The Dogs versus Cats Redux: Kernels Edition playground competition revived one of our favorite "for fun" image classification challenges from 2013, Dogs versus Cats. This time Kaggle brought Kernels, the best way to share and learn from code, to the table while competitors tackled the problem with a refreshed arsenal including TensorFlow and a few years of deep learning advancements. In this winner's interview, Kaggler Bojan Tunguz shares his 4th place approach based on deep convolutional neural networks and model blending. I am a Theoretical Physicist by training, and have worked in Academia for many years. A few years ago I came across some really cool online machine learning courses, and fell in love with that field.

You Can Have Security or You Can Have Speed: RSA Cryptographers' Panel SAN FRANCISCO -- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools are seen by some vendors as a panacea to help improve cybersecurity. While IBM is optimistic about AI, it is also warning that machine learning systems can be tricked and manipulated by attackers. IBM released new tools and research at the RSA Conference 2018 designed to help enable researchers to understand how certain types of malicious inputs can confuse AI systems and lead to in-accurate outcomes. In a video interview with eSecurityPlanet, IBM machine learning researcher Maria-Irina Nicolae and Sridhar Muppidi, VP and CTO IBM Security explained how the new IBM tools work and what risks organizations need to know. "In the toolkit what we have are attack and defense methods, as well as some metrics for measuring robustness," Nicolae told eSecurityPlanet.

Joanna Goodman is a freelance journalist and author. She is The Law Society Gazette's IT columnist and writes about tech for other publications including The Guardian. Her focus is emerging tech, including artificial intelligence (AI), connected devices and robots. She is a visiting scholar at University of Westminster Law School. As she is also the author of ones of the very first books on AI in the legal sector, we were fascinated by her views on just how worried lawyers should be when it comes to the impact of these technologies.

Automatic detection of anomalies in space- and time-varying measurements is an important tool in several fields, e.g., fraud detection, climate analysis, or healthcare monitoring. We present an algorithm for detecting anomalous regions in multivariate spatio-temporal time-series, which allows for spotting the interesting parts in large amounts of data, including video and text data. In opposition to existing techniques for detecting isolated anomalous data points, we propose the "Maximally Divergent Intervals" (MDI) framework for unsupervised detection of coherent spatial regions and time intervals characterized by a high Kullback-Leibler divergence compared with all other data given. In this regard, we define an unbiased Kullback-Leibler divergence that allows for ranking regions of different size and show how to enable the algorithm to run on large-scale data sets in reasonable time using an interval proposal technique. Experiments on both synthetic and real data from various domains, such as climate analysis, video surveillance, and text forensics, demonstrate that our method is widely applicable and a valuable tool for finding interesting events in different types of data.

Al Martin: So Welcome back to the Making Data Simple series, and welcome to 2018, I'm not sure about you but years go by like minutes it seems like particularly the older you get. I don't feel like I'm that old. But we're excited about 2018. I desperately want to thank all the listeners out there because we have been growing exponentially, beyond my expectations so thank you very much. We will continue to find interesting topics and folks to bring in that talk both technology, leadership and everything under the sun. I also want to thank the producers that work tirelessly on this, Kate Nichols and Fatima Sirhindi, they find they great guests, IBMers or external too, industry experts and I know that they have a few surprises for 2018 so stick around. Please give us feedback and if you're on iTunes or elsewhere please rate us we like to know how we're doing. So thank you, and here's to the new year. Al Martin: Welcome to Making Data Simple. I have with me today Judith Hurwitz and Dan Kirsch. Al Martin: Judith Hurwitz is the President of and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, a strategy consulting and research firm. And they're focused on distributed computing technologies.

Extracting information about entities remains an important research area. This paper addresses the problem of corpus-level entity typing, i.e., inferring from a large corpus that an entity is a member of a class, such as "food" or "artist". The application of entity typing we are interested in is knowledge base completion, specifically, to learn which classes an entity is a member of. We propose FIGMENT to tackle this problem. FIGMENT is embedding-based and combines (i) a global model that computes scores based on global information of an entity and (ii) a context model that first evaluates the individual occurrences of an entity and then aggregates the scores. Each of the two proposed models has specific properties. For the global model, learning high-quality entity representations is crucial because it is the only source used for the predictions. Therefore, we introduce representations using the name and contexts of entities on the three levels of entity, word, and character. We show that each level provides complementary information and a multi-level representation performs best. For the context model, we need to use distant supervision since there are no context-level labels available for entities. Distantly supervised labels are noisy and this harms the performance of models. Therefore, we introduce and apply new algorithms for noise mitigation using multi-instance learning. We show the effectiveness of our models on a large entity typing dataset built from Freebase.

HSBC is making plenty of noise about having spent $2.3 billion on improving its artificial intelligence (AI) and digital capabilities around the globe. WeChat is an "important part of our digital strategy" In an interview with South China Morning Post (SCMP), Vivek Ramachandran, head of growth and innovation for HSBC global commercial banking, said that between 2015 and 2017 the bank created new platforms and partnered with technology companies such as Tencent's WeChat. "We have found that an increasing number of clients like to use new technology to conduct bank transactions in a secure and transparent way," says Ramachandran, aka Captain Obvious. In the interview, Ramachandran says HSBC has allocated $200 million globally for investment in fintech and enterprise start-ups. He called WeChat an "important part of our digital strategy".

Accenture, which now has over 50 per cent of its revenues coming from digital, is betting big on Artificial Intelligence as the company feels AI has the ability to enable socio-economic development in India, unlocking at least a trillion dollars of economic value by 2035. In a conversation with BusinessLine, Rekha M Menon, Chairman and Senior Managing Director, Accenture in India, talked about how AI is transforming not just Accenture's clients but also the tech giant itself. People are worried about AI taking away their jobs, and in several instances, bots have in fact replaced humans. Should humans worry about AI taking over? AI is the'alpha' of all technology trends, and someday it will be as pervasive as electricity, truly transforming the way businesses and societies function.

Contract management has gotten on the radar in recent years. The world's contract managers finally gained attention in 2016 when Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Science. Their work on contract theory not only proves how contracts help us deal with conflicting interests, but also shows the importance of contract management. While contract automation is not new, 63% of procurement organizations from The Hackett Group's 2017 Digital Transformation Study are either exploring or piloting technology to advance the digitalization of contract management. As organizations look to become more digital, contract management is becoming more pervasive and sought after.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Germany's Max Planck Society creates Nobel Prize winners. Most recently, in 2014, physicist Stefan Hell, one of its scholars, was recognised for a breakthrough in microscope technology, allowing much smaller structures -- less than 200 nanometres -- to be seen. Commercialising this kind of highbrow abstract research, however, has been a different matter. While the alumni of California's Stanford University have filled Silicon Valley with start-ups, Germany's research institutes have not created clusters on the same scale.