That's the projected galaxy haul of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction in Chile. Starting around 2023, the LSST camera's 3,200 megapixels will soak up 15 terabytes of data every night, which will fill the biggest astronomical database ever built. Computer scientist Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan says the amount of data defies comprehension. "With just a mountain of images, no one will ever inspect them one by one. You can never make a discovery," he says. "You need to convert it into something that machines can understand."

SK C&C has continued Korea's efforts to increase the usage and adoption of cloud computing within the region, announcing a new strategic alliance with IBM focused on the Watson cognitive computing platform. As part of the agreement, IBM will train Watson to understand and comprehend Korean, and South Korea-based developers will create a number of localized API's and services to increase adoption rates of such advanced cloud computing technologies in the region. Korean will be Watson's eighth language, lining up with English, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic. "Watson remains at the forefront of cognitive computing: advanced systems that learn at scale, understand with meaning, reason with purpose and interact with humans in natural ways," said David Kenny, GM for IBM Watson. "The South Korean marketplace is moving quickly to embrace the disruptive opportunities from next generation technology.

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.

When you look at cloud skills, it's more important to think about what's coming rather than what's already here. Why? Thousands of IT people will complete cloud certification programs this year. If you delay, the job market may be flooded by the time you're ready. Soon the "Internet of Things" will be keeping watch on jet engines, refrigerators and freezers, factory floors and more, thanks to a series of partnerships announced by Microsoft at the Hannover Messe industrial fair in Germany. Some people spend weeks, months, even years trying to learn machine learning without any success.

Still in the depths of sleep, I reach out and grab it, knocking a cold cup of coffee over the unread mountain of books on my bedside. I swear loudly, mop up the mess with one hand and look blearily at the message on my screen. It's from Otis, 27, who I have apparently just matched with on Tinder: "Hey sexy like ur curls. Wanna come over n get naked and I'll show you my curls." There is no denying that the pursuit of love in the 21st century has become littered with digital landmines. There are now more than 91 million people around the world on dating apps – and most of that is thanks to Tinder.

Very interesting data compiled and analyzed by O'Reilly, using statistical models such as Lasso regression to predict salary based on different factors. It reminds me our own analysis based on simulated (but realistic) data, to assess whether having Python or R (or both) commands a bigger salary, and what is the extra boost provided by these skills, individually. The statistical model used was Jackknife regression, and it was designed for tutorial purposes. The O'Reilly survey is much bigger, based on real data, and it includes many factors, as well as factor selection. It uses standard statistical techniques which might be less robust than Jackknife regression.

On 25 April, Zooniverse launched a website that asks volunteers to analyse rapidly-snapped satellite imagery of the disaster, which led to more than 650 reported deaths and 16,000 injuries. The aim is to help relief workers on the ground to find the most heavily damaged regions and identify which roads are passable. Several crisis-mapping programmes with thousands of volunteers already exist -- but it can take days to train satellites on the damaged region and to transmit data to humanitarian organizations, and results have not always proven useful. The Ecuador quake marked the first live public test for an effort dubbed the Planetary Response Network (PRN), which promises to be both more nimble than previous efforts, and to use more rigorous machine-learning algorithms to evaluate the quality of crowd-sourced analyses. The network relies on imagery from the satellite company Planet Labs in San Francisco, California, which uses an array of shoebox-sized satellites to map the planet.

This is the leading international symposium where the Ibero-American AI community comes together to share research results and experiences with researchers in Artificial Intelligence from all over the world. The conference will feature a pre-conference program of workshops. The main technical program will consist of invited talks by leading scientists working in the area, presentations of technical papers, as well as system demonstrations. The Proceedings of IBERAMIA 2016 will be published, as in past editions, by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence LNCS/LNAI series. IBERAMIA 2016, the XV edition of IBERAMIA, welcomes submissions on mainstream AI topics, as well as novel cross cutting work in related areas.

After being stranded in the Mediterranean for three days, fear had overcome Alou Sango. "I thought that we would all die, because there was nothing left, the petrol had finished," he says of his journey from Libya. Like thousands before him, Sango boarded an overcrowded boat to escape the country's turmoil after being unable to return to his native Mali. But after days at sea the captain lost his way and, without a GPS position to give to the Italian authorities, the 100 or so passengers were losing hope. Their rubber dinghy was finally spotted by a Chinese vessel, which picked up the migrants and took them to Italy, where Sango, now 24, is studying through a Rome-based charity, Sant'Egidio Community.

Did you know there is a 25% chance your cause of death will be due to environmental pollution? According the World Health Organization, some 12.6 million people--or nearly 1 in 4 worldwide--died in 2012 due to living or working in unhealthy conditions. In addition, environmental degradation seriously affects overall quality of life and the balance of Earth's ecosystems through loss of forests, open spaces, marine environments and biodiversity. While technological growth and industrialization historically contributed to such problems, the latest technologies--from robotics to artificial intelligence to biotechnology--will also help create healthier and greener industries benefiting both people and planet. While affordable electric and hybrid cars will help reduce pollution and use of fossil fuels, self-driving cars will make our whole transportation and logistics systems more efficient. Cars, trucks, ships, drones and jets that drive or pilot themselves and wirelessly communicate with each other can coordinate and optimize delivery of people and goods in ways requiring less energy.