Amazon.com, Inc. wants a piece of the fast-growing music streaming business, and is reportedly looking to launch its own subscription service in September. Along with the regular 10 a month for all you can stream option -- like other services such as Apple Music and Spotify offer -- Amazon is also considering a cheaper package exclusive to its hardware, according to Recode. The second service will cost 5 a month -- half of what other similar services usually charge -- and will work only on Amazon's Echo hardware, allowing users to stream unlimited music without any ads. There have been 5 streaming offers before, but they usually streamed web radio stations instead of allowing users to listen to songs on demand. The Recode report, which cited unnamed sources, added that Amazon has still not reached final agreements with music labels, with one of the issues being whether the company will charge 4 or 5 for the cheaper service.

Feels like a home away from home. Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

A NEW technique using artificial intelligence (AI), to read satellite images could aid efforts to eradicate global poverty by indicating where help is needed most, a team of US researchers says. The method would assist governments and charities that are trying to fight poverty but that lack precise and reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, the researchers based at Stanford University in California say. Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than 1.25 a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals adopted by UN member states in 2015. A team of computer scientists and satellite experts created a self-updating world map to locate poverty, says Marshall Burke, assistant professor in Stanford's department of earth system science. It uses a computer algorithm that recognises signs of poverty through a process called machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, he says.

Could a computer be better at identifying depression than a primary care physician? That's the suggestion of a new study that focused on using machine learning to analyze Instagram photos. The study, conducted by a researcher from the department of psychology at Harvard University and another from the University of Vermont, analyzed nearly 44,000 photographs posted to Instagram, exploring factors like what filter was used and how makes "likes" a photo received. The study included photographs from 166 people, some of whom were depressed, and some of whom were not. Instagram offers a variety of filters to change how a photo appears, and the researchers discovered that healthy participants were more likely to use a filter than depressed people.

Online CRM and enterprise applications provider Salesforce.com has been snapping up different companies, small and large, in a series of acquisitions over the past nine months. The deals have added a range of capabilities to the company's existing portfolio, including cloud-based word processing, quote-price-configure software, and e-commerce. But most of the acquisitions focus on analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. CEO Marc Benioff has said that enterprise software and other systems that can analyze data and recommend the right course of action (that is, smarter and more predictive software) will shape the future of business software. At a Forbes CIO event in March, Benioff said, "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter. Everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient."

They are currently in the NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program taking place between January 11th to April 1st, 2016. This post is based on their fourth class project - Machine learning(due on the 8th week of the program). The Higgs Boson is a landmark discovery that will help us to understand the basic nature of the universe. It was discovered first by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN in 2012. The Higg's Boson decays into two tau particles giving rise to a small signal buried in background noise. The goal of the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge was to classify the characterizing events detected by ATLAS into "tau tau decay of a Higgs boson" versus "background."

Microsoft has acquired Genee, a startup that provided a virtual assistant for scheduling appointments. The deal, announced Tuesday, will bring the Genee team into the Microsoft fold and put them to work on bringing intelligence into Office 365. Genee's service lets users loop in an artificial intelligence assistant that could interpret sentences like "set up lunch at some point this week" and turn them into calendar appointments. Acquiring Genee is part of Microsoft's ongoing crusade to build intelligent productivity software and services using AI. The company has focused on that area under the tenure of CEO Satya Nadella, with features like Office Delve, which finds documents shared within an organization that are relevant to a user, and Focused Inbox in Outlook, which filters unimportant email into a separate tab so it's not cluttering a user's experience. The Genee service will be shutting down on Sept. 1 as part of the deal.

Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Feels like a home away from home. Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Over the past few weeks, we've started to learn more and more about machine learning and the role it plays in computer vision, image classification, and deep learning. We've seen how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) such as LetNet can be used to classify handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset. We've applied the k-NN algorithm to classify whether or not an image contains a dog or a cat. And we've learned how to apply hyperparameter tuning to optimize our model to obtain higher classification accuracy. However, there is another very important machine learning algorithm we have yet to explore -- one that can be built upon and extended naturally to Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks.