Twenty-three years after his death, former Formula 1 world champion Ayrton Senna's name is almost as valuable as when he was alive - and it is making a difference in his home country of Brazil. It is Friday afternoon and children around the age of 12 are gathered in the computer lab of a public school in Itatiba, a small town an hour away from Sao Paulo. Class time is already over for the week, but these students have chosen to stay in school for extracurricular activities. They are learning Scratch, a piece of software developed by MIT experts that aims to teach kids how to code. Most public schools in Brazil don't have computer coding in their curriculum.

Nutrient-based meal recommendations have the potential to help individuals prevent or manage conditions such as diabetes and obesity. However, learning people's food preferences and making recommendations that simultaneously appeal to their palate and satisfy nutritional expectations are challenging. Existing approaches either only learn high-level preferences or require a prolonged learning period. We propose Yum-me, a personalized nutrient-based meal recommender system designed to meet individuals' nutritional expectations, dietary restrictions, and fine-grained food preferences. Yum-me enables a simple and accurate food preference profiling procedure via a visual quiz-based user interface, and projects the learned profile into the domain of nutritionally appropriate food options to find ones that will appeal to the user. We present the design and implementation of Yum-me, and further describe and evaluate two innovative contributions. The first contriution is an open source state-of-the-art food image analysis model, named FoodDist. We demonstrate FoodDist's superior performance through careful benchmarking and discuss its applicability across a wide array of dietary applications. The second contribution is a novel online learning framework that learns food preference from item-wise and pairwise image comparisons. We evaluate the framework in a field study of 227 anonymous users and demonstrate that it outperforms other baselines by a significant margin. We further conducted an end-to-end validation of the feasibility and effectiveness of Yum-me through a 60-person user study, in which Yum-me improves the recommendation acceptance rate by 42.63%.

Previously, I had started this conversation with the saying "I am not a Geek, but I need a job too…". Here is why: Technological anxiety (oh yes, it is a thing). I don't want to be a victim of the inevitable wave of "robots taking over our jobs" which is a simplistic explanation for the impact of advancements in technology in the workplace. The idea that half of today's jobs may vanish has changed my view of my children's future. Quincy Larson, Teacher at FreeCodeCamp (an open-source community that helps you learn to code, build pro bono projects for nonprofits, and get a job as a developer) has not stopped in his attempt to get more people coding.

Millions of citizen scientists have been flocking to projects that pool their time and brainpower to tackle big scientific problems, from astronomy to zoology. Projects such as those hosted by the Zooniverse get people across the globe to donate some part of their cognitive surplus, pool it with others' and apply it to scientific research. But the way in which citizen scientists contribute to the scientific enterprise may be about to change radically: rather than trawling through mountains of data by themselves, they will teach computers how to analyze data. They will teach these intelligent machines how to act like a crowd of human beings. We're on the verge of a huge change – not just in how we do citizen science, but how we do science itself.

Adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is on the increase, but its critics are still fearful that the technology could replace human workers and even do much of the work of HR. Ji-A Min from software company Ideal highlights 10 HR tech leaders who believe AI will support, rather than replace, HR. You can't escape it: everywhere you turn, AI is taking over. AI is a machine's ability to mimic human capabilities such as learning, problem solving, and perception. For HR, this is the application of artificial intelligence to the function in order to streamline or automate some part of the workflow.

Artificial Intelligence is already impacting every industry through automation and machine learning, bringing concerns that AI is on the fast track to replacing many jobs. But these fears aren't new, says Dan Jackson, director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron, a company that designs workplace technology. "I'd argue this is no different than when we moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy at the turn of the last century. The percentage of people working in agriculture significantly decreased, and it was a big shift, but we still have plenty of jobs 100 years later," he says. Anytime society experiences a major technological advancement, we need to be prepared for it to change the way we live and work.

Host- LIS (Law, Innovation and Society Research Group, Newcastle University Law School) Tuesday 16 May 2017, 12:00-18:00 Venue: Newcastle Law School Conference Room Lunch provided from 12:00 The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence and'expert systems' poses wide-ranging and often entirely novel challenges for both the law and for society. This symposium aims to explore the nature of some of these problems, looking at their basis and their implications for the future; as well as the primary areas of focus for effective research into and regulation of this potentially epochal technology. The symposium will have a significant component of discussion, and all with an interest are welcome to join us and take part.

It's all exciting stuff, and I've been studying it for my master's degree. But outside of the classroom, outside of computers, what has it taught me about life? This is especially true with neural networks. When a machine learning algorithm correctly identifies a solution, most of the time no adjustments to any of the parameters (called "weights") are made. But if the algorithm is wrong, these weights are nudged so that the next time the algorithm guesses at a solution, it's closer to the right answer.

A new report titled "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030" explores the role of AI in various aspects of society and considers implications for our future. The increasing personalization of learning due to intelligent systems and the skills likely required for jobs in an AI filled future are important to consider. "While formal education will not disappear, the Study Panel believes that MOOC's and other forms of online education will become part of learning at all levels, from K-12 through university, in a blended classroom experience. This development will facilitate more customizable approaches to learning, in which students can learn at their own pace using educational techniques that work best for them. Online education systems will learn as the students learn, supporting rapid advances in our understanding of the learning process. Learning analytics, in turn, will accelerate the development of tools for personalized education."

The "Learn SQL the Hard Way" and "SQL Problems & Solutions" are definitely worth looking in to. If you're looking for something slightly more fun and interactive, try GalaXQL. GalaXQL is a visual platform, offering lessons on SQL in a database of fictional galaxies. The galaxy rendering reflects the changes you make in the database.