"Machine learning is a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed" -- Arthur Samuel, 1959. Machine learning and artificial intelligence have been a rising field of research in both the corporate and the academic world. Machine learning proves to be incredibly powerful when it comes to making predictions or calculated suggestions that are based on large amounts of data. If an individual wants to master machine learning, how do you start and from where? In order to learn about Machine Learning, one not only needs a keen interest in it but also have the right resources.

MANILA – English school chain ECC Co. will launch a Japanese course in the Philippines in June in partnership with a local college amid growing interest in the language among Filipinos. The Osaka-based firm and the University of Perpetual Help plan to provide a 6-month e-learning program, including a weekly supplementary lecture, for 35,000 pesos (¥72,000), targeting employees of Japanese affiliates and those planning to study and work in Japan, the company said. ECC's first Japanese-language course overseas aims to cater to an increasing number of Filipinos taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, a widely used exam for evaluating and certifying the language proficiency of nonnative speakers, it said. In 2017, a record 14,062 Filipinos took the exam, up 21 percent from the previous year, while the tally for all examinees topped 1 million for the first time, according to the Japan Foundation, which administers the test. The private university, founded in 1975, has three campuses in the south of Manila with about 2,000 employees and some 18,000 students, according to ECC.

If you asked most people, they'd probably say that computers and other gadgets are pretty good at communicating information to us, whether it's by providing directions to an important business meeting or finding the best recipe for gluten-free apple pie. And yet, computers still don't communicate with us nearly as intuitively as we communicate with each other. If you type a query into a search engine, for example, chances are you'll get a list of websites to click on. But if you ask a person a question, she'll respond with an answer, or perhaps ask another question to get more information before answering. Microsoft is hoping to improve how well computers can communicate information to us.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Do grills have girlish associations? A study has revealed how an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm learnt to associate women with pictures of the kitchen, based on a set of photos where the people in the kitchen were more likely to be women. As it reviewed more than 100,000 labelled images from around the internet, its biased association became stronger than that shown by the data set -- amplifying rather than simply replicating bias. The work by the University of Virginia was one of several studies showing that machine-learning systems can easily pick up biases if their design and data sets are not carefully considered.

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, President Donald Trump is reviving an old debate over whether violent video games can trigger violent behavior. But Dr. Louis Kraus, a child psychiatrist, calls that approach a "red herring." Gaming fans wearing VR goggles play "Echo Arena" from Oculus at the E3 conference in Los Angeles. In the wake of the Florida school shooting, politicians have raised concern over the influence of violent video games and films on young people, with President Trump claiming they're "shaping young people's thoughts." Scientists still debate the issue, but the majority of studies show that extensive exposure to media violence is a risk factor for aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

This essay first appeared in Recode in December 2017. "Sometimes a type of glory lights up the mind of a man," writes John Steinbeck in his novel East of Eden, which is set in a California valley -- Salinas, though, not Silicon. "It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. Okay, but what does that have to do with artificial intelligence? I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. That line finds an echo in our times. Various ethicists are writing, these days, about the concerns that AI might eliminate some things "we hold good" -- and not just meaning "jobs." They write, for example, about the threat of "moral de-skilling" in the age of algorithmic decision-making. About what might be lost or diminished by the advent of robot caretakers. About what role humans will play, in general, in an age of machine learning and neural networks making so many of the decisions that shape human lives. "It is true," Steinbeck writes, A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. We are in the process of shifting from the kind of mass production that Steinbeck talked about to a kind of mass production that requires much less human involvement. If "mass method" was bound to get into our thinking back then, how is it shaping our thinking now? Is this what the current focus on data collection and analysis of patterns is about? "In our time," adds Steinbeck, This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. In our own time, AI is spreading into all the various spheres of our lives, and there is tension and great concern about its impact. We are confused by dueling claims that AI will eliminate jobs or create new ones; that it will eliminate bias or perpetuate it and make it harder to identify; that it will lead us to longer, happier lives -- or to extinction. "At such a time," writes Steinbeck's narrator, "it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions.

President Trump meets with leaders of the steel and aluminum industries at the White House last week. President Trump meets with leaders of the steel and aluminum industries at the White House last week. Since the Columbine school shooting nearly 20 years ago, the conversation after mass shootings has inevitably included media that depict violence -- and the effect on children. While Democrats focus on gun restrictions, conservatives often home in on music and video games -- from Marilyn Manson to Grand Theft Auto -- that are sometimes enigmas to parents. "Unproven and emotionally driven gun control legislation is a common and simplistic response to gun-related tragedies, but such lawmaking usually fails to address the underlying problem," Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Missouri Republican, wrote in 2013, for example, following the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

President Trump held a roundtable at the White House Thursday to discuss violent video games and how they relate to school shootings. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Douglas Gentile, psychology professor at Iowa State University, about what research tells us about video games and violence in children.

Deep learning and Convolutional Neural Networks are the buzz words around now a days when we hear anything about AI. By the time I became enough familiar with these terms, I already had started my journey on the road to Computer Vision by reading the fascinating PyImageSearch blogs and joining the PyImageSearchGurus course designed by Dr Adrian Rosebrock. When my fascination about Computer Vision did not diminish a bit even after six months, I decided to pursue it to the best of my abilities. I watched a lot of You Tube videos, skimmed through different papers and books on this subject and finally settled by purchasing the Imagenet bundle of Deep Learning for Computer Vision with Python (DL4CV) by Dr. Adrian Rosebrock. DL4CV certainly exceeded my expectations mark. What I like about Adrian's writing is - his application oriented approach when teaching the theory.

As Donald Trump convenes a meeting on Thursday to address violence in video games, in the wake of last month's Florida school shooting, those in attendance will include a group that argues the Muppets drink too much, and another committed to exposing strident liberal bias on television. The president's round table at the White House will be the latest in a series of discussions on school safety after a gunman left 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman high school in Parkland on 14 February. And although representatives of the mainstream Entertainment Software Association and executives from other gaming parent companies are slated to attend, they will be seated across from a bevy of culture crusaders who have sought to tie mass shootings to violence in video games and movies – despite decades of research failing to produce such a link. In attendance will be retired Lt Col Dave Grossman, the author of Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, a book that purports to "reveal how violent video games have ushered in a new era of mass homicide". Grossman characterizes himself as an expert in "killology". Also present will be Melissa Henson, an advocate from the Parents Television Council, a group that has stood in staunch opposition to depictions of or allusions to sex and violence in entertainment.