On Thursday, Udacity announced a new AI-based Nanodegree. Developed in partnership with WorldQuant, an international asset management firm, "Artificial Intelligence for Trading" will help learners bring machine learning to financial trading. Until recently, most banks have relied on historical data to map out future market trends. Computer modeling and machine learning algorithms, however, allow analysts to test millions of different scenarios to determine which will lead to the best outcomes. The course comprises of two three-month terms.

The space serves as the hub for summer programs in computer science run by the California-based company iD Tech Camps. In one room, a group of children, ages seven to nine, knelt on the carpet next to small white robots, which they were learning to program with handheld tablets. Nearby, other kids worked on laptops, recording YouTube videos or designing video games. While some planned to return the following week, several told me they were squeezing in a few days of programming instruction before heading off to sleepaway camp or on family vacations. Kids don't learn much coding in school, which can leave them unprepared to tackle computer science in college or in a career.

Artificial intelligence promises to make hiring an unbiased utopia. Employee referrals, a process that tends to leave underrepresented groups out, still make up a bulk of companies' hires. Recruiters and hiring managers also bring their own biases to the process, studies have found, often choosing people with the "right-sounding" names and educational background. Across the pipeline, companies lack racial and gender diversity, with the ranks of underrepresented people thinning at the highest levels of the corporate ladder. Fewer than 5 percent of chief executive officers at Fortune 500 companies are women-and there are only three black CEOs.

In March 2018, my collaborator Neus Lorenzo and I had the privilege of hosting a symposium and a workshop at the annual Mobile Learning Week, an event co-sponsored by UNESCO and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). UNESCO is the educational, scientific, and cultural organization of the United Nations. The ITU, also a UN agency, coordinates telecommunications, spectrum allocations, and policy positions on information and communication services which, it seems, the world no longer knows how to live without. The event made for an amazing week, during which we were able to interact with some of the smartest people from all over the world on subjects connected to all kinds of learning in so many different cultural contexts, but all associated with the major question of mobility. A subtheme that ran through many of the interventions, including our own, was Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Japan's education ministry is planning to place English-speaking artificial intelligence robots in schools to help children improve their English oral communication skills. Japanese students are generally not good at writing in English or speaking the language. Curriculum guidelines that are due to be fully implemented in 2 years will focus on nurturing those skills. In April, the ministry will launch the robot initiative on a trial basis at about 500 schools nationwide. Some schools have already adopted similar robots to enable students to have fun while honing their English pronunciation and conversation skills.

For the past year, I've been working on implementing well known model architectures and building web applications, so I have a fair amount of refreshing to do when coming back to theoretical machine learning. A lot of it has to do with understanding machine learning's underlying mathematics rigorously, to be able to reason with the field and validate radically new architectures. To that end, I've put together a short syllabus that I'll be personally going through to review some Math Keep in mind there are a lot of excellent resources out there. I'll no doubt be updating with a better guide as I work through this material over the next few weeks. Having a fundamental understanding of mathematics is absolutely necessary to being able to reason with ML productively.

How did OpenAI's team of 5 neural networks manage to beat some of the world's best DOTA 2 players? In this video, I'll explain in detail the cutting edge research techniques OpenAI used to create such an incredible AI algorithm, and how it could be used in the real world. These techniques include Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks, Proximal Policy Optimization, and a custom rollout system they've dubbed'Rapid'. That's what keeps me going. Sign up for the next course at The School of AI: https://www.theschool.ai

If recent clickbait headlines are to be believed, robots are already taking over our schools, relegating "Sir" or "Miss" to the status of a second-rate computer dumped at the back of the class. Yet to many experts, the real value of artificial intelligence (AI) to education may be far more humdrum as a back-of-house tool to free up time for human teachers to build students' social skills, resilience, appetite for learning and character. Miles Berry, principal lecturer in computing education at the University of Roehampton and a key architect of the national curriculum for computing, introduced to replace ICT four years ago, is disappointed at how few schools have exploited the new programme fully. "AI is difficult to teach and schools either lack relevant resources or don't know how to apply them, but in order to plug the technology skills gap, we must give our youngsters time to experiment with creating rudimentary chatbots for example," he says. "Setting up a Google Assistant, Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa and getting it to answer some of the questions that come up in a lesson would be a fairly simple task for many computing teachers, but to get them on-side, we need to talk far more about the role of machine-learning and far less about the dawn of the robots."

Andrea Soltoggio received a combined BSc and MSc degree in Computer Science in 2004 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, and from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2009 from the University of Birmingham, UK. He was with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL, Lausanne, CH, in 2006 and 2008-2009. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Central Florida, US, in 2009. From 2010 to 2014 he was Technical Coordinator of the FP7 European large-scale integration project AMARSi with the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University, Germany.

"Are you replacing me with a robot?" Bryan Fendley, an artificial intelligence expert and the director of instructional technology and web services at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, has heard this line for years. "Faculty members are worried they're going to be traded in for a computer or the internet," he says. Seventy-three percent of Americans believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it will create, according to a poll by Gallup and Northeastern University. Still, 74 percent say AI will have a positive effect on their lives.