As the world celebrated Earth Day on Friday, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher has found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to protect the Earth's endangered animals and forests by outwitting poachers with technology. With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Army Research Office, researchers are using AI and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Malaysia. "This research is a step in demonstrating that AI can have a really significant positive impact on society and allow us to assist humanity in solving some of the major challenges we face," said Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," said Fei Fang, PhD candidate from the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Tambe who is also director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

From a huge effort to help kids realize their potential to a celebration of our dear old planet, this week brought plenty of interesting and inspiring news around Microsoft. We've rounded up some of the highlights in this latest edition of Weekend Reading. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced grants to 100 nonprofit partners in 55 countries as part of YouthSpark, a global initiative to increase access for young people to learn computer science. In turn, these nonprofit partners -- such as Laboratoria, CoderDojo and City Year -- will use the power of local schools, businesses and community organizations to empower students to achieve more for themselves, their families and their communities. The nonprofits will build upon the work that Microsoft already has underway through programs like Hour of Code with Code.org,

Brands need to be "waking up" up to the potential of bots and be aware of sensors, the cloud and machine learning as we approach the "fourth industrial revolution", Microsoft's UK chief marketing officer told The Drum. Paul Davies, who spoke on the Advertising Week Europe panel dubbed'How smart cities will transform advertising', explained how Microsoft is already looking to an automated, connected future when designing and collaborating on innovations. "We have an app experience for people who are visually impaired, which is powered through bluetooth sensors to help them walk around all the way, through an electric car sharing company called Autolib," he said. "Their mission is to reduce the number of cars in Paris by 25,000 in the next seven years...using data and the cloud to empower that." Davies believes the world is "on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution".

Following last week's predictions by Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed that the search giant has a vision about artificial intelligence too. Quizzed on parent Alphabet's Q1 2016 investor call about areas where Google is pushing forward innovation, Pichai said search, particularly on mobile devices, has the opportunity to become closer to a personal assistant for users and, to fulfill that vision, must deploy machine learning and AI. "And overall, I do think in the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world. And I do think we are at the forefront of development," he said, polishing the search giant's credentials just a week after founder Mark Zuckerberg made a similar claim for Facebook at the F8 developer event. AI-based chatbots, for instance for Facebook Messenger, was a big theme at the social giant's event. Pichai also referenced the "great strides" made by AlphaGo, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, which shocked audiences when it beat a professional South Korean Go player in Seoul last month.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing. "BCI was a technology that was geared specifically for medical purposes, and in order to expand this to the general public, we actually have to embrace these consumer brand devices and push them to the limit."

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing.

In today's blog post, we shall look into time series analysis using R package – forecast. Objective of the post will be explaining the different methods available in forecast package which can be applied while dealing with time series analysis/forecasting. A time series is a collection of observations of well-defined data items obtained through repeated measurements over time. For example, measuring the value of retail sales each month of the year would comprise a time series. My data set contains data of Sales of CARS from Jan-2008 to Dec 2013.

Google made headlines earlier this year when its AlphaGo AI defeated world champion Lee Se-Dol in the ancient board game Go. But a group of researchers want to push the boundaries and see how a computer might fare in a first-person shooter deathmatch. The 2016 Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference will host a competition to determine the best bot that's capable of winning a multiplayer round of Doom, while playing the way a human does. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. That means that unlike enemy AI in video games, which have a complete overview of the level's map, locations of powerups and weapons, the bots will have to rely only on raw visual input that mimics what a human gamer sees when they play a game. The Visual AI Doom Competition will pit bots against each other in two tracks: the first one will see them playing a map known to their programmers with only rocket launchers and health boosts, while the other will feature an undisclosed map with all weapons and items available.

IBM Watson project manager Leanne LeBlanc views analytics of healthcare data. Each person generates more than 1,100 terabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books. What alarms Dr. Craig Thompson, president and CEO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is that 20% of cancer patients in the U.S. are misdiagnosed. Thompson made those remarks during an IBM investor briefing in February as he discussed the cancer hospital's partnership with IBM Watson. Three years ago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and IBM Watson formed a partnership to develop Watson for Oncology, a cognitive computing system that can analyze large volumes of data including medical literature, patient health records, and clinical trials, to offer personalized, evidence-based treatment recommendations for cancer patients.

Earlier today, SMRT Services has just announced that it is partnering with 2 Getthere Holding to bring in automated vehicle systems into Singapore. This could happen as early as end of the year. According to the press release, what we might be seeing end of the year are Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicles being tested on the roads. "The new Singapore-based JV, called 2getthere Asia Pte Ltd will market, install, operate and maintain the Automated Vehicle systems for customers in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific. The JV aims to showcase 2getthere's 3rd Generation Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicle capabilities in Singapore by the end of the year."