The 2018 program brought 24 aspiring data scientists from across the world to Chicago and 15 to Lisbon. They were current (or recent) graduate and undergraduate students from quantitative and computational fields – from computer science and machine learning, to statistics, math, physical sciences and engineering, to social sciences, public health and public policy. From May 28th to August 17th, they worked in teams of 3-4 on data science projects in partnership with nonprofits and government agencies, to tackle data-intensive high impact problems in education, public health, public safety, criminal justice, environmental issues, city operations, and social services, learning from full-time experienced mentors and project managers.

Machine Learning is touching almost all kinds of industries including the healthcare industry. Techniques in machine learning and artificial intelligence are covering the healthcare industry in an enormous way, including the Medicare vertical. With the graph of medical data growing exponentially, it is easier now to achieve great insights by machine learning methods. But on the flip side, it can have serious issues such as the susceptibility to commit Medicare frauds. In one instance in Uttar Pradesh, 21 people were infected with HIV from contaminated syringes by a fraudulent physician in the name of cheaper treatment.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring a select set of advanced techniques to the table when it comes to cyber offense, researchers say. On Thursday, researchers from Darktrace (.PDF) said that the current threat landscape is full of everything from script kiddies and opportunistic attacks to advanced, state-sponsored assaults, and in the latter sense, attacks continue to evolve. However, for each sophisticated attack currently in use, there is the potential for further development through the future use of AI. Within the report, the cybersecurity firm documented three active threats in the wild which have been detected within the past 12 months. Analysis of these attacks -- and a little imagination -- has led the team to create scenarios using AI which could one day become reality. "We expect AI-driven malware to start mimicking behavior that is usually attributed to human operators by leveraging contextualization," said Max Heinemeyer, Director of Threat Hunting at Darktrace.

The increasing accessibility of space has made the detection, tracking, and categorisation of the large volume of objects in orbit ever more critical. In this article, Mohammad Dabbah looks at the role artificial intelligence can play in enhancing our capabilities in space situational awareness (SSA) and suggests it is becoming an integral part of the new Space Age. American philosopher Eric Hoffer's much-cited quote (below) conveys a very important message: automation, or artificial intelligence (AI), is not as artificial as we think it is. There have been many exciting developments in the field of autonomy and AI in recent years. Some of these advances can be argued to have been achieved due to the closer approximation of automated systems to nature.

Sometime around 1am on a warm night in June 2017, Fei-Fei Li was sitting in her pyjamas in a Washington, DC hotel room, practising a speech she would give in a few hours. Before going to bed, Li cut a full paragraph from her notes to be sure she could reach her most important points in the short time allotted. When she woke up, the five-foot three-inch expert in artificial intelligence put on boots and a black and navy knit dress, a departure from her frequent uniform of a T-shirt and jeans. Then she took an Uber to the Rayburn House Office Building, just south of the United States Capitol. Before entering the chambers of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, she lifted her phone to snap a photo of the oversized wooden doors. Then she stepped inside the cavernous room and walked to the witness table. The hearing that morning, titled "Artificial Intelligence – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility," included Timothy Persons, chief scientist of the Government Accountability Office, and Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer of the non-profit organisation OpenAI. But only Li, the sole woman at the table, could lay claim to a groundbreaking accomplishment in the field of AI. As the researcher who built ImageNet, a database that helps computers recognise images, she's one of a tiny group of scientists – a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table – who are responsible for AI's recent remarkable advances. That June, Li was serving as the chief artificial intelligence scientist at Google Cloud and was on leave from her position as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

It has been a stellar 12 months, and we're pumped to share the numbers and secrets behind what went down! Call it fate, or coincidence… On November 8, 2018, about 30 minutes before the devastating California Camp Fire was discovered, we launched something dramatic. We call it Project Watchtower, and it's our new eye in the sky. Watchtower uses machine learning to analyze signals coming from orbiting satellites to detect catastrophic events around the globe. We hooked our in-house bot, Cooper, to a raw data feed coming from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer.

Microsoft is planning to implement self-designed ethical principles for its facial recognition technology by the end of March, as it urges governments to push ahead with matching regulation in the field. The company in December called for new legislation to govern artificial intelligence software for recognising faces, advocating for human review and oversight of the technology in some critical cases, as a way to mitigate the risks of biased outcomes, intrusions into privacy and democratic freedoms. "We do need to lead by example and we're working to do that," Microsoft President and chief legal officer Brad Smith said in an interview, adding that some other companies are also putting similar principles into place. Smith said the company plans by the end of March to "operationalise" its principles, which involves drafting policies, building governance systems and engineering tools and testing to make sure it's in line with its goals. It also involves setting controls for the company's global sales and consulting teams to prevent selling the technology in cases where it risks being used for an unwanted purpose.

So there's been a lot of coverage by various websites, data science gurus, and AI experts about what 2019 holds in store for us. Everywhere you look, we have new fads and concepts for the new year. This article is going to be rather different. We are going to highlight the dark horses – the trends that no one has thought about but will completely disrupt the working IT environment (for both good and bad – depends upon which side of the disruption you are on), in a significant manner. So, in order to give you a taste of what's coming up, let's go through the top four (plus 1 (bonus) five) top trends of 2019 for data science: This single innovation is going to change the way machine learning works in the real world.

Many believed an algorithm would transcend humanity with cognitive awareness. Machines would discern and learn tasks without human intervention and replace workers in droves. They quite literally would be able to "think". Many people even raised the question whether we could have robots for spouses. But I am not talking about today.

In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold'Em. Now, Libratus' technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind--in service of the US military. Libratus--Latin for balanced--was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decisionmaking based on game theory. Early last year, the professor who led the project, Tuomas Sandholm, founded a startup called Strategy Robot to adapt his lab's game-playing technology for government use, such as in war games and simulations used to explore military strategy and planning. Late in August, public records show, the company received a two-year contract of up to $10 million with the US Army.