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Machine learning in finance: Why, what & how – Towards Data Science
Machine learning in finance may work magic, even though there is no magic behind it (well, maybe just a little bit). Still, the success of machine learning project depends more on building efficient infrastructure, collecting suitable datasets, and applying the right algorithms. Machine learning is making significant inroads in the financial services industry. Let's see why financial companies should care, what solutions they can implement with AI and machine learning, and how exactly they can apply this technology. We can define machine learning (ML) as a subset of data science that uses statistical models to draw insights and make predictions.
Stolen Military Drone Documents Found for Sale on Dark Web
The hacker sought buyers for maintenance documents about the MQ-9 Reaper drone, a remotely controlled aerial vehicle used by the Pentagon and other parts of the government to conduct offensive strikes or reconnaissance and surveillance operations. Discovery of the attempted sale of the stolen documents comes amid heightened concern about how U.S. military secrets may be insufficiently protected from hackers. Military officials said last month that the Defense Department's inspector general was investigating a major security breach after Chinese hackers allegedly stole data pertaining to submarine warfare, including plans to build a supersonic antiship missile. There was no evidence that the hacker who acquired the Reaper drone documents was affiliated with a foreign country, or that he was intentionally seeking to obtain military documents, said Andrei Barysevich, a senior threat researcher at Recorded Future, the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm that spotted the attempted sale. Instead, the hacker scanned large parts of the internet for misconfigured Netgear routers and exploited a two-year-old known vulnerability, involving default login credentials, to steal files from compromised machines.
Inside X, the Moonshot Factory Racing to Build the Next Google
At 6:40 in the morning, a klaxon horn sounds three times. "Gas!" a man in a hard hat and fluorescent vest yells out. There's a hissing noise, and the helium starts flowing. From the tanks stacked like cordwood on a nearby truck, the gas moves through a series of hoses until it's 55 feet up, then through a copper pipe and into the top of a plastic tube that hangs down to the ground, like a shed snake skin held up for inspection. It's a Wednesday in late June in Winnemucca, a solitary mining town in northern Nevada that has avoided oblivion by straddling the I-80 freeway. Along with two Basque restaurants, the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, and a giant W carved into the side of a hill, Winnemucca is the test site for Project Loon, a grandiose scheme launched in 2011 to bring the internet to huge swaths of the planet where sparse population and challenging geography make the usual networks of cell towers a nonstarter.
Analyze a Soccer (Football) Game Using Tensorflow Object Detection and OpenCV
The API provides pre-trained object detection models that have been trained on the COCO dataset. COCO dataset is a set of 90 commonly found objects. See image below of objects that are part of COCO dataset. In this case we care about classes -- persons and soccer ball which are both part of COCO dataset. The API also has a big set of models it supports. See table below for reference. The models have a trade off between speed and accuracy. Since I was interested in real time analysis, I chose SSDLite mobilenet v2. Once we identify the players using the object detection API, to predict which team they are in we can use OpenCV which is powerful library for image processing.
Could a Text-Based Dating App Change Selfie-Swiping Culture?
A recent college grad living in rural Connecticut, they'd been subject to the swipe-and-ghost thing a few too many times. Then, this spring, Juniper submitted an ad to @_personals_, an Instagram for lesbian, queer, transgender, and non-binary people looking for love (and other stuff). The post, titled "TenderQueer Butch4Butch," took Juniper two weeks to craft, but the care paid off: the ad ultimately garnered well over 1,000 likes--and more than 200 messages. Tinder's Days as a Hookup App May Be Over "I was so used to the Tinder culture of nobody wanting to text back," Juniper says. "All of the sudden I had hundreds of queers flooding my inbox trying to hang out."
Bulgaria's First New Plane in Decades Is a Freakishly Strong Drone
Moving stuff by air may be quick and convenient, but it's also horridly expensive, accounting for just 1 percent of global shipping by volume--and 35 percent of it by cost. So while autonomous drones dropping a few pounds of snacks or medical supplies are generating plenty of buzz, two Bulgarian brothers see an opening in the long-haul business. And they think they've got the tech to start flying hundreds of pounds of cargo over hundreds of miles, no pilot or 747 required. Svilen and Konstantin Rangelov are the CEO and chief technology officer, respectively, of Dronamics. They've spent the past four years developing an aircraft that can haul nearly 800 pounds of cargo up to 1,550 miles, a far cry from the 10 or 15 miles, or even just a few blocks, that most drone delivery services are targeting.
Free Cash, No Strings Attached
Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. In an age where every day brings more doomsday forecasts of massive technologicallybdriven unemployment, from driverless cars to A.I. robots as caregivers, journalist Annie Lowrey set out to answer a question: Is it possible to live in a world where we get what she calls "wages for breathing"? This week her findings come out in Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. We spoke about what the idea of giving every American cash--no strings attached--would mean for work, gender inequality, and American identity, and whether it's actually a policy that could pass in the U.S. given the current climate of tying even the most basic benefits to paid work. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why financial companies should care about machine learning?
Machine learning in finance may work magic, even though there is no magic behind it (well, maybe just a little bit). Still, the success of machine learning project depends more on building efficient infrastructure, collecting suitable datasets, and applying the right algorithms. Machine learning is making significant inroads in the financial services industry. Let's see why financial companies should care, what solutions they can implement with AI and machine learning, and how exactly they can apply this technology. We can define machine learning (ML) as a subset of data science that uses statistical models to draw insights and make predictions.
Using deep learning for comprehensive, personalized forecasting of Alzheimer's Disease progression
Fisher, Charles K., Smith, Aaron M., Walsh, Jonathan R., Diseases, the Coalition Against Major
A patient is more than one number, yet most approaches to machine learning from electronic health data can only predict a single endpoint. Here, we present an alternative -- using unsupervised deep learning to simulate detailed patient trajectories. We use data comprising 18-month longitudinal trajectories of 42 clinical variables from 1908 patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer's Disease (AD) to train a model for personalized forecasting of disease progression. Our model simulates the evolution of each sub-component of cognitive exams, laboratory tests, and their associations with baseline clinical characteristics, generating both predictions and their confidence intervals. Even though it is not trained to predict changes in disease severity, our unsupervised model predicts changes in total ADAS-Cog scores with the same accuracy as specifically trained supervised models. We show how simulations can be used to interpret our model and demonstrate how to create synthetic control arm data for AD clinical trials. Our model's ability to simultaneously predict dozens of characteristics of a patient at any point in the future is a crucial step forward in computational precision medicine.
Newcrest blazing a trail with big data
Addressing the South Australian government's recent Copper to the World conference in Adelaide, Newcrest's chief information and digital officer, Gavin Wood, gave a rundown on what had already been achieved at Newcrest with data science, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He also talked about the benefits delivered by crowd sourcing, although this can also create some unique challenges of its own. "If you can imagine, an experienced operator at a site being told by a university student in Argentina the answer for optimising their part of the plant is quite different to something they believe from their experience of 20 or so years. Those are real challenges for our business," Wood said. He said data science coupled with machine learning had alr...