Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category such as M&A activity, people movements, funding news, industry partnerships, customer wins, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide you a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help you keep abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We're working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Holberton School, the two-year tuition-deferred college alternative educating the next generation of digital workers, announced the launch of their brand new Machine Learning curriculum which will be available at all eight world-wide Holberton campuses. The announcement was made at the flagship San Francisco campus featuring Grammy award-winner NE-YO, Black Girls Code founder and CEO Kimberly Bryant and representatives from Google (Tensorflow) and IBM. "Machine Learning, and by extension Artificial Intelligence, are increasingly dominating how we interact with technology at all levels, and the need for diversity has never been so urgent," said Gabriela de Queiroz, founder, AI Inclusive and R-Ladies. "Having programming skills isn't enough -- we need people who are aware of the ethical implications of AI, who can bring their diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to the workplace and incorporate them into the algorithms that will increasingly play a major role in healthcare, safety, and every other element of our lives." Machine Learning, which gives computers the capability to learn without being explicitly programmed, is already in use across the globe and is rapidly supplementing, and even replacing, traditional software development.

By Padmaja Ruparel 2019 saw the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem make a paradigm shift. The country's startup landscape saw the emergence of seven new unicorns and value creation of $90 billion. Little wonder, then, that India is globally ranked third in its number of startups, behind only the US and China. The first half of 2019 saw $3.9 billion invested across 292 domestic investment deals, marking an increase of more than 44% over the same period in 2018. Emerging startups also benefited from the windfall.

Fuelled by unprecedented international investment, groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence and inclusive immigration policies, Canada's innovation economy has seen explosive growth. In fact, over the last five years, the Greater Toronto Area's tech sector grew by more than 50 per cent. Now with more than 241,000 employees, the GTA has become an innovation powerhouse on par with cities like New York and Seattle. And VC investment in Canadian startups reached record levels (in the first half of 2019 alone, nearly $3.3 billion investments were made), and the Deutsche Bank ranked Canada as the best country in the world for social entrepreneurship. But while things might be looking up here at home, the world faces unprecedented challenges as we head into the next decade.

The Mayor, a green cube with a top hat, goes "kaboom" in Wattam. The Mayor, a green cube with a top hat, goes "kaboom" in Wattam. The video game designer Keita Takahashi is best known for Katamari Damacy, released in 2004. It's about a god named the "King of All Cosmos" who, while drunk, accidentally destroys the stars in the sky. His son "The Prince" is left to clean up his mess by rolling up objects on Earth into sticky masses that grow so large they become new stars.

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been named one of the ten most influential people in science in 2019 by the journal Nature. The 16 year old has been named alongside a neurologist who brought pig brains back to life and a palaeontologist who shook up humanity's family tree. The prestigious British science journal, which celebrated its 150th anniversary this year, says the Swedish campaigner'channelled the rage of a generation'. She had outshone scientists who couldn't'galvanise global attention' the way she did and many are cheering her along, according to Nature. The ten most influential list also includes a physicist building quantum computers, a biologist editing genes in adult humans and a microbiologist fighting Ebola.

Using machines to augment human activity is nothing new. Egyptian hieroglyphs show the use of horse-drawn carriages even before 300 B.C. Ancient Indian literature such as "Silapadikaram" has described animals being used for farming. And one glance outside shows that today people use motorized vehicles to get around. Where in the past human beings have augmented ourselves in physical ways, now the nature of augmentation also is more intelligent. Again, all one needs to do is look to cars – engineers are seemingly on the cusp of self-driving cars guided by artificial intelligence.

This article was originally published May 11, 2018 on JAXenter. At Kublr we've been talking with customers and the community about the workloads they plan to run using containers and Kubernetes. Frameworks from MapReduce to Hadoop to Spark have created parallel processing capabilities that leverage clusters to speed processing tasks. These clusters have been frequently managed with their own cluster management solution (eg. Recent developments in Kubernetes for data science and machine learning include the 2.3 release of Apache Spark with "native" Kubernetes support.

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Thursday that it has officially launched a National Artificial Intelligence Institute in an attempt to be a "leader" in the development of the technology. The institute will work to "prioritize and realize" AI research and development programs. These include existing projects, like an effort to use AI to reduce veterans' wait times for health appointments, and another to scan their medical records to evaluate their suicide risk as part of the REACH VET program. "VA's artificial intelligence institute will usher in new capabilities and opportunities that will improve health outcomes for our nation's heroes," Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. The institute is a partnership between the VA's Office of Research and Development and Wilkie's Center for Strategic Partnerships.

With late 2019 marking the 20th anniversary of the landmark report on medical errors "To Err is Human," now is time for a renewed focus on novel ways to improve patient safety. The report launched the modern patient safety movement by shedding some much-needed light on the prevalence of medical errors and preventable deaths in the U.S., spawning many improvements to patient safety over the subsequent two decades. But before the healthcare industry gets too self-congratulatory, we could use a quick reality check. Patient safety remains a persistent global issue that exacts a huge human cost, as well as a financial one, as a recent report from the World Health Organization (WHO) starkly illustrates. While it is estimated that there is a one in 3 million risk of dying while travelling by airplane, the risk of patient death while receiving healthcare due to a preventable medical accident is estimated to be one in 300, according to the WHO.