field workforce performance. "As a company that has successfully managed billions of service engagements, and is exclusively focused on providing field service technology – since creating the market – we know what it takes to help our customers always be a step ahead of the demand, not just move in lockstep with it," explained Tom Heiser, ClickSoftware's Chief Executive Officer.

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

This repository contains both MATLAB and R code for implementing the Bayesian GP-LVM. The MATLAB code is in the subdirectory vargplvm, the R code in vargplvmR. For a quick description and sample videos / demos check: http://git.io/A3Uv The Bayesian GP-LVM (Titsias and Lawrence, 2010) is an extension of the traditional GP-LVM where the latent space is approximately marginalised out in a variational fashion (hence the prefix'vargplvm'). Let us denote \mathbf{Y} as a matrix of observations (here called outputs) with dimensions n \times p, where n rows correspond to datapoints and p columns to dimensions.

Since we released our text summarization resources, the legal technology community has shown interest in leveraging summarization technology to support litigation document review, deposition digests, and contract analysis. Data scientist interest to use machine learning to mine legal document corpuses and support legal strategy was also one factor motivating our summarization research. The time is therefore ripe for data scientists to apply new text analytics capabilities for legal use cases. But to be effective, data scientists must first understand how lawyers think: what problems they're trying to solve, how their processes are structured, and, perhaps most importantly, what fears may hinder the adoption of new technologies. This guest blog post from Dean Gonsowski, kCura's VP of Business Development, provides tips to help data scientists explain the value of machine learning to lawyers. Electronic discovery software helps manage the exchange of electronically stored information, documents that could be used as evidence in various forms of litigation like investigations or contract reviews.

RE•WORK will host it's annual East Coast events on Deep Learning and the Internet of Things in Boston on 12 & 13 May. Over 300 machine learning and IoT enthusiasts and experts will come together to hear keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats and to explore the startup showcase area. The Deep Learning Summit brings together leaders from industry, academia and startups to explore advances in deep learning methods and techniques, as well as their business applications in areas including finance, manufacturing, healthcare & transportation. Professor Bengio is also Head of the Machine Learning Laboratory, Co-director of the CIFAR Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program, and editor of many prestigious machine learning publications. Daniel's work has been reported on in The Times, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, New Scientist and Forbes magazine.