Each Sunday, we publish a list of top articles and other content related to manufacturing in areas like quality control, product development, supply chain management, sourcing, auditing and law. The world of manufacturing is constantly evolving. It never seems to stop. Just when one technology seems to take center stage, another one steps up. One big performer on the horizon is machine learning.

Ask most people outside academia or Silicon Valley what comes to mind when they hear the term "machine learning" and you're likely to get a response that involves a movie like "The Matrix" or "Ex Machina." You're less likely to hear how it's a great tool for fraud detection or supply chain optimization, and that's too bad. Machine learning has a tremendous range of business applications, from optimizing data centers to predicting fine wine price changes to retail market basket analysis. With that in mind, I hope to cut through the science fiction clutter and misconceptions so you can consider how machine learning relates to your business. Many have heard about Andrew Ng's popular graduate level machine learning course at Stanford, now available on Coursera.

Some time in earlyFacebook will be'better than humans' in a DECADE, Mark Zuckerberg claims. Read more ... » 2016, Siddhartha Pahwa thought it would be "disruptive" if he could make a softwareAutomation of the creative: Are the bots coming for our creative and marketing departments?. Read more ... » that will allow users to book a cab on WhatsApp. That would give Pahwa's Meru Cabs a technologicalMan and machine, human and bot. Read more ... » edge over other cab aggregators such as Uber and Ola, but to his disappointment WhatsApp did not allow automatedAutomation of the creative: Are the bots coming for our creative and marketing departments?.

IMAGE: UMass Amherst researchers will apply recent advances in machine learning, specifically biologically inspired deep learning methods, to analyze large amounts of scientific data from laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and hyperspectral camera... view more They are funded by a new four-year, 1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to computer scientist Sridhar Mahadevan, lead principal investigator at UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences. His co-investigators are Mario Parente, an expert in analysis of hyperspectral images at UMass Amherst, and Darby Dyar of Mount Holyoke, a specialist in planetary chemistry and geology who serves on the scientific mission team for the Mars rover. As Mahadevan explains, NASA's Curiosity rover, a car-sized robot, has been exploring a crater on Mars since August 2012 and sending back a steady stream of specialized camera images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust for analysis. The data range from one-dimensional spectra of rock samples to three-dimensional hyperspectral images of the Martian surface. He advises Ph.D. students Thomas Boucher, CJ Carey, Steve Giguere, Ian Gemp, Francisco Garcia and Ishan Durugkar in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory, who are exploring machine learning methods to show, for the first time, that new deep learning approaches provide a practical and useful new tool for handling large scientific data sets.

Tesla announced it's semi-autonomous Autopilot system was involved in its first deadly crash on May 7, 2016. This marks the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle. However, this tragedy should not hinder progress. What everyone wants to know is how did this happen and why it happened. Here's what we know: Put simply, a Tesla Model S failed to see an oncoming threat.

Nearly one in four of the UK adult population – 12.6m adults – lacks key basic digital skills, according to GO ON UK. This gap has many causes and implications, but high on the list is jobs, because those who lack digital skills are more likely to be unemployed. This is more significant to young people, given that the youth unemployment rate is 14.4% and people aged 16 to 24 are three times more likely to be out of work than the rest of the working population. It is estimated that over 4.4 million IT jobs will be created around Big Data, but only a third of these new jobs will be filled. At Acorn Aspirations we strongly believe that if young people are inspired to create technology from an early age, they will be better equipped to face the constantly changing digital world we live in and contribute as creators of technology and change-makers to solve the most pressing local and global problems.

It's your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you'd talk to a friend. Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice. AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time.

Amazon wasn't the only technology stock to outshine the broader market for tech shares during the last three months. Investors also hit the'play' button on shares of companies that get all or most of their revenue from the computer-games business. Sony (SNE), Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Electronic Arts (EA) and NetEase all posted market-trouncing returns for the second quarter, a period when the Nasdaq was essentially flat. So did shares of Nvidia (NVDA), whose graphics chips are used in powerful computers favored by gamers. The question now for momentum investors is how far the stocks can run, as these issues tend to be volatile.

It is Monday, July 4. Celebrate Independence Day with a fireworks display. Here's what else is happening in the Golden State: For the men and women who lived through the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, there is no closure. Fighting off the horror of that event is a daily struggle, they say. "They were living through their own trauma of a terrorist attack when another one, in Orlando, brought back fresh memories of the bloodshed they endured. And the world's attention shifted again."

German car maker BMW has announced that it is joining forces with US computer chip giant Intel and the Israeli technology firm Mobileye to develop self-driving cars. The three companies'are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021,' they said in a joint statement. The news comes amid growing interest in self-driving cars following tests over the past few years by Google and research by several major automakers. The future of BMW could see driverless cars rolled out by 2021 in an effort to make travel'safer and easier'. Pictured is the German car firm's i3 electric car Germany's premium auto makers are at the centre of thecountry's global reputation for meticulous engineering. But with the expected shift in focus from a car's body toits brains, the risk is that the expertise will accumulate insilicon valley or in China, rather than Germany's carmakingregions of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemburg.