Mining heavyweights BHP, Roy Hill and Alcoa have joined forces with universities and the CSIRO to develop a new data science training centre to upskill workers in the local resources sector. The $3.9 million Training Centre for Transforming Maintenance being funded by the Australian Research Council will be based at Curtin University and will be supported by Adelaide and Western Australia universities. Federal Education and Training Minister Senator Simon Birmingham says the new centre will equip engineers and graduates with data analytics skills to better manage the vast and expensive array of assets owned by mining and energy operators around the country. The centre's director, professor Andrew Rohl, said the effective maintenance of those assets is essential for the $205 billion annual output of the Australian resources sector. "However, maintenance management practices have changed little in the last 20 years and are ripe for a digital overhaul that will bring developments in computational methods, statistics, applied mathematics and artificial intelligence to determine how, when and why maintenance is conducted," said Rohl. "The new centre, which will bring together the relevant research and industry expertise, will enable the development and adoption of new practices to improve productivity and asset reliability for industry and to foster a new maintenance technology service sector for national and international markets."

Deep learning models have lately shown great performance in various fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, speech translation, and natural language processing. However, alongside their state-of-the-art performance, it is still generally unclear what is the source of their generalization ability. Thus, an important question is what makes deep neural networks able to generalize well from the training set to new data. In this article, we provide an overview of the existing theory and bounds for the characterization of the generalization error of deep neural networks, combining both classical and more recent theoretical and empirical results.

Long before NBC's The Office made Scranton a lovable character, the historic city in Pennsylvania's northeast corner has been an important voice in the nation's narrative. With roots as an anthracite coal king, the city continues to lead the Commonwealth with innovative programs in the arts, culture, science, and healthcare. The University of Scranton is one of the city's educational leaders that honors its prestigious legacy while keeping an eye to the future, and collaborative technologies help set the institution apart. As the media and control system engineer of The University of Scranton, Robert Kennedy, CTS designs the touchpanels of the school's control systems and supports audiovisual technology in nearly 200 classrooms. He also works on AV system implementation, collaborating with outside integrators when necessary.

"The world around us is getting'smarter.' Artificial intelligence (AI), data, and natural language processing have enabled Alexa, Siri, Pandora, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Waze, and other platforms to become part of our lives. Both AI and robotics are projected to have a massive impact on the global economy. While anticipated improvements in GDP and efficiency are positive, some fear that jobs will be lost through automation. What will AI and robotics mean for higher education? Will automation affect colleges and universities?"--Source:

A teenager from London has been given some extra homework for the school holidays by the co-founder of Artificial Intelligence firm DeepMind. Aron Chase, 17, tweeted Shane Legg looking for five top tips on how to succeed in the burgeoning field of AI. Dr Legg replied with some very specific advice, including brushing up on linear algebra. Some AI scientists command six-figure salaries because of the current shortage of experts in the field. DeepMind, a sister company to Google, is considered by many to be at the cutting-edge of AI research.

With the continuous evolution of technology and new developments arising from the need to integrate technology to efficiently deliver an excellent digital consumer experience, more women are taking charge by being part of this evolution through their involvement in local communities tailored to effectively share resources and current trends in data science and Machine Learning. The WiMLDS community which comprises of data scientist and machine learners aims at increasing representation of women data scientist into the tech space, the luck of therefore presented an opportunity to build up this local community where the majority are self taught and hence are able to keep up with the ever highly advancing technology. "We are all largely self taught so we found each other while looking for data science and machine learning communities to aid our learning journeys. There was no such community in existence and the opportunity presented itself to start a local chapter of Women in Machine Learning and Data Science. So we jumped at it and now it has been almost 2 years," says Kathleen Siminyu Head of data science at Africa's Talking.

You define Machine Learning problems using JavaScript and push them over for fast computation to any GPU using WebGL. Or you train your model on a standard TensorFlow stack using high performance GPUs, convert the model and use it in the browser for prediction or transfer learning. This might not sound like a big deal, but tight integration of Machine Learning with all the things that make the web great opens up a whole new world of applications in the areas of education, deployment, visualization, gaming, development, and overall UX. You will also learn how to do your own experiments. Show that Machine Learning in the Browser is not a toy.

The first dedicated masters degree program for machine intelligence in Africa is launching in September with backing from tech leaders Google and Facebook. The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), which created the program, says the African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) is crucial so African countries don't get left behind as advancements in machine intelligence rapidly develop. "The lack of MI researchers from Africa means that many opportunities to use MI to create a better and more stable world are being missed," said Moustapha Cissé, founder of the program. He noted Africa is on the lower end of a "technology gap" in the field. This is why the program is called the "African Masters" in machine intelligence, as a branding strategy but also because the challenges they are choosing to focus on in the program will be challenges and insights relevant to Africa.

Pedants, imagine how much more relaxed your life would be if artificial intelligence automatically corrected grammar mistake's in online forum and social network posts. Never again would you explode with frustration and anger over misplaced apostrophe's, commas, full stop's and exclamation! The faults could be fixed up by machine-learning software, and your soul would be soothed. Yes, software of the kind built by Mengyi Shan, a mathematics student at Harvey Mudd College in California, USA. She trained recurrent neural networks to restore missing punctuation in text.

How machine learning creates room for continuous business model innovation. A 35-year veteran of the industry, Weinstein sensed that the practice of accounting--issuing financial statements three months after the fact--while still necessary, was losing relevance in the real-time, data-driven economy. So he organized a three-day partner meeting to consider how machine-learning capabilities in particular might remake the traditional accounting firm for the digital era, enabling it to help its clients look into the future rather than simply reporting on the past. Weinstein invited a partner in charge of global innovation at a big-four accounting firm (not a direct competitor) to talk about the moves his firm was making. As the visitor spoke, it became plain to Weinstein that there was little time to waste. "That meeting was a watershed moment; it created a united mindset for the firm around deciding to lead, not follow, when it came to leveraging technology in the accounting space," says Weinstein.