How often do you ring your bank and forget the special dates, places or names needed just to get through security? Apparently, it takes us 45 seconds on average just to confirm who we are. Now that might not seem very long, but if you're a global bank like Citi receiving 35 million calls a year in Asia alone, that adds up to 437,500 hours of staff time a year. But by using computers to identify our voices, this authentication process can be cut to 15 seconds on average, saving the bank pots of cash and us lots of hassle. Citi has just begun rolling out this kind of voice biometrics authentication for its 15 million Asian banking customers, starting in Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Vivek Wadhwa has been named to the Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering faculty as a distinguished fellow on its Silicon Valley campus, the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based university recently announced. In his role, Wadhwa will be teaching classes in exponential technologies, technology convergence and industry disruption, and the new rules of innovation. He will also be researching technologies and helping members of the Pittsburgh faculty connect with the Silicon Valley. "CMU is doing some of the most advanced research in areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, autonomous cars and almost every field of engineering and bioengineering," Wadhwa said in an emailed statement. "This will provide me direct access to the amazing faculty and enable me to help them make a much greater impact on the world."

A chart of global internet speeds, created using R. New features in the forecast package, updated to version 7. This year's Data Journalism Awards Data Visualization of the Year was created with R. Using GitHub avatars and the Microsoft Face API to estimate gender ratios of programmers by language used. Using the Data Science Virtual Machine and Microsoft R Server to analyze data from 600 million taxi rides. R is once again the top-ranked software in the KDnuggets annual poll.

The depths of the ocean can be a dangerous place, even for a drone. Incredible footage has captured the moment a Great white shark mistakes the machine for food and attacks it with amazing speed and precision. It is believed the video was filmed off the coast of Australia where Great whites are commonly spotted in southern waters from Exmouth in Western Australia to Southern Queensland. The video shows the metal drone sitting deep in the ocean, when almost out of nowhere the underwater beast appears. Within seconds the Great white wraps it teeth around drone and viciously tugs at it before realising the hunk of metal is not a tasty meal.

The race to build the world's first true quantum computer is on, with huge potential payoffs for businesses that harness the technology before their competitors. The computers we use today represent information in binary bits – on/off, 0/1 – while a quantum computer's qubit can, in simple terms, be both on and off the same time. That means many computations can be performed in parallel; a quality that, when fully realised, will give quantum computers a huge speed advantage over'classical' computers in solving certain problems. Microsoft and IBM are ploughing significant sums into related research. Google, NASA and Lockheed Martin have invested in a D-Wave 2X -- described by its maker as the "world's first commercially available quantum computer", although debate rages over its capabilities.

Machine learning artificial intelligence has unlocked big data as a source of military, weather and business intelligence that has opened up multiple options. Social Media giants Twitter and Facebook have been spending millions trying to keep their companies ahead of the flock, highlighted by Twitter Buys Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Star Magic Pony Technology Pavel Machalek co-founder of Silicon Valley data analytics firm Spaceknow working with commercial satellite data says the convergence of computing power, machine learning and satellite imagery is a perfect storm that s just beginning to peak, ... We could not have done this five years ago. Chinese government economic reports are notoriously inaccurate. Spaceknow's China Satellite Manufacturing Index uses satellite imagery to monitor changes at 6,000 industrial facilities in China as an alternative. The above image courtesy of DigitalGlobe shows how geospatial data companies can track activity by identifying surface material as seen here with individual trees in a forest (above) and aircrafts on the tarmac (below).

Top Machine Learning & Data Mining Books - in this post, we have scraped various signals (e.g. We have combined all signals to compute the Quality Score for each book and publish the list of top Machine Learning and Data Mining books. The readers will love the list because it is data-driven & objective. This book is very well rated on Amazon website and is written by three professors from USC, Stanford and University of Washington. The book's authors: Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, & Rob Tibshirani all have backgrounds in statistics.

Machines that "learn" and make decisions on their own are proliferating in our daily lives via social networks and smartphones, and experts are already thinking about how we can engineer them so that they don't go rogue. So far, suggestions have ranged from "training" self-learning machines to ignore certain kinds of information that might teach them racism or sexism, to coding them with values like empathy and respect. But according to some new work from researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,as well as other schools in Spain, the US, and Australia, once an AI becomes "superintelligent"--think Ex Machina--it will be impossible to contain it. Well, the researchers use the word "incomputable" in their paper, posted on the ArXiv preprint server, which in the world of theoretical computer science is perhaps even more damning. The crux of the matter is the "halting problem" devised by Alan Turing, which holds that no algorithm is able to correctly predict whether another algorithm will run forever or whether it will eventually halt--that is, stop running.

A robot carrying an explosive device was used to kill one of the shooters in Thursday night's horrific violence in Dallas, Texas, in what many law enforcement and other experts are calling the first such use of robotics technology by U.S. police. Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded, along with two civilians, during a demonstration protesting the recent deaths of two African-American men at the hands of police in other cities. Micah Johnson, the man suspected of shooting the officers, was killed by remotely detonated explosives on the robot after a standoff and failed negotiations with police. Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, cautions against seeing this use of a robot as a nightmarish science-fiction scenario--because the robot was being operated by a human via remote control. "In [that] sense, it was no more taking us down the road to killer robots than the remote-controlled Predator drones flying above the skies of Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere," Walsh told Scientific American in an email.

Over a couple of drinks, you cover the usual suspects: favourite foods, dream jobs, where you each grew up. On the way home, you wonder: Were they into me? They were smiling a lot, so probably. But they also looked at their watch a few times, so probably not. Now imagine that the whole time you two were talking, scientists were sitting under the table transcribing the conversation.