Our world is generating more and more data, which people and businesses want to turn into something useful. This naturally attracts many data scientists – or sometimes called data analysts, data miners, and many other fancier names – who aim to help with this extraction of information from data. A lot of data scientists around me graduated in statistics, mathematics, physics or biology. During their studies they focused on individual modelling techniques or nice visualizations for the papers they wrote. Nobody had ever taken a proper computer science course that would help them tame the programming language completely and allow them to produce a nice and professional code that is easy to read, can be re-used, runs fast and with reasonable memory requirements, is easy to collaborate on and most importantly gives reliable results.

People's faces change all the time. During a conversation, a person's facial expressions and head angle change, and over time, people's appearances also change if they lose weight, grow a beard, or change their hairstyle. If we know someone, we can recognize them despite these changes - but if a face is unfamiliar, research has shown that people are generally very bad at matching together two images of the same face. If we know someone, we can recognize them despite changes in facial expressions - but if a face is unfamiliar, research has shown that people are generally very bad at matching together two images of the same face. Pictured is Jim Carrey in the film'A Series of Unfortunate Events' How the human visual system manages to overcome the challenge of face changes and allow us to recognize people it still mostly unknown.

For an introduction to statistics, this tutorial with real-life examples is the way to go. The notebooks of this tutorial will introduce you to concepts like mean, median, standard deviation, and the basics of topics such as hypothesis testing and probability distributions. A fine way to start your stats learning, since it is inspired by the books "Think Bayes" and "Think Stats", which are two top recommendations that will come back below! If you're looking for books, you can try out this free book on computational statistics in Python, which not only contains an introduction to programming with Python, but also treats topics such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo, the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, resampling methods, and much more. Or you can buy this book by Thomas Haslwanter for a general introduction to common statistical tests, linear regression analysis and topics from survival analysis and Bayesian statistics. Note that this book does take life and medical sciences as an application area. Both of the above books already introduce you to more advanced statistics topics with Python too, as you can see. If you're a fan of videos, you should consider watching this tutorial on statistical data analysis with SciPy with Christopher Fonnesbeck, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Science fiction has been instrumental in creating the future from the very beginning. Real-life manipulator hands, originally created for the nuclear industry, were named after Robert Heinlein's short story, "Waldo." It makes a lot of sense, then, that when the Xprize program partnered with All Nippon Airlines (ANA) to "imagine a bold vision of the future," it would look to celebrated science fiction novelists, writers, filmmakers, producers and screenwriters. The collaboration has produced the Science Fiction Council, a group comprised of high-octane sci-fi storytellers from nine countries, including luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Cory Doctorow, Andy Weir, Charles Stross, Ernest Cline and Nancy Kress. The Xprize organization runs prize competitions to encourage and support solutions to humanity's biggest challenges, like clean water, moon flights, Star Trek-inspired tricorders and even artificial intelligence.

The AI company is in the early stages of partnering with the UK's National Grid DeepMind is in talks with the UK's National Grid to boost energy efficiency using artificial intelligence. The AI company, acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, has developed algorithms that can anticipate energy demand and supply. These algorithms are already being used within Google's own data centres, allowing the tech giant to cut energy by 40%, but they are now in talks with the National Grid, which owns and operates energy infrastructure across the UK. DeepMind is offering AI-powered solutions that could help balance energy supply and demand across the nation. "We're early stages talking to National Grid and other big providers about how we could look at the sorts of problems they have," Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's co-founder and CEO, told the Financial Times.

A split-second can be the difference between victory and defeat; between setting a record and coming in second. So, it's a big deal when a team of Harvard engineers reveal a pair of shorts that reduce an average marathon time from 9:14 minutes/mile to 8:49 minutes/mile. The shorts are part of a larger exosuit system researchers have in mind. But, for now, the shorts are tethered to an actuation unit that supports the muscles along the hip and leg. The suit adds strength and tension to these muscles as they're activated, reducing the overall metabolic cost of a run by 5.4 percent.

Researchers have discovered that the lionfish, a predator with venomous spines, has invaded Caribbean coral reefs and is eating native species. Ember gobies school together in massed of about 100 fish - starkly different behavior from most gobies that hide alone in holes or cracks in the reef, making the new species an easy target for lionfish attacks. Ember gobies school together in massed of about 100 fish - starkly different behavior from most gobies that hide alone in holes or cracks in the reef, making the new species an easy target for lionfish attacks. They've gone on about 150 dives to Caribbean reefs using a 6.5-ton submarine with two robotic arms that stun fish for capturing by spraying them with water or an anesthetic, collecting them using a vacuum hose.

Apple's about to hold its Worldwide Developers Conference – the event where it shows off the future of the company, and of all its products. The event is one of the biggest company in the world's biggest events. While there won't be a new iPhone revealed – that gets saved for its own event in September – there will be new iPhone software, and plenty of glimpses at where the handset might be headed. Here's everything we're expecting when Apple takes the stage for its big keynote presentation on 5 June. But with Apple the most reliable expectation is that there'll be a surprise, so while a lot has leaked it's sure not to be everything.

AI-powered intelligent assistant Alexa is now able to create reminders, Amazon announced today. Now anyone with an Alexa-enabled device can say "Alexa, remind me to stay woke in 10 minutes" or "Alexa, remind me to tell my dad I love him on June 18." Amazon also announced today that Echo or Echo Dot users can create countdown timers with custom names. All scheduled reminders and timers can be viewed in the Alerts and Alarms section section of Alexa app. The ability to create reminders is a longtime requested feature from Alexa fans, like adding calendar events used to be for Google Assistant on Google Home users until Google finally added that feature in May.

For a more technical explanation, this and this article can be read. Here you can find a good explanation as well as a list of the mostly used Kernel functions.