Most of my experience is in database development and alytics. I have maged projects from very small to some having more than 100 people worth more than $10 million.

He said that he grew up in a poor neighbourhood in east Los Angeles and could relate to youngsters today trying to make living.

Two months before the first total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States in a century, NASA has revealed its plans to study and promote a celestial show that will darken skies from Oregon to South Carolina. During the Aug. 21 eclipse, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, blocking the face of the sun and leaving only its outer atmosphere, or corona, visible in the sky. It is the first coast-to-coast total eclipse since 1918 - and NASA has creraqted a pair of eclipse posters to celebrate the occasion. To celebrate the upcoming eclipse, NASA has also created these retro posters to mark the occasion,. The space agency said viewers around the world will be provided a wealth of images captured before, during, and after the eclipse by 11 spacecraft, at least three NASA aircraft, more than 50 high-altitude balloons, and the astronauts aboard the International Space Station – each offering a unique vantage point for the celestial event.

We consider settings where owners of electric vehicles (EVs) participate in a market mechanism to charge their vehicles. Existing work on such mechanisms has typically assumed that participants are fully rational and can report their preferences accurately via some interface to the mechanism or to a software agent participating on their behalf. However, this may not be reasonable in settings with non-expert human end-users.Thus, our overarching aim in this paper is to determine experimentally if a fully expressive market interface that enables accurate preference reports is suitable for the EV charging domain, or, alternatively, if a simpler, restricted interface that reduces the space of possible options is preferable. In doing this, we measure the performance of an interface both in terms of how it helps participants maximise their utility and how it affects deliberation time. Our secondary objective is to contrast two different types of restricted interfaces that vary in how they restrict the space of preferences that can be reported. To enable this analysis, we develop a novel game that replicates key features of an abstract EV charging scenario. In two experiments with over 300 users, we show that restricting the users' preferences significantly reduces the time they spend deliberating (by up to half in some cases). An extensive usability survey confirms that this restriction is furthermore associated with a lower perceived cognitive burden on the users. More surprisingly, at the same time, using restricted interfaces leads to an increase in the users' performance compared to the fully expressive interface (by up to 70%). We also show that some restricted interfaces have the desirable effect of reducing the energy consumption of their users by up to 20% while achieving the same utility as other interfaces. Finally, we find that a reinforcement learning agent displays similar performance trends to human users, enabling a novel methodology for evaluating market interfaces.

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. They work in multiple stages where the result of each stage may influence the result of the next stage. Both procedures proceed according to a given linear order of the alternatives, an agenda. We obtain the following results for both voting procedures: On the one hand, deciding whether one can make a specific alternative win by reporting insincere preferences by the fewest number of voters, the Coalitional Manipulation problem, or whether there is a suitable ordering of the agenda, the Agenda Control problem, takes polynomial time. On the other hand, our experimental studies with real-world data indicate that most preference profiles cannot be manipulated by only few voters and a successful agenda control is typically impossible. If the voters' preferences are incomplete, then deciding whether an alternative can possibly win is NP-hard for both procedures. Whilst deciding whether an alternative necessarily wins is coNP-hard for the amendment procedure, it is polynomial-time solvable for the successive procedure.

A Microsoft-made artificial-intelligence system has achieved a perfect score of 999,990 points on the Atari 2600 version of the classic "Ms. Pac-Man" -- making it very likely the first time anybody, human or robot, has "beaten" the game. That notion is backed up by Highscore.com, Per that site, the highest score ever recorded in this version of "Ms. Pac-Man" was 266,330, by a player in Brazil.

The exploded skull of a man who died in the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago has been pieced together giving scientists a unique opportunity to capture the ancient face using 3D imaging. It is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum. The appearance is that of a typical southern European who may have been wealthy and educated because he was 50 years old when he died - an unusual milestone for the time. He was one of 350 casualties discovered frozen in time, buried under volcanic ash in Herculaneum. This is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum.

This is a class in data visualization. But before we leap into making charts and maps, we'll consider the nature of data, and some basic principles that will help you to "interview" datasets to find and tell stories. This is not a class in statistics, but I will introduce a few fundamental statistical concepts, which hopefully will stand you in good stead as we work to visualize data over the next few weeks -- and beyond. We're often told that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." But data visualization and statistics provide a view of the world that we can't otherwise obtain. They give us a framework to make sense of daunting and otherwise meaningless masses of information. The "lies" that data and graphics can tell arise when people misuse statistics and visualization methods, not when they are used correctly. The best data journalists understand that statistics and graphics go hand-in-hand. Just as numbers can be made to lie, graphics may misinform if the designer is ignorant of or abuses basic statistical principles. You don't have to be an expert statistician to make effective charts and maps, but understanding some basic principles will help you to tell a convincing and compelling story -- enlightening rather than misleading your audience. I hope you will get hooked on the power of a statistical way of thinking. As data artist Martin Wattenberg of Google has said: "Visualization is a gateway drug to statistics." Download the data for this session from here, unzip the folder and place it on your desktop.

These and many other insights are from the Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution published last week. The report is available for download here (50 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The survey is based on interviews with 3,500 marketers worldwide conducted by Salesforce Research through a third-party survey firm in April 2017. The 3,500 respondents are full-time marketing leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, U.K., Ireland and U.S. Respondents were segmented into high-performing, moderate-performing or under-performing groups. High-performing organizations are defined as those who are "extremely satisfied" with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company's marketing investment.

The global risk analysis used by big banks, hedge funds, and governments to inform their decision-making around everything from foreign currency investment to foreign aid is getting the machine learning treatment with the launch of the new startup GeoQuant. In the months since the company launched its service, GeoQuant has accurately predicted increasing political stability in Italy and Mexico before a corresponding rise in the value of those countries' capital markets and a collapse in political stability in Brazil before markets fell in that country, according to chief executive Mark Rosenberg. "Large asset managers and large corporations increasingly recognize that political risk is a growing factor in this investment climate," says Rosenberg. The former head of product development at the global risk consulting firm, The Eurasia Group, Rosenberg had long wanted to come up with a simpler measurement tool for gauging political risk, but felt it would have eroded much of the value in the bespoke reports that companies like the Eurasia Group rely on for income. Like many entrepreneurs before him, Rosenberg thought the process could be automated with a bit of technology.