My name's Stelios and I work in Search Marketing on some of the biggest brands in Australia with Big Data Analytics requirements. Throughout 2015, I did a lot. I've very excited to start off 2016 with a blog post about some of the most exciting things I've ever seen throughout my short but eventful digital career: Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning algorithms. One of the biggest events in 2015 in my opinion was Google sharing to the public that for the past three months, search results received direct input from a machine learning, possibly deep learning algorithm. They further remarked it had returned more accurate search results than a Google Engineer, who up till 2015 could've told you what made a page rank in Google.

Production is underway on "Ghost in the Shell," Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures announced Thursday, releasing a first look at Scarlett Johansson ("Lucy," "The Avengers") as cyborg Major Kusanagi. Directed by Rupert Sanders ("Snow White and the Huntsman," "Van Helsing"), the film has begun shooting in Wellington, New Zealand. Based on the eponymous Kodansha Comics manga, written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow, the film centers on the Major, who leads an elite task force called Section 9, focused on stopping only the most dangerous criminals and extremists. Joining Johansson in the cast are Beat Takeshi Kitano ("Battle Royale" series), Juliette Binoche ("The English Patient") and Michael Pitt ("Hannibal," "Boardwalk Empire"). Beloved as the original manga series and resulting animated film and series have been, the live-action adaptation of "Ghost in the Shell" has already courted controversy with its casting of Johansson as its lead.

Crown-of-thorns starfish are the zombies of the sea. They won't die even if you cut them in half. To kill one, you must dismember it completely--or inject it with poisonous (to them) bile salts. Instead of braaains, these zombies munch coral, and off the coast of Australia, infestations of the beasts are damaging the Great Barrier Reef at an alarming rate. In development since late 2014, the underwater droid identifies and assassinates the ravenous stars--autonomously.

The wide-ranging scope of the capabilities coming with The Internet of Things creates a relatively unlimited number of ways to create new and innovative methods to interact with consumers. These can range from new ways to incorporate robotic devices to leveraging drones for not only product delivery but also as a new advertising mechanism. Drones, commonly viewed as a future delivery mechanism, are now being seen as way to deliver super-targeted advertising. Engineers at Swiss firm Aerotain have created a helium-filled balloon with propellers that can carry messages like a large floating billboard to consumers based on their location. And robots, commonly seen as a great aid inside large manufacturing facilities, are now being introduced to the public as a way to deliver various goods to them.

Lessons from Kaggle competitions, including why XG Boosting is the top method for structured problems, Neural Networks and deep learning dominate unstructured problems (visuals, text, sound), and 2 types of problems for which Kaggle is suitable. Here is a summary of Anthony Goldbloom presentation at the Data Science Chicago Meetup, Nov 2 2015. Nice to see Anthony coming from financial statistics/econometrics (he mentioned his first job was with the Reserve Bank of Australia).

In addition to accessing cutting edge data analytics tools, and allowing them to scale at speed, companies are looking to platform-as-a-service providers Google, Microsoft and Amazon to remove trade barriers in complex markets like China. Last week, Xero announced a strategic push into Asia with the opening of its new regional headquarters in Singapore. But it will bide its time on China until big platform-as-a-service providers pave the way. "As it works at the moment, we would have to give Chinese authorities access to our source code and host our data in China. I don't know that we'd feel very comfortable with that," Mr Drury told The Australian Financial Review at Xerocon last year when asked about the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal involving Australia and 11 other countries.

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 three authors: Gareth James, Daniela Witten, & Trevor Hastie all have backgrounds in statistics.

I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

We've compiled a list of the hottest events and conferences from the world of Data Science and Machine Learning this year that we think you should know about! Image Processing, Computer Vision and Machine Learning based on Optimization and PDE.(Oslo, Norway) 29th August https://ivlopde2016.wordpress.com/

Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, Quoc Le had no electricity till he was nine. A little over 20 years later he has helped design artificial intelligence used by millions everyday. The 32-year-old helps lead the Google Brain team, a specialised unit that attempts to give computers the kind of profound neural networks that human beings possess, or at least helps them simulate it. It is Google's attempt to build an artificial brain. It may not be humanoid-like machine that can think for itself that many will have in mind, but "intelligence" has already been integrated into Google products, the kinds of technology that Mr Le could only imagine as a child.