Never one to shy away from expressing his opinion on all things Apple, Steve Wozniak has now waded into the debate about the firm's tax affairs. Apple's co-founder believes all companies, including the one he started with the late Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976, should pay a 50 per cent tax rate as he did. Apple has been criticised over its tax affairs and accused of using tax shelters in order to protect its revenues. Never one to shy away from expressing his opinion on all things Apple, Steve Wozniak (pictured) has now waded into the debate about the firm's tax affairs. Apple's co-founder said he believes all companies, including the one he started in 1976, should pay a 50 per cent tax rate as he did In particular, the firm has been accused of using Ireland and Luxembourg to get tax breaks, allegations being investigated by the European Commission.

German automaker Daimler AG, which makes the Mercedes and Smart car brands in the U.S., said Friday it had launched an investigation, at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, into how it measures diesel exhaust emissions. The carmaker was approached by USDJ last week, following a class-action lawsuit filed against the company in February. In its statement, released Friday, Daimler dismissed the claims as being "without merit" and said it was cooperating fully with the authorities. The announcement came in the same week which saw Japan's Mitsubishi Motors admitting it had rigged data on some of its models' fuel efficiency, while France's PSA Peugeot Citroen's offices were raided by anti-fraud investigators as part of ongoing investigations in the auto industry. Regulators and carmakers have increased their scrutiny of emission tests in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, which emerged in late September.

BigML is a leading Machine Learning company that helps other businesses make highly automated, data-driven decisions. BigML was founded in 2011 in Corvallis, OR, USA and made its European expansion official by opening its European headquarters in Valencia, Spain in July 2015. The company has pioneered the Machine Learning as a Service (MLAAS) wave of innovation through its consumable, programmable, and scalable software platform streamlining the creation and deployment of smart applications powered by state-of-the-art predictive models. To date, BigML has 15 patent applications, more than 25,000 customers from 120 countries and 5M in venture capital investment. In addition to commercial activities, BigML is playing an active role in promoting Machine Learning in education around the world through its rapidly expanding ambassador program thanks to active participation from top universities in diverse geographies such as North America, Europe and Africa, making real BigML's motto: "Machine Learning made beautifully simple for everyone".

Machines could gradually come to replace doctors, usurping their technical and surgical know-how. However, this could be good news for the patient. Doctors would be more available to counsel and reassure their patients. In this way, machines deployed in the medical field could actually help to bring more of a human touch to the doctor-patient relationship. This is the prediction put forward by Guy Vallancien – a surgeon, member of the French National Academy of Medicine and President of the European School of Surgery – in his book'La médecine sans médecin.

Taking a vehicle to the race track to improve it has been a thing for almost as long as we've had cars. Henry Ford built his brand's name on his early racing exploits, and so have countless others. So it's natural that some of the people interested in self-driving cars have been thinking about how the track can benefit this new technology. Joshua Schachter is one such person, and he's organizing the first autonomous track day, to be held on May 28th-29th at Thunderhill Raceway in Willow, California. Self-driving cars and racing are two of my favorite things, so I spoke to Schachter to find out more.

This is a good question, and one that seems to get raised time and time again. Myself and a colleague (Sven Crone from Lancaster University in the UK) published a paper on this issue last year in the International Journal of Forecasting. A summary of our findings can also be found in the book "Credit Scoring, Response Modeling and Insurance Rating. There are also some very good papers by G. Weiss from 2004/5 which are highly cited and referenced in our paper/book. What we found was that for some methods of model construction sample imbalance was not an issue at all – not even a tiny amount.

A team of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have created prototypes of "electronic synapses" based on ultra-thin films of hafnium oxide (HfO2). These prototypes could potentially be used in fundamentally new computing systems. The paper has been published in the journal Nanoscale Research Letters. The group of researchers from MIPT have made HfO2-based memristors measuring just 40x40 nm2. The nanostructures they built exhibit properties similar to biological synapses.

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Facebook on Tuesday announced the opening of a new artificial intelligence lab in Paris to expand a push to make its online social network smarter and more profitable. The new Paris AI lab--the third after two it operates in the United States--has six researchers at work and will more than double that number by the end of the year, executives from the US-based company said. The recruits will come from France's top public and private technological institutions. Since 2013, Facebook has been looking to push the envelope for artificial intelligence. It hired Yann LeCun, a renowned French professor at New York University specialised in "deep learning" algorithms, to run the initiative.

PAVIS department at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) (http://www.iit.it/pavis) is looking for a highly qualified candidate with a strong background in Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, with particular emphasis on recognition, video analysis, behavior understanding and prediction. As the activities may be carried out in collaboration with other research units inside IIT, previous multidisciplinary experience is an added value which will be duly considered. The main mission of PAVIS (Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision) is to design and develop innovative video surveillance systems, characterized by the use of highly-functional smart sensors and advanced video analytics features. PAVIS also plays an active role in supporting the other research units inside IIT providing scientists in Neuroscience, Nanophysics and other departments/centers with ad-hoc solutions. To this end, the group is involved in activities concerning computer vision and pattern recognition, machine learning, multimodal\multimedia data analysis and sensor fusion, and embedded computer vision systems.