Today's highlighted deal comes via our Online Courses section of the Neowin Deals store, where for only a limited time you can save 99% off this AI & Machine Learning Mastery Bundle. From Tesla's self-driving cars to Apple's Siri, AI is powering the future of tech, and it's in your best interest to keep pace if you want to stay relevant in your field. Covering the building blocks of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotics through the applied topic of building a self-driving car, this 27-hour bundle is the perfect starting point. Jump in, and you'll learn from HD videos served in short bight-sized pieces plus hands-on lab video tutorials. You'll have access to Python files and datasets to practice concepts on your own, and you'll receive a certificate of completion that you can print and share on LinkedIn!

SqwidNet, in partnership with Sigfox, has concluded the second round of its Internet of Things (IoT) SA University Challenge with ten university teams competing in the final pitch presentation day this week. The programme is designed to challenge students to develop and create innovative projects focused on building solutions that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals using SqwidNet/Sigfox technology. "We were astounded by the creative thinking displayed by the ten teams that presented their solutions to the judges this week," says Phathizwe Malinga, managing director of SqwidNet. "The solutions presented ranged from agricultural solutions for early pest detection to avoid crop losses, to generating electricity from plants by collecting electrons from roots in an anode and converting that into electricity. We also saw an IoT water monitoring solution, an early fire detection for rural communities and a two-way learning solution using artificial intelligence."

Are you ready to take that next big step in your machine learning journey? Working on toy datasets and using popular data science libraries and frameworks is a good start. But if you truly want to stand out from the competition, you need to take a leap and differentiate yourself. A brilliant way to do this is to do a project on the latest breakthroughs in data science. Want to become a Computer Vision expert?

Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed artificial intelligence software able to tell the difference between individual chimpanzees in the wild. As an endangered species, keeping track of the movement, social lives and behaviour of chimpanzees is important for researchers and conservationists. Dan Schofield, researcher and DPhil student at Oxford University's Primate Models Lab, School of Anthropology explains why this is key for research: "For species like chimpanzees, which have complex social lives and live for many years, getting snapshots of their behaviour from short-term field research can only tell us so much. By harnessing the power of machine learning to unlock large video archives, it makes it feasible to measure behaviour over the long term, for example observing how the social interactions of a group change over several generations." This novel use of facial recognition saw the software trained using more than 10 million images from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute.

"The most beautiful part of the whole thing is when we started the project we didn't really know each other, but slowly we've grown up together." It's a remark that you might expect to hear in a scene from one of your favourite movies, or perhaps in a confession from a colleague on a team-building day. But it's actually how AI tech startup Aiir Innovation's CEO Bart Vredebregt explains how five AI students and an AI professor came together to launch a business that could revolutionise the maintenance industry. It all started in 2015, when Dutch airline KLM invited students on the University of Amsterdam AI master's degree programme to work on a project to automate the inspection of their jet engines. When done manually, this inspection requires an engineer to put a camera called a borescope into the engine after removing the aircraft's wing.

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." In the 2018-19 Union Budget, Niti Aayog was mandated to establish a National Program on AI. This highlighted the urgency and importance the Indian Government is placing on the need to strategise the approach on AI and recognise its potential in transforming economies and providing social benefits. A study by EY and NASSCOM – Future of Jobs in India: A 2022 Perspective 2017 found that by 2022, 46% of the workforce will be engaged in entirely new jobs that do not exist today, or will be deployed in jobs requiring radically different skill-sets. These potential transformation leaders are to be created today.

A team of PG students along with their faculty members from IIT Guwahati are developing an AI-based chatbot - ALBELA - which will aid in teaching to the first-year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE) at the institute. The researchers are from the department of EEE. The chatbot will also be able to handle the queries and doubts of the students. According to the statement from IIT Guwahati, the chatbot will help the students in finding their class schedule, tutorial schedule, examination queries and more through a simple AI-based chat window. "We have been working on its development since last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the Chabot, and started using from this academic session onwards," Prof. Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said.

For a lot of higher level courses in Machine Learning and Data Science, you find you need to freshen up on the basics in mathematics - stuff you may have studied before in school or university, but which was taught in another context, or not very intuitively, such that you struggle to relate it to how it's used in Computer Science. This specialization aims to bridge that gap, getting you up to speed in the underlying mathematics, building an intuitive understanding, and relating it to Machine Learning and Data Science. In the first course on Linear Algebra we look at what linear algebra is and how it relates to data. Then we look through what vectors and matrices are and how to work with them. The second course, Multivariate Calculus, builds on this to look at how to optimize fitting functions to get good fits to data.

This summer, Blakeley Payne, a graduate student at MIT, ran a week-long course on ethics in artificial intelligence for 10-14 year olds. In one exercise, she asked the group what they thought YouTube's recommendation algorithm was used for. "To get us to see more ads," one student replied. "These kids know way more than we give them credit for," Payne said. Payne created an open source, middle-school AI ethics curriculum to make kids aware of how AI systems mediate their everyday lives, from YouTube and Amazon's Alexa to Google search and social media.

The artificial intelligence system, called Aristo, just passed an eighth-grade science test, a benchmark in AI development that scientists had been aiming to reach for four years, The New York Times reports. It got an A on the quiz, correctly answering more than 90% of the questions on the test designed for New York students, and then it went on to answer questions on an exam for 12th graders, earning a solid B (80%). The AI's science prowess shows how far artificial intelligence has come at mimicking human logic, language, and decision-making. Unlike your average eighth grader, the AI, which was designed by the Allen Institute--the lab founded by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen--was built solely to take multiple-choice tests. According to the Times, the researchers view standardized science tests as a more meaningful AI benchmark than the machine's ability to play chess, and Aristo passed with flying colors.