KDnuggets recently ran an Automated Data Science and Machine Learning blog contest, which garnered numerous entries and lots of appreciation for the winning posts and a pair of honorable mentions. The winning post, titled Contest Winner: Winning the AutoML Challenge with Auto-sklearn, written by Matthias Feurer, Aaron Klein, and Frank Hutten, all of the University of Freiburg, provides an overview of Auto-sklearn, an open-source Python tool that automatically determines effective machine learning pipelines for classification and regression datasets. The project is built around the successful scikit-learn library and won the recent AutoML challenge. Given the popularity of the post, we asked the authors if they would be interested in answering a few followup questions on themselves, their project, and automated data science in general. What follows is the result of this conversation. What if we start by having you introduce the members of the team and provide a little information on each of your backgrounds?

Brilliant minds like Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nicola Tesla, and of course Albert Einstein are equally known for the application of knowledge to problem solving. While we doubt we'll be winning a Nobel Prize any time soon, we're pleased to announce that Email Studio now includes artificial intelligence (AI) powered by Salesforce Einstein. Einstein combines machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, smart discovery, and predictive analytics to help our customers get smarter and more predictive about their customers. Admittedly, the idea of adding AI to your email program may seem a little like science fiction, but in reality it's something you can do today. Machine learning is a lot more common than we may realize.

What are the best practices for creating artificial intelligence? It's a question posed by the "partnership on AI" formed by major American technology firms. The goal of the partnership, which includes Google, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook, is to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license (sic) in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology." Now, a clarification of terms: AI and robots are different. I should know: I wrote a series of novels about self-replicating humanoid robots.

Golden parachutes can't seem to stay out of the news. Last year, Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, received a separation payment of 4.875 million in cash along with additional equity awards and other benefits for a total of close to 37 million after being ousted from his company. Can it also transform the nation? Hillary Clinton was campaigning for her husband in January 1992 when she learned of the race's newest flare-up: Gennifer Flowers had just released tapes of phone calls with Bill Clinton to back up her claim they had had an affair. We tend to associate salads most closely with spring and summer, when fresh produce is at its peak and when we're all in the mood for lighter, fresher-tasting meals.

Though best known for his ability to make audiences laugh, actor, writer and director Ben Stiller is hoping his latest effort will make people stop and think. Stiller published an essay Tuesday morning revealing that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2014. He was declared cancer-free in September of the same year. "The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify," Stiller wrote of the time. The publication of the essay was released in connection with Stiller's appearance on "The Howard Stern Show" where he first spoke of his diagnosis.

This week on the GoodPractice podcast, the CIPD's David D'Souza joins Owen Ferguson, Jonny Anderson and Ross Garner from GoodPractice to discuss the future of work. Artificial Intelligence is already creeping into our workplace and homes through Google search, smartphones and the new Amazon Echo. But what happens to us when it starts to perform our jobs? Should we embrace AI or fight against it? Will we even need to work in the future? If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, you can get in touch with us on Twitter at @dds180, @owenferguson, @biofractal and @RossGarnerGP.

No one did more to put Los Angeles theater on the map than Gordon Davidson. The founder of the Mark Taper Forum, he was one of the city's cultural founding fathers, a mild-mannered but determined revolutionary who built Center Theatre Group into the prodigious theatrical institution it is today and, even more important, built an audience with an appreciation for serious drama in this town. It is impossible to do justice to the dimensions of such a legacy. Davidson's influence on Los Angeles is twinned in my mind with the architectural landmark just down the street from his old Music Center headquarters -- Walt Disney Concert Hall. The reason is that I believe Davidson, who died Sunday at age 83, has done as much to transform the city's conception of itself as a cultural capital as Frank Gehry's magnificent building.

A lifetime in comedy continues to pay off for Eddie Murphy, who will be honored with the Hollywood Career Achievement Award at the 2016 Hollywood Film Awards in November. Murphy, who was honored in 2015 with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, earns his latest accolades for a career that includes years on "Saturday Night Live," blockbuster hits "Shrek," "Coming to America" and "Beverly Hills Cop," as well as an Academy Award-nominated turn as James "Thunder" Early in the 2006 musical "Dreamgirls." "Eddie Murphy has had a spectacular career as a comedian, actor, writer, producer and director, spanning more than 35 years," said Allen Shapiro, CEO of Dick Clark Productions, in a statement released Monday. "We look forward to honoring his extraordinary body of work." Actor and comedian James Corden ("The Late Late Show With James Corden") will host the ceremony held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on Nov. 6.

HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, won the Award for Best AI Innovator at the 2016 AIconics Awards, which celebrate drive, innovation, and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community. HCL won for Satori, a DRYiCE(TM) module that is an AI-enabled web application combining the functions necessary for traditional and 21st-century enterprises, such as content and document management, personal profiling, enterprise social networking, enterprise search, business intelligence, workflow management, and an enterprise application store. The category for Best AI Innovator celebrates the company that is at the front-end of AI innovation, investing significantly in R&D, and committed to advancing the industry. HCL's high placement in these awards underscores the company's commitment to bringing innovative automation and AI solutions to the enterprise. In May, the company won for Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the London AIconics Awards.

One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, "This is Silicon Valley, right here." All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup "accelerator" that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a "unicorn"--Valleyspeak for a billion-dollar company. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power--and the peculiarities--of an island nation. At the noisy end of the room, Graham was cheerfully encouraging improbable schemes. At the quiet end, Sam Altman was absorbed in private calculations. When founders came over to ...