The Kinect is officially dead. But the reality is that Microsoft signed the do-all sensor's fate years ago. Faced with slumping hardware sales in 2014, then-new Xbox chief Phil Spencer had a decision to make. Either Microsoft would drop the price of the Xbox One, or continue letting Sony and the $400 PlayStation 4 eat its lunch. So it stopped bundling the Kinect with the console and cut $100 off the asking price.

Josiah Renaudin: Welcome back to another TechWell interview. I'm joined by Jason Arbon, the CEO of Appdiff and a speaker at this year's STAR WEST. First, could you tell us a bit about where you worked at before you started Appdiff? Jason Arbon: Hi, Josiah, nice to chat with you again. After college, I started my career at Microsoft doing testing and automation for products like Windows and Bing.

Yann LeCun is one of AI's most accomplished minds, so when he says that even recent advances in the field aren't taking us closer to super-intelligent machines, you need to pay attention. LeCun has been working in AI for decades, and is one of the co-creators of convolutional neural networks -- a type of program that's proved particularly adept at analyzing visual data, and powers everything from self-driving cars to facial recognition. Now, as head of Facebook's AI research facility FAIR, he helps AI make the journey from the lab to the real world. His team's software automatically captions photos for blind users and performs 4.5 billion AI-powered translations a day. "We had a bigger impact on products than Mark Zuckerberg expected," LeCun told The Verge over Skype recently.

Is there a global theory for the shapes of fish? But for most of the history of biology, it's not the kind of thing anyone would ever have asked. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And it's now 100 years since D'Arcy Thompson published the first edition of his magnum opus On Growth and Form--and tried to use ideas from mathematics and physics to discuss global questions of biological growth and form. Stretch one kind of fish, and it looks like another. Yes, without constraints on how you stretch. It's not quite clear what this is telling one, and I don't think it's much. But just to ask the question is interesting, and On Growth and Form is full of interesting questions--together with all manner of curious and interesting answers. D'Arcy Thompson was in many ways a quintessential British Victorian academic, steeped in the classics, and writing books with titles like A Glossary of Greek Fishes (i.e. But he was also a diligent natural scientist, and he became a serious enthusiast of mathematics and physics. And where Aristotle (whom Thompson had translated) used plain language, with perhaps a dash of logic, to try to describe the natural world, Thompson tried to use the language of mathematics and physics.

The recent Association of Public Data Users (APDU) Conference gave me the opportunity to meet some people who have made tremendous contributions to the world of Open Data. One of the most popular R packages I've published is choroplethrZip. This package contains the US Census Bureau's Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) map, as well as metadata and visualization functions. It literally never occurred to me to think about who created the first ZCTA map, the methodology for creating it, and so on. It turns out that one of the people who created the ZCTA map – Jon Sperling – was at the conference.

In 2017, we celebrated 50 years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, known simply as the Turing Award. Justifiably, the Turing Award is often accompanied by the tagline "The Nobel Prize in Computing." How did this prestigious award come to be? The early history of the Turing Award is somewhat murky. The minutes of meetings of ACM Council from the mid-1960s shed some, but not complete light on this history.

Ranked the world's third-largest non-game app developer, Cheetah Mobile faces significant challenges in meeting the different needs of a diverse advertiser clientele. In Asia-Pacific, specifically, advertisers have yet to catch up – in terms of media investments – with consumers who are rapidly moving towards mobile devices, according to Josh Ong (pictured below), Cheetah Mobile's director of global marketing and communications. In this Q&A with ExchangeWire, Ong explains how the Chinese app developer is enhancing its programmatic and technology stack to better cater to advertisers' needs, as well as glean deeper insights on its monthly user base of more than 600 million. Khin Mu Yar Soe, PubMatic's customer success manager, also chimes in to discuss how the publisher ad platform works to support Cheetah Mobile, compared to publishers in other regions. If we get that right, then we have a solid base on which to build our business.

It's a skill that is critical for forming relationships, and now it seems that even young children can understand why others feel the way they do. A new study has revealed that children as young as one year old can distinguish between different emotions, and work out what is causing that feeling. Researchers believe that these abilities may play a critical role in developing theory of mind, social cognition, and early relationships. It's a skill that is critical for forming relationships, and now it seems that even young children can understand why others feel the way they do (stock image) In the first experiment, two to four year olds were shown two images, and were then played a vocal expression. The children were told that the vocal expression was made by a doll (Sally) who sat facing the screen, and were asked'Which picture do you think Sally is looking at?' Results showed that children were able to correctly identify the right image as well as an adult.

These question can make you think THRICE! Machine learning and data science are being looked as the drivers of the next industrial revolution happening in the world today. This also means that there are numerous exciting startups looking for data scientists. What could be a better start for your aspiring career! However, still, getting into these roles is not easy. You obviously need to get excited about the idea, team and the vision of the company. You might also find some real difficult techincal questions on your way. The set of questions asked depend on what does the startup do. Do they build ML products? You should always find this out prior to beginning your interview preparation. To help you prepare for your next interview, I've prepared a list of 40 plausible & tricky questions which are likely to come across your way in interviews. If you can answer and understand these question, rest assured, you will give a tough fight in your job interview. Note: A key to answer these questions is to have concrete practical understanding on ML and related statistical concepts.

"Microsoft Monday" is a weekly column that focuses on all things Microsoft. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about the new Xbox dashboard rolling out, the KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability being patched, new tree house offices, four new Xbox One S bundles, 62 vulnerabilities fixed in the "Patch Tuesday" update, Cortana integration in Skype, a machine learning partnership with Amazon, several major LinkedIn updates and much more! Microsoft is now rolling out the new Xbox dashboard for all users. The new Xbox dashboard features Microsoft's "Fluid Design" interface. There are four areas in the Xbox dash: the first area lets you resume what you were playing quickly, the second and third areas are suggestions for friends and the fourth area highlights deals and offers. And there is a horizontal strip at the bottom with most recently used content. The new Xbox Dashboard also has a new feature called "Content Blocks." Each content block has large visuals focused on a game, a friend or what is happening in the Gold Lounge.