Large-scale Hierarchical Classification (HC) involves datasets consisting of thousands of classes and millions of training instances with high-dimensional features posing several big data challenges. Feature selection that aims to select the subset of discriminant features is an effective strategy to deal with large-scale HC problem. It speeds up the training process, reduces the prediction time and minimizes the memory requirements by compressing the total size of learned model weight vectors. Majority of the studies have also shown feature selection to be competent and successful in improving the classification accuracy by removing irrelevant features. In this work, we investigate various filter-based feature selection methods for dimensionality reduction to solve the large-scale HC problem. Our experimental evaluation on text and image datasets with varying distribution of features, classes and instances shows upto 3x order of speed-up on massive datasets and upto 45% less memory requirements for storing the weight vectors of learned model without any significant loss (improvement for some datasets) in the classification accuracy. Source Code: https://cs.gmu.edu/~mlbio/featureselection.

Minority report: An exchange Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press underscores why one option that had been batted around--staying in the deal while explicitly softening the U.S. commitment--was rejected in the internal administration debate. Pruitt argued the wording of the deal only allows nations to make their emissions targets more aggressive, not scale them back. However, this view is not widely held among experts. For instance, E&E News noted Friday that "the vast majority of international legal experts say they can be rescinded and lowered at will." Finessing Trump: Pruitt, joining several other administration officials, declined to say whether President Trump still believes human-induced global warming is a "hoax." Pruitt noted only that Trump has "indicated the climate changes," but declined to address the scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver of the warming trend.

It has not been a proud week for America, what with the current administration randomly deciding to remove us as signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement and all. Luckily, the United States is still a nation of self-starters and problem-solvers who are willing to stand up, as 100 cities and six states across the country did on Thursday, and pledge to tackle climate change themselves -- with or without help from the Feds. They're not the only ones, researchers from Keio University have developed a pair of robotic arms to help their user out when nobody else is around while a team from Harvard University showed off robotic shorts that make you run faster. Numbers, because how else would you know which is the loneliest one? Andrew has lived in San Francisco since 1982 and has been writing clever things about technology since 2011.

We're only a few months into 2017 and cyber attacks seem to be hitting the headlines even more regularly than last year. In the same week, it was announced that cyber breaches have cost UK companies £42m since 2013. The week before that, it was revealed that Chinese hackers had been carrying out sustained cyber attacks for three years across the globe. As a result of this boom in cyber crime, startups and companies across the world are harnessing new ways to handle the sophisticated attacks and spending is thought to be around $106.1bn in 2017, according to research by IDC. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are just two types of technology that are fighting cyber breaches on the front line.

That's the question many have about recent reports that robots could replace millions of jobs currently held by human workers. On one hand, there's the research by global accounting and consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that projects 38% of American jobs could be at risk of replacement by automation within the next 15 or so years. On the other hand, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin thinks that we're so far away from seeing artificial intelligence take American jobs that "it's not even on [his] radar screen." Is your job safe from the rise of the robots? The best answer right now: It depends.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) believes in incorporating artificial intelligence (A.I.) in its decision-making process, a senior official told CNBC. The 68-year-old military alliance must be prepared for the prospect of A.I. delivering strategic verdicts on key NATO issues, said General Denis Mercier, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation of NATO. "The key issue is the distribution of data -- how we can, through that, empower subordinate levels of command, when it's necessary, to take action," he said on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Such a vision is "the next step," Mercier continued. "That's not what we do today but this is really what we need to be available to do in the future."

With AI advancing at such a fast clip, it's time to get to the bottom of the AI automation issue. Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The artificially intelligent turtles can be printed out of cardboard and folded into shape, making them a cheaper alternative to existing minesweeping robots. These gloves let you'feel' objects in virtual reality Trusted Reviews A team from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering are attempting to add an extra level of immersion to Virtual Reality with their latest innovation.

Those who mistakenly thought 2016 was an anomaly, a series of unprecedented events, should have few remaining doubts. Marine Le Pen may have stuttered but still picked up almost 11 million votes. Her opponent, the "normal" candidate, was leader of a party only one year old. The ongoing terror attacks, fake news panic, Trump's tweets and James Comey: last year never really ended, it just carried straight on into this one. After decades of exaggerated prediction, the internet is finally transforming politics, but not in the way the digital prophets expected. The 90s, you may recall, were awash with optimism about our online future: limitless information and total connection would make us more informed, less bigoted and kinder citizens. But the internet is an overwhelming mess of competing facts, claims, blogs, data, propaganda, misinformation, investigative journalism, charts, different charts, commentary and reportage.

In Wired for War, P. W. Singer explores the great est revolution in military affairs since the atom bomb: the dawn of robotic warfare. We are on the cusp of a massive shift in military technology that threatens to make real the stuff of I, Robot and The Terminator. Blending historical evidence with interviews of an amaz ing cast of characters, Singer shows how technology is changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and the ethics that surround war itself. Travelling from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to modern-day "skunk works" in the midst of suburbia, Wired for War will tantalise a wide readership, from military buffs to policy wonks to gearheads.

Kai-Fu Lee sees America as destined to lose to China in the race for leadership in AI. Kai-Fu Lee watched the U.S. beat China to global internet leadership during the dot-com bubble from the inside. Now with what he sees as an even greater technological revolution taking place in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence, Lee doesn't expect China to take a backseat a second time. "China started slow, and American companies went international," Lee says during a May visit to Forbes Media's headquarters. "But simple math says China has a larger GDP. The market will be bigger."