Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew playing an April Fool's Day prank on Kochie. IT'S April Fool's Day today, and Australian companies have gotten into the spirit by having a lend of their customers in some very creative ways. Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew had Kochie fooled when she announced she was engaged to her long time partner Neil Varcoe today. To carry out the joke she used Natalie Barr's ring and put it on her hand. Australia's online dating site eHarmony, in partnership with WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo in Darling Harbour, announced the launch of aHarmony, a revolutionary new dating platform specifically designed for animals, where pet owners can find fluffy, scaly or even prickly partners using eHarmony's famous Compatibility Matching System.

Young scientists should be valued by their commitment to education, their dedication to fighting inequality in science, and their efforts to democratize science.

Editor's note: This is one in a series of profiles of five finalists for NVIDIA's 2016 Global Impact Award, which provides 150,000 to researchers using NVIDIA technology for groundbreaking work that addresses social, humanitarian and environmental problems. Eradicating worldwide poverty by 2030 is the top goal on the United Nations' sustainable development agenda, published late last year. But a lack of data has frustrated efforts to measure progress toward the goal. Most of those living in extreme poverty are in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, where accurate poverty data is scarce. A small team at Stanford University is changing that, one satellite image at a time.

With hosts and guests around the globe, Airbnb aspires to provide a frictionless payments experience where our guests can pay in their local currency via a familiar payment method, and our hosts can receive money via convenient means in their preferred currency. For example, in Brazil the currency is Brazilian Real, and people are familiar with Boleto as a payment method. These are quite different than what we use in the US, and imagine this problem spread across the 190 countries Airbnb serves. In order to achieve this, our Payments team has built a world-class payments platform that is secure and easy to use. The team's responsibilities include support of guest payments and host payouts, new payment experiences like gift cards, and assisting in financial reconciliation, to name a few.

CAMBRIDGE – How can we improve the state of the world? How can we make countries more competitive, growth more sustainable and inclusive, and genders more equal? One way is to have a correct theory of the relationship between actions and outcomes and then to implement actions that achieve our goals. But, in most of the situations we face, we lack such a theory, or if we have one, we are not sure that it is correct. Should we postpone action until we learn about what works? But how will we learn if we do not act?

Change detection (CD) in time series data is a critical problem as it reveal changes in the underlying generative processes driving the time series. Despite having received significant attention, one important unexplored aspect is how to efficiently utilize additional correlated information to improve the detection and the understanding of changepoints. We propose hierarchical quickest change detection (HQCD), a framework that formalizes the process of incorporating additional correlated sources for early changepoint detection. The core ideas behind HQCD are rooted in the theory of quickest detection and HQCD can be regarded as its novel generalization to a hierarchical setting. The sources are classified into targets and surrogates, and HQCD leverages this structure to systematically assimilate observed data to update changepoint statistics across layers. The decision on actual changepoints are provided by minimizing the delay while still maintaining reliability bounds. In addition, HQCD also uncovers interesting relations between changes at targets from changes across surrogates. We validate HQCD for reliability and performance against several state-of-the-art methods for both synthetic dataset (known changepoints) and several real-life examples (unknown changepoints). Our experiments indicate that we gain significant robustness without loss of detection delay through HQCD. Our real-life experiments also showcase the usefulness of the hierarchical setting by connecting the surrogate sources (such as Twitter chatter) to target sources (such as Employment related protests that ultimately lead to major uprisings).

The Times has assembled a panel of distinguished and diverse writers who will regularly contribute to the Books section. The 10 authors who make up the Los Angeles Times Cultural Critics At Large have published works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. They have won dozens of prizes. A majority have deep connections to Southern California, even though they hail from four different nations. They will help expand the literary conversation, challenging ideas and broadening readers' understanding of literature and culture within the contemporary moment.

Some metaphors end up forgotten by all but the most dedicated historians, while others lead long, productive lives. It's only a select few, though, that become so entwined with how we understand the world that we barely even recognize them as metaphors, seeing them instead as something real. Of course, why some fizzle and others flourish can be tricky to account for, but their career in science provides some clues. Metaphors, as we all by now know, aren't just ornamental linguistic flourishes--they're basic building blocks of everyday reasoning. And they're at their most potent when they recast a difficult-to-understand phenomenon as something familiar: The brain becomes a computer; the atom, a tiny solar system; space-time, a fabric. Metaphors that tap into something familiar are the ones that generally gain traction.

"Our research shows that a growing number of customers actually prefer self-service channels to answer questions, resolve issues or complete transactions. Yet, automated handling often hits limitations when it comes to handling complex queries or'remembering' information previously mentioned in a conversation," says Dan Miller, Opus Research lead analyst. "As intelligent assistant technology evolves; we anticipate the emergence of highly specialized'intelligent advisors' that know when and how to involve a live agent. Inbenta's Hybrid Chat is the beginning of this progress." "As a transactional e-commerce-based company, having a superior digital customer support program is essential. You wouldn't make your brick and mortar customers search your store without helping them, so why not give them a personalized experience virtually," says Andreia Ferreira, Live Chat Manager, Ticketbis.

Chat apps are very popular and arguably, most people would prefer engaging in a chat conversation rather than make a phone call. Going by recent buzz, it's apparent that tech giants are planning to bring chat conversations to advertisers and marketers. But there are many startups out there already using chat conversations to simplify user queries. Yellow Messenger is one such Bangalore-based startup. Instead of a team of people answering your queries however, it has put in place an Artificial Intelligence-powered interface that converses with users and responds to their queries related to shopping, real estate, recharge, etc.