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.

In a disappointing defeat against France, the human German soccer team was knocked out of the European Championship July 7. But at least the nation can take heart that its robots proved victorious in the annual RoboCup robot soccer tournament that took place this past weekend in Leipzig, Germany. The winning team, from the University of Bremen, called "B-Human," beat out the University of Texas, Austin's team--the wonderfully named "Austin Villa"--on penalties after a goalless draw in the final of the tournament, according to The Telegraph. Robot teams play two 10-minute halves on a 9-by-6-meter pitch, autonomously roving about the field trying to pass the ball to teammates and score goals. But unlike the cool efficiency that the German human soccer team is known for, the robots are a bit more ramshackle in their approach to the sport.

Discussing the pros and cons of articial intelligence is, to be sure, an emotional topic. People have feared artificial intelligence (AI) almost as soon as it was invented. Hollywood in particular has done a masterful job of stoking those fears with movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Terminator" and "The Matrix" all making AI systems into demonic forces. Most recently, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking told Larry King he thought humans and AI could "co-exist," but that "a rogue AI could be difficult to stop" without appropriate safeguards in place. Coming from someone like Hawking, that kind of warning carries some weight with people.

Future historians of technology may look back at one week this March as a tipping point of a new era, and it all started with smooth black-and-white stones on a simple wooden board. It was a five-game match of Go, the ancient Chinese board game, pitting top-ranked world champion Lee Se-dol against an artificial intelligence system called AlphaGo from Google's DeepMind. Although Lee confidently predicted a shutout victory over AlphaGo, the system beat him a resounding 4-1. Games were live-streamed around the world, with a monumental ending reminiscent of Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat against Deep Blue. But this AI victory goes far beyond the basic mathematical win that Deep Blue achieved. Among other factors, chess has fewer possible legal moves and a well-defined end state: checkmate.

Google buys machine vision startup focusing on'instant object recognition' It's a good time to be a machine learning startup. Two weeks after Twitter bought, has purchased . The acquisition was made for an unknown sum, and seems primarily a grab for talent. Moodstocks' engineers and researchers will move to Google's Paris R&D site, and the startup's primary commercial product -- an image recognition API for smartphones -- will be phased out. "Ever since we started Moodstocks, our Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Machine intelligence Machine learning Places: Americas North America United States Google today announced it has acquired French machine learning startup Moodstocks for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the next few weeks and seems to be focused primarily on the talent, with the team at Moodstocks moving to Google's Paris R&D site, and its image recognition API for smartphones to be gradually phased out.

An artificial intelligence platform, called Rechtwijzer, could soon give lawyers in Australia a run for their money by being called on in legal battlegrounds like divorce, custody, employment and debt disputes. National Legal Aid and RMIT University are showcasing Dutch technology that could make time-consuming and expensive court conflict a thing of the past. The technology would be similar to eBay's dispute resolution service that helps people log on, rather than lawyer up. The dispute resolution robot was born in the Netherlands and can mediate everything from divorces, tenancy disputes, and employment, debt and consumer matters. For custody matters, for example, it will ask the ages of the children to be sensitive to their development needs.

Up to 40 per cent of current Australian jobs could disappear within the next 10 to 15 years as robots and computers continue their unstoppable advance. They have already replaced humans in workplaces such as factories, supermarkets and airline check-in counters. Hugh Durrant-Whyte, director at the Centre for Translational Data Science at the University of Sydney, said technology was taking on middle-class professions once thought safe from automation -- professions such as law, accountancy and banking. "We always used to think of automation as moving everybody up," he said. "The big difference now is machine learning and artificial intelligence are solving jobs that we thought traditionally were very highly qualified jobs … it's eating out the middle of the job market, rather than the bottom end."