This month I spent part of my free time to go through the'March Machine Learning Mania 2016' competition, by studying the subject and by attending two meetups here in London. The objective of the Kaggle competition was to predict the 2016 NCAA Basketball Tournament, called March Madness. It was a very enjoyable experience. You might think, what the heck has this to do with HR Analytics, the subject in which I am normally interested in. Predicting performance through machine learning algorithms is a crucial aspect for HR Analytics.

The automation of work and the digital disruption of business models place a premium on leaders who can create a vision of change and frame it positively. How disruptive will accelerating workplace automation be for organizations in the future? For decades, businesses have deployed technology to reduce costs and complexity, make better products, and develop new business models. But the new potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics poses major new challenges for leaders as they seek to reset their strategies for a digital age. Last November, Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer and Nadir Mohamed, the recently retired CEO of Rogers Communications, sat down with Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor at INSEAD, and Harvard professor Robert Kegan to debate some of the issues with Claudio Feser, head of McKinsey's leadership development initiative.

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

Why did our ancestors develop a prominent protruding nose when most primates have flat nasal openings? A new study suggests that our unusual nose may have gained its shape simply as a by-product of other, more important changes in the structure of our face – although other researchers insist that some human noses have been directly shaped by natural selection. One of the many functions of the nose and nasal cavity is to act as an "air conditioner". Together, they make sure that the air an animal breathes in is made warm and humid enough to avoid damaging the delicate lining of the lungs. But Takeshi Nishimura at Kyoto University, Japan, and his colleagues argue that the human nose performs this job poorly.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is one of the'Eight Great Technologies' identified by the UK Government in 2012. A national strategy for RAS innovation from a'RAS Special Interest Group' was published by Innovate UK in 2014. The Government responded to that strategy in March 2015 (PDF 405 KB) and agreed to establish a RAS Leadership Council to oversee its execution. The Special Interest Group also published'The UK Landscape for Robotics and Autonomous Systems' in 2015. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council launched an UK-RAS network, also in 2015.

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

Drones are experiencing something of an arms race for aerial domination. As fast as the technology develops to make the unmanned vehicles better in the air, new ways are being developed to take them down. Video footage has emerged of a soldier in the US using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight before falling out of the air. Video footage has emerged of a US soldier using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight and fall out of the air (still pictured). The cyber-rifle is built by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point in the US, and was tested in front of the US Secretary for Defense, Ash Carter.

Tamr first brought its data unification technology to the market as a general purpose solution to help companies in their quest to become truly data- and analytics-driven enterprises, providing a next-generation means for them to clean and connect disparate data in an automated and scalable way. When DATAVERSITY spoke to Tamr co-founder Andy Palmer in late 2014 for an article on data curation, he discussed how using Machine Learning and semantic triple stores to address the enterprise data unification issue offered a great opportunity for businesses to gain 360-degree views of suppliers, customers, products, or whatever their needs might be to inform analytics and address hard business questions. At the time, he pointed to one unnamed enterprise that was putting the technology to work to optimize spending, making sure to get the best price for all products it buys across the entire company. Now, spend analytics for the cause of strategic sourcing is a primary use case that Tamr has settled on as giving businesses, large and small, the biggest opportunities for success from the holistic Data Management enabled by its technology. "Data is in the forefront for our customers like GE, Toyota Motors Europe, GSK and Thomson Reuters," says Nidhi Aggarwal, Global Lead of Strategy and Marketing at Tamr. "They understand the importance of data preparation and how that lets them become data-driven."

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews." Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic.

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