Everyone who gets going in Machine Learning (and Deep Learning) gets overwhelmed by the plethora of MOOCs available. Here, I try to give a comprehensive survey of such courses available freely on the internet. You can take this post as an complementary to this and this previous posts. I will try to highlight some important pointers such as the difficulty of the courses, the correct order in which these should to be completed, the right audience for these courses. You will get a feel of how these courses give you a stack of skills in your arsenal and how you can use them to develop practical machine learning systems.

Today eBay announced it will acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. SalesPredict is eBay's latest acquisition that will support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. It follows eBay's recent acquisition of Expertmaker, in order to further bolster our structured data efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, a number of SalesPredict's employees will join eBay's structured data organization, working from eBay's Israeli Development Center in Netanya.

Scientists in the Netherlands are looking to pair artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning, with MRI techniques that measure blood perfusion in the brain. This approach, said the researchers -- diagnoses early forms of dementia and predicts the onset of Alzheimer's disease with between 82 and 90 percent accuracy. Though there is no cure for Alzheimer's, experts believe that early diagnosis could improve patient outcomes and alleviate the healthcare system's financial burden associated with the disease. According to the Alzheimer's Association, only 45 percent of patients and their caregivers dealing with the disease are aware of the diagnosis. Recent Alzheimer's research suggests that it may be possible to isolate biomarkers in the blood to diagnose the disease, demonstrated by scientists at Rowan University.

The devastating neurodegenerative condition Alzheimer's disease is incurable, but with early detection, patients can seek treatments to slow the disease's progression, before some major symptoms appear. Now, by applying artificial intelligence algorithms to MRI brain scans, researchers have developed a way to automatically distinguish between patients with Alzheimer's and two early forms of dementia that can be precursors to the memory-robbing disease. The researchers, from the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, suggest the approach could eventually allow automated screening and assisted diagnosis of various forms of dementia, particularly in centers that lack experienced neuroradiologists. Additionally, the results, published online July 6 in the journal Radiology, show that the new system was able to classify the form of dementia that patients were suffering from, using previously unseen scans, with up to 90 percent accuracy. "The potential is the possibility of screening with these techniques so people at risk can be intercepted before the disease becomes apparent," said Alle Meije Wink, a senior investigator in the center's radiology and nuclear medicine department. "I think very few patients at the moment will trust an outcome predicted by a machine," Wink told Live Science.

Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs' Fund IV, a 100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space. Saxena is also a Special Advisor to IBM senior leadership where he focuses on operationalizing IBM's 100m Watson Cloud Ecosystem Fund and making side-by-side investments with the TEF IV fund. Saxena is also the chairman of two other startups in the cognitive computing space, WayBlazer and SparkCognition. Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world's first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. He received the IBM Chairman's award for Watson commercialization and helped with the formation of Watson Business Group in January 2014 with a 1B investment from IBM. Saxena will be speaking on the subject of artificial intelligence at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd.

Robots could eventually play integral roles in labor wards, according to findings from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Robots are currently employed in hospitals to carry out simple actions, like dispensing medication. But can they understand patient needs and make scheduling decisions? The researchers have been working for the past two years to determine whether robots can be more than just helpful companions. They've been conducting experiments to see if a robot can serve as an effective "resource nurse." That's the nurse in the labor and delivery unit that's in charge of assigning other nurses to care for patients.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces for new cloud technologies that will bring improved use of big data to production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

A First Course in Machine Learning by Simon Rogers and Mark Girolami is the best introductory book for ML currently available. It combines rigor and precision with accessibility, starts from a detailed explanation of the basic foundations of Bayesian analysis in the simplest of settings, and goes all the way to the frontiers of the subject such as infinite mixture models, GPs, and MCMC.

Continuing the mission of the past AGI conferences, AGI-16 gathers an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI-16 @ New York will be held from July 16-19 of 2016, on the campus of the New School in Lower Manhattan. As a special event for 2016, the AGI-16 conference will be co-located with three other related conferences -- BICA-16, the Neural-Symbolic Workshop 2016 and the AI & Cognition Workshop 2016 -- as part of the overall Human-Level Intelligence 2016 (HLAI-16) event. AGI conferences are organized by the Artificial General Intelligence Society, in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The proceedings of AGI-16 will be published as a book in Springer's Lecture Notes in AI series, and all the accepted papers will be available online.