Single Index Models (SIMs) are simple yet flexible semi-parametric models for machine learning, where the response variable is modeled as a monotonic function of a linear combination of features. Estimation in this context requires learning both the feature weights and the nonlinear function that relates features to observations. While methods have been described to learn SIMs in the low dimensional regime, a method that can efficiently learn SIMs in high dimensions, and under general structural assumptions, has not been forthcoming. In this paper, we propose computationally efficient algorithms for SIM inference in high dimensions with structural constraints. Our general approach specializes to sparsity, group sparsity, and low-rank assumptions among others. Experiments show that the proposed method enjoys superior predictive performance when compared to generalized linear models, and achieves results comparable to or better than single layer feedforward neural networks with significantly less computational cost.

Everyone is on social media. According to Pew Research, in 2015 an astounding 65 percent of all Americans were using social media. That's more than 200 million people in the USA alone, and is approximately the same amount as the number of people in America who own pets. Worldwide, the total on social media already exceeds 2 billion people. That's twice as many people worldwide as the number who own a car.

Nintendo Reports Second Quarter Losses But 3DS Sales Are Up Thanks To'Pokmon GO' At Inbound 2016, HubSpot's co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah entertained 19,000 attendees with their take on the past and future of marketing. Here's what I learned from their keynote presentation and a brief interview. So predicts Halligan, adding "in five years, you will do a lot less navigating through apps and more just asking questions and chatting back and forth with bots… the next thing you know, we like it and it's easier and more efficient than waiting for the sales rep to call you back." Shah notes that businesses started building websites in the 1990s so they can answer customer questions 24/7. "Soon," he says, "they will start building bots. They won't replace the websites, but they will power them. The shortest time between a customer question and the answer will be a bot. It's not human vs. bot, it's human to the bot powered."

When medics apply radiotherapy to a cancer patient, they have to carefully determine which parts of the body should be exposed to radiation in order to kill the tumor while ensuring that as much healthy surrounding tissue as possible is preserved. "Clinicians will remain responsible for deciding radiotherapy treatment plans, but it is hoped that the segmentation process could be reduced from up to four hours to around an hour," explains DeepMind. It's currently drawing on 600,000 medical evidence reports and 1.5 million patient records and clinical trials to help doctors develop better treatment plans for cancer patients. After coming under fire earlier in the year when an app project appeared to provide DeepMind with free access to 1.6 million patients' records, the research outfit recently announced that it was helping to spot the early signs of visual degeneration by sifting through a million eye scans.

It seems like almost every day a new headline warns us that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon take over the world, or at the very least steal jobs. Even when AI is not in the news, Hollywood offers up a steady stream of entertainment that depicts a very near future in which life as we know it is threatened by super-intelligent machines. These scenarios have something in common: they oversimplify and misrepresent an important and broader set of transformative technologies that hold great promise for business and society. They indulge in fantasy rather than take into account a rational and better-informed dialogue currently underway in the scientific, policy and business communities about what we consider the third age of computing -- the cognitive era. Cognitive computing -- of which AI is but one part -- refers to an entirely new class of technologies whose purpose is to deepen human engagement, scale and elevate expertise, enable new products and services, and enhance exploration and discovery.

The idiom "never judge a book by its cover" warns against evaluating something purely by the way it looks. And yet book covers are designed to give readers an idea of the content, to make them want to pick up a book and read it. Good book covers are designed to be judged. And humans are quite good at it. It's relatively straightforward to pick out a cookery book or a biography or a travel guide just by looking at the cover.

Fedscoop: Autonomy and artificial intelligence may be integral to the Defense Department's Third Offset Strategy, but making those technologies useful will require IT investments to integrate them into defense systems, a new report says. "Both the DOD and the Intelligence Community, they are investing in these technologies. So artificial intelligence is a big priority area, machine learning, all these technologies," Matthew Hummer, director of analytics at big-data and analytics firm Govini, told FedScoop. "But they haven't really done a good job of integrating it into the current Distributed Common Ground Systems. And that's because those systems really need pretty much a big overhaul to be able to do that."

When it comes to artificial intelligence, forget the scary movies about rebellious robots or the dire warnings of a dystopian world of disconnected humanity imagined by some popular writers. AI promises, rather, to change our lives in profound ways we are just beginning to experience, according to a ground-breaking survey produced by Stanford University. Stanford is taking the long view of AI, with a project called One Hundred Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). The study, written by a panel of AI experts from multiple fields including healthcare, will continue as an ongoing activity, with periodic reports examining how AI will touch different aspects of daily life. The first of those reports, "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," looks into the effects that AI advancements will have on a typical North American city a little more than a decade from now.

This piece, written by MWD Advisors' lead analysts Angela Ashenden, Neil Ward-Dutton and Craig Wentworth, provides an overview of the key trends we see organisations facing in 2017 (and beyond). If you're in a technology leadership role, you should be exploring how these trends will impact the ways you plan, design, deliver and support services and capabilities. At MWD Advisors, our research program is focused, at a high level, on how digital technology changes work. The core of our scope of research is the systems and platforms organisations use to share knowledge, make decisions and co-ordinate work; we look at how new technologies are changing the picture, and what distinguishes successful organisations that reap the benefits of new technologies from those that struggle to drive meaningful change. The three trends we outline below are fundamentally changing the relationship between technology and business.

This is the first textbook to teach students how to build data analytic solutions on large data sets (specifically in Internet of Things applications) using cloud-based technologies for data storage, transmission and mashup, and AI techniques to analyze this data. This textbook is designed to train college students to master modern cloud computing systems in operating principles, architecture design, machine learning algorithms, programming models and software tools for big data mining, analytics, and cognitive applications. The book will be suitable for use in one-semester computer science or electrical engineering courses on cloud computing, machine learning, cloud programming, cognitive computing, or big data science. The book will also be very useful as a reference for professionals who want to work in cloud computing and data science. Cloud and Cognitive Computing begins with two introductory chapters on fundamentals of cloud computing, data science, and adaptive computing that lay the foundation for the rest of the book.