You've been taking MOOCs and reading a bunch of textbooks, but now what do you do? Getting a job in data science can seem daunting. The best way to showcase your skills is with a portfolio. This shows employers that you can use the skills you've been learning. Data scientists can expect to spend up to 80% of the time on a new project cleaning data.

Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name

Despite the success of neural networks (NNs), there is still a concern among many over their "black box" nature. Why do they work? Here we present a simple analytic argument that NNs are in fact essentially polynomial regression models. This view will have various implications for NNs, e.g. providing an explanation for why convergence problems arise in NNs, and it gives rough guidance on avoiding overfitting. In addition, we use this phenomenon to predict and confirm a multicollinearity property of NNs not previously reported in the literature. Most importantly, given this loose correspondence, one may choose to routinely use polynomial models instead of NNs, thus avoiding some major problems of the latter, such as having to set many tuning parameters and dealing with convergence issues. We present a number of empirical results; in each case, the accuracy of the polynomial approach matches or exceeds that of NN approaches. A many-featured, open-source software package, polyreg, is available.

We introduce TextWorld, a sandbox learning environment for the training and evaluation of RL agents on text-based games. TextWorld is a Python library that handles interactive play-through of text games, as well as backend functions like state tracking and reward assignment. It comes with a curated list of games whose features and challenges we have analyzed. More significantly, it enables users to handcraft or automatically generate new games. Its generative mechanisms give precise control over the difficulty, scope, and language of constructed games, and can be used to relax challenges inherent to commercial text games like partial observability and sparse rewards. By generating sets of varied but similar games, TextWorld can also be used to study generalization and transfer learning. We cast text-based games in the Reinforcement Learning formalism, use our framework to develop a set of benchmark games, and evaluate several baseline agents on this set and the curated list.

One of the top universities in China, Tsinghua University, established an institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Thursday, June 28. The newly-established institute, according to a report by Chinese news outlet Netease Technology, aims to make fundamental innovations in both theories and key technologies of AI, and broaden the influence of Tsinghua University. Professor Zhang Bo from the school's Department of Computer Science and Technology, who is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will be the head of the institute. Chinese computer scientist Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who won the most prestigious award in computer science -- the Turing Award, in 2000, will be the director of the institute's academic committee. Additionally Jeffrey Dean, head of Google.ai--Google's

Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) are about to launch AI in Finance (AIF), the first online programme for finance professionals. Despite the growing hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI), many finance professionals are still unfamiliar with the impact it will have on their industry. Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP), one of Singapore's leading institutes of higher learning, is partnering with London-based Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) to launch the first online course to showcase AI applications and use cases in the banking industry. "AI is a technological driving force that no industry can ignore. Some studies estimate that about 50 per cent of today's tasks would be assisted by AI in the next 20 years. With Singapore and London gaining recognition as leading fintech hubs of the world, it is timely for NP and CFTE to launch an industry-led course that provides finance professionals and others a practical guide to AI." "You will also see that a lot more can be automated in future. If you want to keep your job, you need to question both what your role will be in this automated future, and what impact artificial intelligence will have on your area of the business."

On the windy afternoon of March 17, 2017, I opened my mailbox and saw a white envelope from the San Francisco Unified School District. The envelope contained a letter assigning my younger daughter to a middle school. This letter was a big deal; San Francisco's public schools range from excellent to among the worst in the state, and kids are assigned to them through a lottery. The last time we put her name into the lottery, for kindergarten, she was assigned to one of the lowest-performing schools in California. Then we got a break: A private school offered a big discount on tuition.

Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels said, "It is our initiative to help create economic opportunities for Americans. Our goal is to connect with small businesses, job seekers, entrepreneurs and anyone else interested to provide them with the skills necessary to succeed in the digital economy."

The world of academia is becoming more personalized and convenient for students thanks to recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). The technology has numerous applications that are changing the way we learn, making education more accessible to students with computers or smart devices if they're unable to make it to class. Students aren't the only ones who benefit as AI is also helping to automate and speed up administrative tasks, helping organizations reduce the time spent on tedious tasks and increasing the amount of time spent on each individual student. A recent study from eSchool News discovered that the use of AI in the education industry will grow by 47.5% through 2021 as we move towards a more connected world. The technology's impact will exist anywhere from Kindergarten through higher education, offering the opportunity to create adaptive learning features with personalized tools to improve the student experience.

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