The video game industry has already taken 2016 by storm. With San Francisco's annual Game Developers Conference seeing record numbers of attendees, and Ubisoft's The Division becoming the fastest-selling original IP in games history – and generating 300m in the process – there's good reason to be excited if you're a video game fan. If first-person shooters are not your cup of tea, there's Stardew Valley, a new role-playing adventure game that allows you to go fishing, plant seeds and fall in love. Joining co-hosts Keith Stuart and Jordan Erica Webber are the founder of UK-based studio Fourth State, Mark Backler, and the community manager at Chucklefish, Molly Carroll.

Google is making it easier for companies to take advantage of the machine learning (ML) revolution with an offering that allows creation of custom machine learning models. The company on Wednesday showed off its new AI product that it is making available to folks outside of the Internet giant. With machine learning, applications are able to learn or adjust on their own without help from human developers. According to Tech Crunch, the search giant's chairman, Eric Schmidt said that Google believes machine learning is "what's next." With the new cloud service, the Internet giant will make it easier to employ some of the machine learning tech the company already uses to power features like Smart Reply in Inbox.

Cambridge Science Festival 2016 was the biggest and best ever, organisers have revealed. More than 350 events were held during the fortnight-long festival, attracting 60,000 visitors. Cambridge University, which runs the events, said the festival's main theme, artificial intelligence, sparked "considerable interest". This year was the 22nd in the festival's history, and it finished last Sunday with dozens of events on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. A spokeswoman said: "We had two momentous weeks of over 350 events and 60,000 visits, making it the largest festival to date in terms of both events and visits. "This year was marked by the considerable interest from both the public and the media in many of the artificial intelligence and machine learning events, testament to both the fascination and the concern we all feel with our growing interaction and reliance on machines.

Data scientists often spend hours or days tuning models to get the highest accuracy. This tuning typically involves running a large number of independent Machine Learning (ML) tasks coded in Python or R. Following some work presented at Spark Summit Europe 2015, we are excited to release Scikit-learn integration package for Spark that dramatically simplifies the life of data scientists using Python. Python is one of the most popular programming languages for data exploration and data science, and this is in no small part due to high quality libraries such as Pandas for data exploration or scikit-learn for machine learning. Scikit-learn provides fast and robust implementations of standard ML algorithms such as clustering, classification, and regression. Scikit-learn's strength has typically been in the realm of computing on a single node, though.

Azure Machine Learning is Microsoft's machine learning studio. It provides a workbench for analysts to perform data analysis including applying predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms. One of the key uses of Machine Learning is finding correlations in data and using the relationships between different indicators to provide predictive power. Here is an example scenario I built in Azure ML. I found a dataset that describes a set of Community Health Status Indicators by county for the United States.

It's well understood that machine learning is eating the software world, so it's no surprise to see tech startups like Cosmify and LodgIQ emerging from stealth today with plans to leverage big unstructured data for a competitive advantage. San Francisco-based Cosmify came out of stealth today with a new solution that uses machine learning to jumpstart knowledge discovery across a range of information sources. The company's solution is designed to scan, analyze, and visualize unstructured data sources, such as documents, tweets, user data, chat logs, and photographs. Machine learning algorithms create a model of the data sources, and then maps all relevant relationships between them based on individual words or properties, according to Cosmify. Users can then explore the model to find outliers, discover behavioral trends, and predict future results.

Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you. Tay may use the data that you provide to search on your behalf. Tay may also use information you share with her to create a simple profile to personalize your experience.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as the Amazon Echo and self-driving cars are hitting the market, they are poised to become an essential part of society. For people around the world, especially college students, this could mean some big changes. Once created, an AI can be used either internally or externally. Internal interfaces are located on a cloud and can access other devices and software that is used in the home such as a TV or smartphone. Technology like the Amazon Echo, which can access apps that are downloaded on a smart phone, is an example of this, but in comparison this technology is rudimentary compared to what others have developed.

Summary: At least one instance of Real Time Predictive Model development in a streaming data problem has been shown to be more accurate than its batch counterpart. Whether this can be generalized is still an open question. It does challenge the assumption that Time-to-Insight can never be real time. A few months back I was making my way through the latest literature on "real time analytics" and "in stream analytics" and my blood pressure was rising. The cause was the developer-driven hyperbole that claimed that the creation of brand new insights using advanced analytics has become "real time".

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display