Microsoft today launched two new courses in its online education program for developers: an entry-level software development class and an AI course for more advanced developers who want to expand their knowledge of machine learning. It's no secret that there aren't enough data scientists and machine learning developers available to fulfill the current demand. It's no surprise, then, that a number of large companies have started to teach the fundamentals of these disciplines to their existing employees; starting today, anybody can take the AI courses that Microsoft first developed for its own employees. The Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence is available for free on edX.org, though you can also opt to pay for a certificate. Each course runs three months and starts at the beginning of the quarter. Unsurprisingly, there's a bit of a focus on Azure and Microsoft's Cognitive Services here (and you need an Azure account), but otherwise the course is agnostic to the operating system you run.

Click here to register using the code UNDERWOOD and save $300 on an All Access Pass or $200 off a Conference Pass.] As machine learning algorithms are transparently weaved into business intelligence tools, automated decision-making processes, and the fabric of our day-to-day lives, it is becoming more important for everyone to understand the fundamentals. Machine learning is susceptible to a wide variety of bias types and a myriad of other issues if applied improperly. It also has amazing untapped potential when implemented correctly.

Ready for a world in which a $50 DNA test can predict your odds of earning a PhD or forecast which toddler gets into a selective preschool? Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist, says that's exactly what's coming. For decades genetic researchers have sought the hereditary factors behind intelligence, with little luck. But now gene studies have finally gotten big enough--and hence powerful enough--to zero in on genetic differences linked to IQ. A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000 test takers.

Researchers at Mt. Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine in New York at have a unique collaborator in the hospital: Their in-house artificial intelligence system, known as Deep Patient. The researchers taught Deep Patient to predict risk factors for 78 different diseases by feeding it electronic health records from 700,000 patients. Doctors now turn to the system to aid in diagnoses. While not a person, Deep Patient is more than just a program. Like other advanced AI systems, it learns, makes autonomous decisions, and has grown from a technological tool to a partner, coordinating and collaborating with humans.

Dubai: Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't the future, it is the present. People have woken up to the many benefits that AI has to offer, especially in the field of education. We have already witnessed the rise of education technology in today's classrooms especially through a host of adaptive learning platforms. With virtual reality (VR) making inroads at a rapid pace and coding being taught to children, we see that educators are embracing technological advancements as an integral part of the teaching system just like chalk and blackboards. It is not the simple matter of whiteboards in place of blackboards or the obsolescence of textbooks. From kindergarten to graduate school, one of the best ways AI will impact education is through the application of greater levels of individualised learning.

The software connects a robot's arms and grippers as well as its onboard cameras and sensors to off-the-shelf virtual reality hardware via the internet. Using handheld controllers, users can control the position of the robot's arms to perform intricate manipulation tasks just by moving their own arms. Users can step into the robot's metal skin and get a first-person view of the environment, or can walk around the robot to survey the scene in the third person -- whichever is easier for accomplishing the task at hand. The data transferred between the robot and the virtual reality unit is compact enough to be sent over the internet with minimal lag, making it possible for users to guide robots from great distances. "We think this could be useful in any situation where we need some deft manipulation to be done, but where people shouldn't be," said David Whitney, a graduate student at Brown who co-led the development of the system.

Some state colleges in California are apparently not impressed by the Parkland high school shooting survivor who helped become a voice for a global gun control movement. David Hogg, 17, has so far been rejected by four University of California campuses -- UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Irvine, he told TMZ. According to the UC site, a minimum 3.4 GPA is required for non-California residents to get in. The Florida teen has a 4.2 GPA and an SAT score of 1270. "At this point, we're already changing the world," Hogg, a senior at Stoneman Douglas High School, told the outlet.

As wireless networks evolve towards high mobility and providing better support for connected vehicles, a number of new challenges arise due to the resulting high dynamics in vehicular environments and thus motive rethinking of traditional wireless design methodologies. Future intelligent vehicles, which are at the heart of high mobility networks, are increasingly equipped with multiple advanced onboard sensors and keep generating large volumes of data. Machine learning, as an effective approach to artificial intelligence, can provide a rich set of tools to exploit such data for the benefit of the networks. In this article, we first identify the distinctive characteristics of high mobility vehicular networks and motivate the use of machine learning to address the resulting challenges. After a brief introduction of the major concepts of machine learning, we discuss its applications to learn the dynamics of vehicular networks and make informed decisions to optimize network performance. In particular, we discuss in greater detail the application of reinforcement learning in managing network resources as an alternative to the prevalent optimization approach. Finally, some open issues worth further investigation are highlighted.

We derive upper and lower bounds for the policy regret of $T$-round online learning problems with graph-structured feedback, where the adversary is nonoblivious but assumed to have a bounded memory. We obtain upper bounds of $\widetilde O(T^{2/3})$ and $\widetilde O(T^{3/4})$ for strongly-observable and weakly-observable graphs, respectively, based on analyzing a variant of the Exp3 algorithm. When the adversary is allowed a bounded memory of size 1, we show that a matching lower bound of $\widetilde\Omega(T^{2/3})$ is achieved in the case of full-information feedback. We also study the particular loss structure of an oblivious adversary with switching costs, and show that in such a setting, non-revealing strongly-observable feedback graphs achieve a lower bound of $\widetilde\Omega(T^{2/3})$, as well.

Momentum is a simple and widely used trick which allows gradient-based optimizers to pick up speed in low curvature directions. Its performance depends crucially on a damping coefficient $\beta$. Large $\beta$ values can potentially deliver much larger speedups, but are prone to oscillations and instability; hence one typically resorts to small values such as 0.5 or 0.9. We propose Aggregated Momentum (AggMo), a variant of momentum which combines multiple velocity vectors with different $\beta$ parameters. AggMo is trivial to implement, but significantly dampens oscillations, enabling it to remain stable even for aggressive $\beta$ values such as 0.999. We reinterpret Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent as a special case of AggMo and provide theoretical convergence bounds for online convex optimization. Empirically, we find that AggMo is a suitable drop-in replacement for other momentum methods, and frequently delivers faster convergence.