By the end of 2017, over three million Canadians will own smartphones with machine learning capabilities. Machine learning tops the list of Deloitte's 2017 Canadian Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions, which claims that 300 million people around the world will own smartphones with the capacity to do onboard machine learning. This amounts to over a third of the smartphones sold in the coming year, though this trend won't end with smartphones. These capabilities will soon be found in tens of millions more devices such as drones, tablets, cars, virtual or augmented reality devices, medical tools, IoT, etc. "Machine learning will see everyday tasks become even faster and more effortless -- so simple, that Canadians may not even realize their mobile devices have in fact learned these new capabilities," said Anders McKenzie, partner and national TMT Leader for Deloitte Canada. "Not only will machine learning revolutionize how we conduct simple tasks through our mobile devices, but it will also improve the safety of Canadians through other platforms, such as better autonomous vehicles, responding to disasters and more resilient to cyberattacks," he continues.

Rising inequality and social polarisation are set to shape world developments for the next decade after contributing to Britain's decision to leave the European Union and the ballot-box success of US president-elect Donald Trump, the World Economic Forum says. Climate change was underlined as the third major global trend in the WEF's annual assessment of global risks, published on Wednesday at an event at Bloomberg's European headquarters in London. It said world leaders must work together to avoid "further hardship and volatility in the coming decade". If everything goes to plan, we should see Australian growth around 2.8% in 2017, but there are a number of risks in both directions. Bellamy's CEO Laura McBain has been widely credited for transforming the family-run local company to a global brand.

WASHINGTON – Islamic State jihadis are using small commercial drones to attack Iraqi security forces in the battle for Mosul, a U.S. commander said Wednesday. Col. Brett Sylvia, who commands an "advise and assist" U.S. unit in Iraq, said IS fighters are attaching small munitions to quadcopters in an attempt to kill local forces as they retake Mosul, the last major IS bastion in Iraq. "They are small drones with small munitions that they've been dropping," Sylvia said. While the munitions were no larger than "a small little grenade," he said, that was enough to do what "Daesh does, and that's just, you know, indiscriminate killing," he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. The group's use of small drones is not new, Sylvia said, though initially they were mainly used for reconnaissance.

The U.S. Transportation Department has created an advisory committee on automation filled with representatives from the auto industry, ride-hailing companies, universities and the mayor of Los Angeles. The committee will hold its first meeting Monday to discuss automation issues, such as the development and deployment of self-driving cars. The committee will be co-chaired by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors Co., which bought the self-driving technology firm Cruise Automation last year and is working with ride-hailing company Lyft to develop driverless taxis. The brain trust will play a "critical role" in describing challenges, opportunities and best practices in automation, and also "will open lines of communication" to help stakeholders learn from each other, according to a statement Wednesday from the department. Other committee members include representatives from companies with autonomous vehicle aspirations such as Uber Technologies Inc., Delphi Automotive and Lyft, as well as other interested parties like Apple, the American Trucking Assns.

It is perhaps a stretch to call Elaine Chao, President-Elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of transportation, "hip with it." The Kentucky resident today sat for her fourth Senate confirmation hearing, following stints at the Transportation and Labor departments starting in the mid-80s. Chao, who happens to be married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is the ur-Washington bureaucrat, a woman described by those on both sides of the aisle as a longtime, competent doer. Not the sort of hoodie-wearing early adopter to embrace world-shaking visions of the future. And yet, her performance this morning left autonomous vehicle advocates--who fancy themselves as sitting on the bleeding-edge--quietly cheering.

Discrete-time hidden Markov models are a broadly useful class of latent-variable models with applications in areas such as speech recognition, bioinformatics, and climate data analysis. It is common in practice to introduce temporal non-homogeneity into such models by making the transition probabilities dependent on time-varying exogenous input variables via a multinomial logistic parametrization. We extend such models to introduce additional non-homogeneity into the emission distribution using a generalized linear model (GLM), with data augmentation for sampling-based inference. However, the presence of the logistic function in the state transition model significantly complicates parameter inference for the overall model, particularly in a Bayesian context. To address this we extend the recently-proposed Polya-Gamma data augmentation approach to handle non-homogeneous hidden Markov models (NHMMs), allowing the development of an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling scheme. We apply our model and inference scheme to 30 years of daily rainfall in India, leading to a number of insights into rainfall-related phenomena in the region. Our proposed approach allows for fully Bayesian analysis of relatively complex NHMMs on a scale that was not possible with previous methods. Software implementing the methods described in the paper is available via the R package NHMM.

There were no demonstrations or outbursts from protesters at Elaine Chao's confirmation hearing Wednesday to become Trump's secretary of transportation. The former secretary of labor in the second Bush administration may have not been loved by labor unions, but her previous experience as a deputy transportation secretary for George H.W. Bush makes her uniquely qualified for the job. The most notable moments during Chao's appearance before the Senate Science, Commerce, and Transportation Committee did not concern her positions on safety regulation, Trump's infrastructure plan, or incubating the self-driving car industry, but rather her marriage to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell appeared at the hearing to introduce his wife. "I regret that I have but one wife to give for my country's infrastructure," McConnell said echoing the words of the former Senate majority leader Bob Dole in 1983, when he introduced his wife, Elizabeth Dole, for her confirmation hearing to be secretary of transportation in the Reagan administration.

Rising income inequality and the polarisation of societies pose a risk to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation unless urgent action is taken, according to the World Economic Forum. Before its annual meeting in Davos next week, the WEF said the gap between rich and poor had been behind the UK's Brexit vote and Donald Trump's election victory in the US. And it warned that there were new threats to social cohesion from the robotics and artificial intelligence revolution. The organisation said fundamental reform of capitalism may be needed to tackle public anger. The WEF's annual global risks report – culled from 700 experts – found that rising income and wealth disparity, and increasing polarisation of sectors of society, were ranked first and third among the underlying trends that will determine the shape of the world in the next decade.

This still image taken from drone footage posted online Monday, Jan. 2, 2017 by the Aamaq News Agency, a media arm of the Islamic State group, purports to shows an aerial image of a neighborhood damaged by Turkish airstrikes in the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, in Aleppo province, Syria. Nearly two months into the assault, Turkey has become bogged down in an unexpectedly bloody fight to retake the Islamic State group's last stronghold in northern Syria. It has been forced to pour in troops, take the lead in the battle from its Syrian allies and reach out to Russia for aerial support -- a move that tests its alliance with the United States and the Syrian opposition. This still image taken from drone footage posted online Monday, Jan. 2, 2017 by the Aamaq News Agency, a media arm of the Islamic State group, purports to shows an aerial image of a neighborhood damaged by Turkish airstrikes in the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, in Aleppo province, Syria. Nearly two months into the assault, Turkey has become bogged down in an unexpectedly bloody fight to retake the Islamic State group's last stronghold in northern Syria.

In cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is implemented through Machine Learning techniques. The Machine Learning algorithms allow computers to learn and make predictions based on data already known. When we talk about Artificial Intelligence, people often refer to a world dominated by robots in a science fiction universe. But Artificial Intelligence is rooted in reality and is already used in many fields, such as online shopping, surveillance systems and many others. Artificial Intelligence has already proven effective in the treatment of millions of malware every day.