Last week the smart watch company Pebble announced a Kickstarter campaign for a new device that has no watch face and lives on your key ring. While optimized for exercise (it streams Spotify and quantifies your run) the Pebble Core also can be retooled easily to perform a variety of different functions, limited only by the apps that developers might imagine. Buried in the company's Kickstarter pitch was one of those ideas: "Add a Bluetooth or wired headset to create an always-on walkie-talkie or personal voice assistant." The italics are mine, but today Pebble itself is boldfacing those last few words, by announcing that the Core will integrate the capabilities of Amazon's Alexa super-bot. Pebble has been upfront about its broad vision for the Core, and while its pocket gadget has no microphone, a simple mobile-phone earbud or Bluetooth headset enables two way voice interaction.

We made it to the third lesson on Data Science. At this point, I'll implore us not to be bored. I promise the next post will dwell more on the coding part of Machine Learning. What is the final deliverable and what format should it have? Before one jumps into analytics and working with data, one has to ask the first and most important questions.

John Rampton is founder of online invoicing company Due. By now everyone has heard of Google's RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I'll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses. When we talk about the context of Google's RankBrain, and the machine learning algorithms that are currently running on Google, we are talking about Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI).

I had the good fortune to meet Charis Loveland at the Machine Learning, Analytics, & Data Science Conference in Redmond, WA. Charis manages the team behind the Decoding Brain Signals machine learning contest and she was kind enough to join me on FWTV on 9.

Only the most dedicated statistics geeks would get into actuarial science, although the field of study is secretly pretty cool: actuaries are charged with enormous responsibility -- their job is essentially to predict the future, although unlike futurologists, there are real and severe consequences to getting it wrong. The world's "least famous scientists" will be in Lyon, France later this month for the ISFA-Columbia University Actuarial Science Workshop to talk about how smart machines will bring better predictions to an increasingly unpredictable world. Rather than predict what future technologies will corrupt the brains of future children and grandchildren, actuaries concern themselves with money and risk. How will climate change affect home insurance claims from hurricanes ten years from now? If 20-somethings are promised a pension plan on certain terms today, will the world of 40 years from now be able to pay up? How much will it cost to treat the unknown diseases of the future?

In this video from TiEcon 2016, Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha from IBM and Christopher Re from Stanford present: Data Economy – Brain Inspired Computing Will AI & Robotics Make Humans Obsolete. "The human brain is an ideal model. It's small and efficient, and it can process many types of inputs almost instantly. Computers have been compared to brains since the dawn of computer science. More recently, researchers have started to design computers that are modeled on how the brain works, a field now known as neuromorphic computing. IBM has developed end-to-end technology and ecosystem to create and program energy-efficient, brain-inspired machines that mimic the brain's abilities for perception, action, and cognition. The ecosystem consists of an indexcard-sized board with 1 million neurons; a simulator; a programming language; an integrated programming environment; a library of algorithms as well as applications; firmware; tools for composing neural networks for deep learning; a teaching curriculum; and cloud enablement. The ecosystem will be demonstrated on a number of datasets with near state-of-the-art accuracy and unprecedented energy-efficiency. Today, 100 researchers at 30 universities, government agencies, and companies are exploring the ecosystem. IBM has developed new scale-up and scale-out systems -- with 16 million neurons -- that will be presented in Dr Modha's pioneering research talk. Watson wins at Jeopardy and enters industrial applications while AlphaGo defeats the human Go champion. No day goes by before the dooms day prediction of AI infused Robots taking over our world comes up in the news. Will Artificial Intelligence make us obsolete? Tech optimists like to argue a new revolution in robotics will simply eliminate old jobs and create new ones. Even as large companies look to streamline with the help of automation, new technology also opens up possibilities for new products and services. Adaptation, they contest, is what has seen society thrive since the industrial revolution. Stanford has been in the middle of AI revolution and experts including speaker Dr Chris Re will weigh in on how close we are to AI domination and how data science can help human kind."

Robot-authored news stories rated'more credible' by humans Facebook's iOS apps describe photos to blind users China wants to beat Google's AlphaGo with own AI program The development of artificial intelligence is progressing so fast that humans will soon need a technological interface inserted into their brains to be able to keep up with the ever smarter machines, Elon Musk said at a tech conference in California this week. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors was among a line-up of high-profile tech experts and entrepreneurs discussing the evolution of AI and machine learning at the Code Conference organised by tech publication Recode. He said that judging by the tempo of development, it is likely that AI systems will soon become so sophisticated that they will be able to create even more intelligent computers by themselves that could side-line the human race. Although Musk's comments may seem a bit far-fetched, other speakers at the conference, including Google CEO Sundar Pitchai and Amazon's chief Jeff Bezos, agreed that the technology could start affecting the world within the next five to 20 years. "I would say in five years, there's no doubt in my mind that cognitive AI will impact every decision made from healthcare to education to financial services," said Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, which has been developing its own AI supercomputer, called Watson, since 2005. Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, predicts that AI will dominate the technology sector in approximately 20 years.

Well, that sure got weird, didn't it? Tribune's takeover of what used to be called Times-Mirror was messy when it started, a decade and a half ago, and has gotten worse every few years: This is the company, after all, that took over several great newspapers, crowed about "synergy," and made a few legendary editors so uncomfortable that they left their posts. And they sold their papers to Sam Zell, who had no background in newspapers and made an even bigger mess of things before filing for Chapter 11. Last fall, the company put Tribune Tower, where its original newspaper is based, up for sale. But now Tribune has a new trick: It has renamed itself tronc – a term that means, in French, "poor box," and if modulated to "trunk," something worse. According to Tribune's current chair, Michael Ferro – who was invited onto the board by former CEO Jack Griffin, whom he fired -- this is a bold step into the future.

Toyota and Honda have unveiled separate initiatives for car connectivity and artificial intelligence, the latest moves by Japan's auto industry to counter emerging tech rivals in Silicon Valley. Toyota has formed a partnership to create a global communications platform that will support unified car connectivity worldwide, rather than relying on varying networks in different markets. Meanwhile, Honda will establish a Honda R&D Innovation Lab in Tokyo around September to work on "intelligent technologies" beyond mechanical engineering, such as vehicle connectivity, robotics, brain research and visual recognition. The projects, announced independently on Thursday, June 2, underscore a new urgency felt by Japanese automakers to invest more in next-generation technologies for autonomous driving and safety systems. They are stepping up as entrants from outside the industry, such as Google and Uber, take the lead in the fields.

Facial recognition for whales may sound like a terrible elevator pitch, but to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the data scientists at Deepsense.io, Piotr Niedzwiedz told the story of how marine biologist Christin Khan - whose day job is flying over the ocean taking pictures of endangered whales for NOAA - was taking a break one afternoon and logged into Facebook. Here she was asked to identify her friends in photos and thought: "Why couldn't she do something similar with whales?" So she set up a competition on the data science website Kaggle - called Right Whale Recognition - to help them catalogue and track the small remaining population of the endangered whale. Piotr Niedzwiedz was simply that: "Humans are completely incapable of remembering 500 whale faces. The key to recognising this breed of whale is the unique white callosity pattern surrounding the blow hole."