This A.I. Chatbot Is Scaring Lawyers and Fighting Homelessness

Top data science teams around the world are doing incredible work on some of the most interesting datasets in the world. Google has more data on human interests than every 20th century researcher, while Uber seamlessly coordinates the itinerary and pricing of more than 1 million trips every day. With machine learning, and artificial intelligence, top data science teams are changing the way we ingest and process data, and they are coming up with actionable insights that impact the lives of millions. What if there were common patterns between the interviews top data science teams were giving that would let you master the data science interview process? What if the specific differences between various teams and their interview practices could be enumerated so that interviewing with a top data science team were more akin to a science than an art?

It has been well documented that technology has played a major role in the Olympics this year in Rio. Athletes are using technology to train smarter, wearing specialized equipment to compete stronger and are recovering faster and more effectively all due to advances in technology and new innovations. Barbara Kendall has seen this transformation in a way in which few can relate. She competed in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympics in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney and won gold, silver and bronze medals through her 25-year Sailboarding career. When her athletic career ended, she got into the technology world and is now a member of board of directors for an artificial intelligence (AI) company Arria NLG.

Humans are amazing creatures – driven by curiosity, intellect, ambition. The Olympic Games this month and the Nobel Prize Awards are examples of how our society reveres those who push their limits to achieve the seemingly impossible in both work and life. Digital advancements and new technologies are quickly redefining what is possible by accelerating human potential beyond the physical and intellectual capabilities of just a few years ago. But what can humans achieve with a little help from artificial intelligence? According to Erik Brynjolfsson, economist at MIT and the co-author of The Second Machine Age, "The accumulated doubling of Moore's Law, and the ample doubling still to come, gives us a world where supercomputer power becomes available to toys in just a few years, where ever-cheaper sensors enable inexpensive solutions to previously intractable problems, and where science fiction keeps becoming reality."

FANUC, the world's largest maker of industrial robots, plans to start connecting 400,000 of their installed systems by the end of this year. The goal is to collect data about their operations and, through the use of deep learning, improve performance. Similarly, Kuka is building a deep-learning AI network for their industrial robots. FANUC is now moving forward to connect all its manufacturing robots. The system proactively detects and informs of a potential equipment or process problem before unexpected downtime occurs.

Canadian video game star Elliot Carroza-Oyarce won the gold medal Tuesday in the first-ever EGames contest, held amid the Olympics festivities in Rio de Janeiro. Organizers hoped the hours-long "Super Smash Bros." competition would show how the growing number of competitive video gamers across the world could have their own recurring celebration in the years to come. The e-sports community has been divided over whether video games should be in the Olympics, commemorated with their own global championships, or continue as is, with disparate worldwide contests and leagues. Video game players "don't necessarily want to be boxed in with traditional athletes," said Neil Duffy, executive vice president at the British nonprofit behind the EGames. "But the level of skill and practice and effort that this competition requires really is comparable with that of a football or basketball player."

This is the first in Blue Hill Research's occasional blog series "Questioning Authority with Toph Whitmore." As co-founder (with friend Michael Stonebraker) of Vertica, Andy Palmer ambitiously sought nothing less than to reinvent the database. In 2013, he and Stonebraker moved up the data value chain and founded Tamr, the Cambridge, MA-based software company aiming to provide a unified view of data in the modern enterprise. Palmer joined me for a discussion in which he talked Tamr, predicted the future of enterprise data management, and introduced a rather colorful (yet apt) analogy of which, he admits, his marketing team is less than fond. TOPH WHITMORE: Tell me about the genesis of Tamr.

From May to July 2016, over one thousand Kagglers competed in Facebook's fifth recruitment competition: Predicting Check-Ins. In this challenge, Kagglers were required to predict the most probable check-in locations occurring in artificial time and space. As the first place winner, Tom Van de Wiele, notes in this winner's interview, the uniquely designed test dataset contained about one trillion place-observation combinations, posing a huge difficulty to competitors. Tom describes how he quickly rocketed from his first getting started competition on Kaggle to first place in Facebook V through his remarkable insight into data consisting only of x,y coordinates, time, and accuracy using k-nearest neighbors and XGBoost. I have completed two Master programs at two different Belgian universities (Leuven and Ghent), one in Computer Science (2010) and one in Statistics (2016).

EC: Welcome to the Wastes, Arthur! Hey, real quick before we get started… I understand you like to "poke pixels into proper shape". I'm a bit of a video game nerd, could you tell me about the game developer thing? AW: A friend I've known for 25 years, asked me to help him build games. He loves games, but isn't super creative.

Nick Triantos spent the past year trying to commercialize the technology being developed at SRI International, the Stanford research offshoot that helped invent the Internet and Siri, among other things. Now he has joined Ignition Partners at its new office in Los Altos, where he says he will be able to help create companies from a broader range of innovation. Triantos said his focus will be on business-focused startups, particularly ones working in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and augmented and virtual reality. But he doesn't expect that will include startups in the currently hot space of chatbots, despite his background with voice recognition and machine learning at SRI. The following Q&A about these and other topics has been edited for length and clarity. What was your role at SRI and why are you leaving there? Unfortunately, not many people know about SRI.