Welcome to the Remark Holdings First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Becky Herrick of LHA. Thank you all for joining us today for the Remark Holdings first quarter 2017 financial results conference call. On the call today are Chairman and CEO, Shing Tao; and CFO, Doug Osrow. After the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. A webcast replay of today's call will be available at www.remarkholdings.com. Some of the statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements reflect Remark Holdings current views and Remark Holdings expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements after the date hereof. This disclaimer is only a summary of Remark Holdings' statutory forward-looking statements disclaimer which is included in its filings with the SEC.

The E-learning course starts by refreshing the basic concepts of the analytics process model: data preprocessing, analytics and post processing. We then discuss decision trees and ensemble methods (bagging, boosting, random forests), neural networks, support vector machines (SVMs), Bayesian networks, survival analysis, social networks, monitoring and backtesting analytical models. Throughout the course, we extensively refer to our industry and research experience. The E-learning course consists of more than 20 hours of movies, each 5 minutes on average. Quizzes are included to facilitate the understanding of the material.

There are big discussions in the automotive industry right now, about whether autonomous electric vehicles – yes, the ones that can drive themselves – will come to dominate transportation, personal and public, in the next few years. But it is completely foreseeable, in my opinion. The future of transportation is the electric vehicle (EV) because of sustainability; it can be powered by wind and sun, requiring only 1/3 of the energy of a vehicle with a combustion engine. Looking ahead to 2020, there will be many more EVs. Looking further to 2030, we will see major advancements in the area of autonomous driving.

The robot takeover will start in the smaller cities. Towns and small cities have a smaller proportion of jobs that will be resilient to automation than larger urban centres, according to a new study. By looking at the jobs that are most susceptible to automation and their distribution across different US cities, Iyad Rahwan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and his team have found a trend between the size of a city and the impact we should expect artificial intelligence and robots to have on human workers. Roughly speaking, cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants are more at risk. The East Coast cities are full of jobs that should be resilient to automation. Washington DC, for example, has many government-related roles that are hard to automate, and New York, with its population of 8.5 million, is able to support many specialist jobs too.

US ride services company Lyft and Google parent Alphabet's self-driving car unit Waymo have launched a self-driving vehicle partnership, bringing together two rivals to dominant ride-sharing service Uber. Lyft, the No. 2 US ride service by ride volume, in a statement said a deal to launch self-driving pilots would accelerate its vision for transportation and Waymo, which is beginning tests of a self-driving car service in Phoenix, said the partnership would let its technology reach "more people, in more places". Neither offered many details of the agreement, which was reported earlier by The New York Times. The car industry and technology companies are racing to develop self-driving technology, which they expect in a number of years will transform transportation, cutting costs of ride services and changing the way people buy and use cars. Uber is the biggest US ride service by volume and has been developing self-driving technology, which it sees as a key to its future, as it expands its ride service with human drivers.

This summer, Delta will test a facial recognition system for checking luggage. The airline says that the move is an effort to save customers time and further streamline the pre-flight process. "One machine will be equipped to test facial recognition technology to match customers with their passport photos through identification verification," the press release says. The $600,000 pilot program's four machines will reside at the sprawling Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. The news comes after recent word that domestic airports would start using biometrics for registering travelers when they leave the US and return.

Unlike evaluating the accuracy of models that predict a continuous or discrete dependent variable like Linear Regression models, evaluating the accuracy of a classification model could be more complex and time-consuming. Before measuring the accuracy of classification models, an analyst would first measure its robustness with the help of metrics such as AIC-BIC, AUC-ROC, AUC- PR, Kolmogorov-Smirnov chart, etc. The next logical step is to measure its accuracy. To understand the complexity behind measuring the accuracy, we need to know few basic concepts. E.g. – A classification model like Logistic Regression will output a probability number between 0 and 1 instead of the desired output of actual target variable like Yes/No, etc.

The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. In 2014, the proportion of the US who didn't believe in God was 33 per cent while in the UK it was 39 per cent. Despite this growing disbelief in a higher being, in a new article for The Conversation, Robert Nelson, a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland explores why he believes that God exists. The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. In 2014, the proportion of the UK who said they didn't believe in God was 39 per cent, while it was 33 per cent of people in the US (stock image) In 1960 the Princeton physicist – and subsequent Nobel Prize winner – Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always – so far as we know – obey laws of mathematics?

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction. And like any game-changing technology, AI is not exactly what we expected – at least not yet.

Cars will die out by 2030 as electric self-driving car shares take over our roads, according to a new report. Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled in the US will happen in autonomous vehicles owned by fleets rather than individuals in just over a decade, researchers found. This new technology will be up to ten times cheaper than buying a new car and will bring an end to more than 100 years of individual vehicle ownership. Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled will happen in autonomous electric vehicles which are owned by fleets rather than individuals in little more than a decade, report suggests. The report found Autonomous Electric Vehicles (A-EVs) will be owned by companies providing Transport as a Service (TaaS) by 2030 which will make up 60 per cent of vehicles on US roads.