Apparently, director Tim Burton would be fine if you retitled his movie "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children but Only if They're White." In an interview with the website Bustle, Burton was asked why, given the pervasive, ongoing discussion of diversity in Hollywood, the overwhelming majority of the characters (and, hence, actors) in his latest fantasy film are white. "Nowadays, people are talking about it more," Burton said. He went on to talk about how, as a kid, he would've been dismayed to see an Asian kid or a black kid on "The Brady Bunch," or more white actors in blaxploitation movies. Burton's statements are just the latest from a celebrated, veteran filmmaker unable to wrap his mind around why diversity matters.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have come to a temporary, three-week agreement on custody of their six children, a person familiar with the negotiations said Friday. The deal was voluntary and doesn't reflect any ruling from the court regarding permanent custody, legal or physical, the source said. Both Pitt and Jolie agreed to get individual counseling, the source said, and Pitt offered to submit to drug and alcohol testing, which was not required. The couple agreed that Pitt's first visit with the kids would include a therapist, but there was no requirement for a monitor during subsequent visits. Decision-making for Maddox, 15; Pax, 12; Zahara, 11; Shiloh, 10; and 8-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne will follow a structured plan agreed to by both parents.

Clarifai, the leading visual recognition AI company that uses sophisticated machine learning to understand images and videos, today announced two new products: Custom Training and Visual Search. Available for developers and businesses of all sizes, these products significantly further Clarifai's mission to empower all developers and businesses to easily build visual recognition solutions into every app and business workflow. Custom Training puts the power to train artificial intelligence into the hands of every developer and business, allowing them to "teach" Clarifai's visual recognition API to understand everything we see in the world around us in a matter of seconds. Users can train concepts as granular as a specific brand of clothing in an image or video, and they can also create "custom models" that recognize specific sub-categories to match their distinct needs (e.g. New concepts can be trained with high accuracy orders of magnitude faster than before, requiring less than ten images per concept as compared to the thousands of images per concept traditional AI training required.

It was an accidental discovery. Miami based start up, Premonition, was set up to do legal analytics. They assembled the World's largest litigation database and trained an artificial intelligence system to read it. While primarily focused on finding the performance of individual lawyers before specific judges to determine potential relationships, they noticed that a particularly prolific foreclosure attorney produced an 83% win rate for one of his bank clients, while another was only winning 16% of their foreclosures, essentially the same case types. "We couldn't figure it out and had all kinds of foolish theories why," Premonition co-founder and inventor, Toby Unwin confides.

I keep hearing Data Scientists say that'Statistics is Dead', and they even have big debates about it attended by the good and great of Data Science. Interestingly, there seem to be very few actual statisticians at these debates. So why do Data Scientists think that stats is dead? Where does the notion that there is no longer any need for statistical analysis come from? Is statistics dead or is it just pining for the fjords?

The first comic that cartoonist Gene Luen Yang ever bought was a two-in-one issue that featured a man made out of rocks and an intergalactic cyborg. He loved comics, especially the kind that featured space aliens. So he started making his own. He and a friend drew comics and sold them for 50 cents each. Among their earliest creations were the "Trans-Smurfers," Smurfs who transformed into robotic fruit. They also flew and fought crime.

Prof Raghavan also serves as the Director of the NSF-sponsored Industry/ University Cooperative Research Center for Visual and Decision Informatics. In this role, he co-ordinates several multi-institutional, industry-driven research projects and manages a budget of over 500K/year. From 1997 to 2003, he led a 2.3M research and development project in close collaboration with the USGS National Wetlands Research Center and with the Department of Energy's Office of Science and Technical Information on creating a digital library with data mining capabilities incorporated. His research interests are in Big Data, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and Internet computing. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed research papers --appearing in top-level journals and proceedings - that cumulatively accord him an h-index of 31, based on citations.

HiringSolved, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems for talent acquisition practitioners, has introduced RAI, an artificial intelligence assistant for recruiters. RAI is built upon HiringSolved's TalentFeed search engine, which uses a layered approach to search relevance, combining multiple scoring algorithms to find the best results. Similarly, RAI's flexible Knowledge Engine provides recruiters with detailed insights about companies, skills, title concentrations and specific people that can be sorted based on location, gender and more. Specifically regarding diversity, RAI is able to predict candidates' genders through HiringSolved's Diversity Search tool, which uses proprietary data that HiringSolved has access to, as opposed to relying on published statistics as most companies do. For instance, if a recruiter wants to know Google's male-female ratio, the engine analyzes every employee working for Google, predicting their gender with an error rate of 3%, and computing the ratio.

Artificial intelligence is quickly shaping up to be one of the key defining technology areas of our time. A day after announcing a new artificial intelligence partnership with IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft is upping the ante within its own walls. The tech giant announced that it is creating a new AI business unit, the Microsoft AI and Research Group, which will be led by Microsoft Research EVP Harry Shum. Shum will oversee 5,000 computer scientists, engineers and others who will all be "focused on the company's AI product efforts," the company said in an announcement. The unit will be working on all aspects of AI and how it will be applied at the company, covering agents, apps, services and infrastructure.

Cortana has a new boss, and he has a problem: If Google's turning its Google Now digital assistant into a chatbot, should Microsoft do the same with Cortana? In 2014, Microsoft first unveiled Cortana, the digital assistant within Windows 10. Interacting with Cortana was simple: You asked a question, she responded. In the last few months, however, Google's Assistant has offered an alternative: a chatbot that interacts with users via an ongoing stream of text and images. In an interview with PCWorld, Shum said he hasn't ruled out adding a Cortana chatbot to its roster of digital assistants.