Speaking verbally and performing sign language require the same parts of the brain, according to a new study. Researchers at New York University found that the neural skills needed to perform sign language are the similar to those required for speaking out loud. Their report is the first of its kind to prove the association between the two communication forms. Sign language communicators and verbal English speakers rely on the same neural skills, a new report says. The new research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Andrew Ng's five courser aims to give newbies and practitioners a crash course on all things deep learning – from fully connected neural networks to convolutional nets to sequence models. I've taken all five courses, and completed four. For some more online course recommendations, check out the best online courses to get started with data science. The first course in the specialization focuses on the building blocks of deep learning. It goes over logistic regression interpreted as a one-layer network, shallow networks, and finally deep networks as stacked shallow networks. Well, if you've taken Andrew Ng's precursor course Machine Learning, then the first course in Deep Learning is basically just an elaboration of the neural network part.

Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Roy was an AI and robotics expert at MIT, Patel an eminent speech and language specialist at nearby Northeastern University. For years, they had been planning to amass the most extensive home-video collection ever. From the ceiling in the hallway blinked two discreet black dots, each the size of a coin. Further dots were located over the open-plan living area and the dining room. There were 25 in total throughout the house – 14 microphones and 11 fish-eye cameras, part of a system primed to launch on their return from hospital, intended to record the newborn's every move. It had begun a decade earlier in Canada – but in fact Roy had built his first robots when he was just was six years old, back in Winnipeg in the 1970s, and he'd never really stopped. As his interest turned into a career, he wondered about android brains. What would it take for the machines he made to think and talk? "I thought I could just read the literature on how kids do it, and that would give me a blueprint for building my language and learning robots," Roy told me. Over dinner one night, he boasted to Patel, who was then completing her PhD in human speech pathology, that he had already created a robot that was learning the same way kids learn.

At the same time, L&D professionals are rightly wondering whether they'll soon be automated out of existence. After all, Google and YouTube are the de facto training departments for many employees: they're ubiquitous, free, and packed with seemingly limitless content. But more sophisticated technology is on the rise, too. For example, AI can determine what someone needs to learn based on their performance data and career stage, then push content to them as they need it. This leaves many corporate trainers to stake their own value on curation, controlling the quality and consistency of training resources–but that's already shrinking territory for L&D experts to stake their value on.

Fortnite Battle Royale has added a message to its mobile app telling kids not to play in school. The game was released on mobile just a few weeks ago but some teachers say it's distracting their students. One teacher posted on the game's Reddit thread, asking the game's developers if they could "mess with" his students. The message "Mr Hillman says stop playing in class" now features on a loading screen in the app. In a now deleted Reddit post Mr Hillman wrote: "First, I love your game. My friends from college and I play pretty much every night. "One problem, since mobile came out my students won't stop playing in class.

Many programmers are moving towards data science and machine learning hoping for better pay and career opportunities -- and there is a reason for it. Data scientist has been ranked the number one job on Glassdoor for last a couple of years and the average salary of a data scientist is over $120,000 in the United States according to Indeed. Data science is not only a rewarding career in terms of money but it also provides the opportunity you to solve some of the world's most interesting problems. IMHO, that's the main motivation many good programmers are moving towards data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. If you are in the same boat and thinking about becoming a data scientist in 2018, then you have come to the right place.

At a time when words like data and privacy evoke visions of the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica, Rajasthan-based Bodhi AI is leveraging data collected from students to help them improve their exam scores. School can be a difficult time for students, with multiple tests and examinations. While some students thrive under the constant pressure, what most seek is feedback that goes beyond what they get from their teachers so as to be able to improve their grades. Founders Prashant Pandey, 25, and Gourav Sanghai, 23, both engineers by qualification, were keen to startup after graduating. Prashant had taken a few Machine Learning courses at university, and thinking of areas he could apply his skills in, and Gourav had founded Bunkstation, which sold old books, while still in college.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to speak at The Item Conference http://www.item.nu/cgi-oic/pagedb.exe/show?no 1 in London for educators, policy-makers and head-teachers visiting our amazing City for inspiration and knowledge about how to foster creativity in children with I. T. They were particularly interested in the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. So, with thinking cap on, and just a few short hours to prepare, I was thrilled to find out that A.I in education is not the work of science fiction, but is with us right now -- in action, and starting to build impact. For hundreds of years, humans have pondered the idea of building intelligent machines. Over this time, artificial intelligence has had highs and lows, demonstrated successes and unfulfilled potential. Today, the news is filled with the application of AI and machine learning to new problems.

More companies are buying into the hype of artificial intelligence every day, though reaping the rewards can be a tricky game. After all, it is more often than not that the practical, not the sexy, AI application boosts a company's bottom-line. Balancing the influx of new information, from apocalyptic musings on the future of the technology to highly technical research reports -- incomprehensible to this writer and many of the most eager computer scientists -- is a challenge, but that's a problem Twitter can actually help with. Position: Co-founder at Coursera; adjunct professor at Stanford University; board of directors at drive.ai; chairman of the board at Woebot Ng is a staple in the AI sphere and helped build up some of the most prominent AI insititutions today, such as Google Brain and Baidu. He is also a driving force in AI education, and through his online learning program Coursera, Ng is trying to teach millions of new AI experts.

Microsoft has added an AI track to its Professional Program courses. The track is open to the public and is comprised of nine online courses -- each of which take eight to 16 hours to complete -- as well as a final project. "The program provides job-ready skills and real-world experience to engineers and others who are looking to improve their skills in AI and data science through a series of online courses that feature hands-on labs and expert instructors," the company said in a statement. The track features courses focused on AI ethics, how to conduct a data study and building different learning models. Enrollees have three months to complete each separate course and each are offered four times per year. The final project course is six weeks long and is also offered four times per year.