Today, the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate announced the release of a virtual training platform for active shooter incidents. The Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment, or EDGE, is a program that creates a virtual active shooter scenario through which first responders can train themselves. EDGE launches today and is free for all first responders. The platform was built on Epic Games' Unreal engine, which has also been used to create training programs for NASA astronauts and the US Army. The scenario that's available now is set in a 26-story hotel in Sacramento, California and every part of the hotel is accessible to the trainee.

Experts in education and technology caution that, while heartening, evidence that games improve hiring pools isn't quite definitive yet. The experiment works only if the skills you want in workers end up being accurately predicted by the games, after all: "There is some belief that people have very specific core ability, and you're trying to assess for that," said Dan Schwartz, dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and an expert in educational technology. The question is: Can they correlate them, so that it isn't actually just testing how good they are at the game?"

This post is based on Most Viewed Writers in Machine Learning, the 10 writers with the most answer views in the last 30 days, as retrieved on June 25, 2017. Just so there is no confusion, please note that this post is "authored" by me, but none of the information contained herein -- from the questions to the answers -- has anything to do with me. Excerpt from answer to: To what extent does Håkon Hapnes Strand feel that it's important to memorise advanced formulae in machine learning algorithms? I don't think it's important to memorize formulae. In fact, I think it can even be counter-productive.

Bitville has launched a major research project to investigate various alternatives about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be harnessed to assist in human learning. The research project is funded partly by Tekes, and it belongs to the Team Finland Augmented Intelligence campaign. Tekes is a governmental expert organization for funding research, development and innovation in Finland. The length of the project is six months, and will be conducted by Bitville's AI team. The solutions will be based on deep neural networks, also known as "deep learning".

While artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days, the industry is facing a key problem: Not enough scholars are staying in academia to teach the massive influx of students. It's a problem that Jennifer Chayes, a managing director and distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, has seen firsthand while recruiting top researchers away from universities and into her organization. In her view, professors, like one who she hired away from a post at Stanford University last year, aren't leaving entirely for the money, since they could work at startups or do consulting on the side while keeping their academic posts. Large companies like Microsoft offer increased pay, but also access to massive amounts of data that gets updated frequently. It's an issue because the top-notch academic researchers who might have been training the next generation of data scientists are leaving.

AI promises to transform the world. Companies like this one will pave the way. He's been called one of the "foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence," so it's no surprise that Andrew Ng -- the cofounder of Coursera, the lead developer of Stanford University's main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, and the founder of the Google Brain project -- is starting another AI company of his own now that he's left Baidu. The resume of this impressive entrepreneur reads like a laundry list of some of the most impressive achievements in AI technology, and it seems safe to assume that Ng's newest venture, known only as deeplearning.ai, Hope will help many of you: deeplearning.ai

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

Intelligent machines are taking over thousands of jobs, and being qualified is no longer enough to keep your job. Earlier this year, consulting firm McKinsey and Co. released a study that said 51% of all jobs could be automated in the next 20 years. Even specialized professions like medicine, law and banking are feeling the heat of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A few months ago, investment bank JP Morgan made the news by introducing intelligent machines to review financial deals that once kept employees busy for thousands of hours. Diagnostics and other decision-making skills previously thought of as the exclusive preserve of human beings, will soon be better handled by machines.

The search to improve and eventually perfect artificial intelligence is driving the research labs of some of the most advanced and best-known American corporations. They are investing billions of dollars and many of their best scientific minds in pursuit of that goal. All that money and manpower has begun to pay off.In the past few years, artificial intelligence -- or A.I. -- has taken a big leap -- making important strides in areas like medicine and military technology. What was once in the realm of science fiction has become day-to-day reality. You'll find A.I. routinely in your smart phone, in your car, in your household appliances and it is on the verge of changing everything. On 60 Minutes Overtime, Charlie Rose explores the labs at Carnegie Mellon on the cutting edge of A.I. See robots learning to go where humans can'... It was, for decades, primitive technology. But it now has abilities we never expected. It can learn through experience -- much the way humans do -- and it won't be long before machines, like their human creators, begin thinking for themselves, creatively. Independently with judgment -- sometimes better judgment than humans have. As we first reported last fall, the technology is so promising that IBM has staked its 106-year-old reputation on its version of artificial intelligence called Watson -- one of the most sophisticated computing systems ever built.

The search to improve and eventually perfect artificial intelligence is driving the research labs of some of the most advanced and best-known American corporations. They are investing billions of dollars and many of their best scientific minds in pursuit of that goal. All that money and manpower has begun to pay off.In the past few years, artificial intelligence -- or A.I. -- has taken a big leap -- making important strides in areas like medicine and military technology. What was once in the realm of science fiction has become day-to-day reality. You'll find A.I. routinely in your smart phone, in your car, in your household appliances and it is on the verge of changing everything. It was, for decades, primitive technology. But it now has abilities we never expected. It can learn through experience -- much the way humans do -- and it won't be long before machines, like their human creators, begin thinking for themselves, creatively. Independently with judgment -- sometimes better judgment than humans have. As we first reported last fall, the technology is so promising that IBM has staked its 106-year-old reputation on its version of artificial intelligence called Watson -- one of the most sophisticated computing systems ever built. John Kelly, is the head of research at IBM and the godfather of Watson.