The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. The software, which is linked to IBM's Watson artificial intelligence, combs through tweets and images, specific hashtags and phrases, or posts from or about a particular geographic area and then uses computer algorithms to gauge the mood of that swirling digital conversation. The AI aspects of the iAWACS app only monitor the social media posts -- they don't analyze the audio from police scanners nor from the airspace maps. The result, which the Jester said was still a work in progress, was built from the ground up for law enforcement and intelligence officials with real-time information needs.

Machine intelligence is your firm's primary area of interest. Can you talk about how machine intelligence will make organizations "smarter" and what it'll do to the traditional employer-employee relationship? The intersection of machine intelligence and organizational life is a complex subject about which, today, we know very little. I generally try to avoid predictions, because I think they're mostly lullabies -- stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. I prefer to focus on the unknowns, so we can work to make them known.

She is currently in the NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program taking place between April 11th to July 1st, 2016. This post is based on her third class project - Web Scraping, due on the 6th week of the program. Oil prices have fallen sharply since the summer of 2014. Prices bottomed in February 2016, since then they have gradually increased. While the breakeven cost is a popular topic among investors, on the consumer side gasoline prices are very cheap.

He told the Cheltenham Science Festival that robot technology risked being hijacked for malign purposes in the way the internet has been for pornography unless governments take action. The former advisor to the United Nations on robotics said he knew of at least 14 companies in South Korea and Japan that were manufacturing and marketing "childcare" robots, and he warned that the growing capability of so-called sex robots means they are likely to enter mainstream use within years. Devices such as the Roxxxy or Rocky True Companion, which come with an optional "talking" feature, can currently be bought online for around 7,000. The cost of sex robots is expected to come down, however, as more manufacturers enter the market.

So Brexit turned out to be the non-event for markets we expected with asset prices booming to record highs while support for remaining inside the single currency free-trade zone has risen within other European Union countries. As is often the case, the trade was to "fade" – or bet against – the apocalyptic hyperbole both before and after the referendum. Remarkably one boutique Australian quant shop did exactly this by leveraging academic studies of "blue green algae", which helped it generate enormous 32 per cent returns on the day of the vote. Taaffeite Capital Management (TCM) claim their "artificial intelligence" (aka computer code operating autonomously of humans) figured out that there were massive financial market mispricings that warranted shorts on equities and long positions on government bonds without actually knowing that a referendum was being held. The intellectual property underlying this "systematic" – or automated – trading strategy belongs to Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD Desmond Lun, who is a 36-year old Australian professor of computer science at Rutgers University in the US, and a Melbourne University alumnus.

Palantir in particular is interesting because of their B2B business model and their lack of traditional marketing or sales teams1.] They helped convict Bernie Madoff 2, analyzed roadside bomb patterns in Afganistan, and are rumored to have helped locate Osama bin Laden 3. They've worked with the FBI, CIA, Marine Corps, Air Force, and at least 8 other government organizations 4. With that sort of pedigree, you'd think Palantir was some sort of top-secret government program. Complete with free meals and gym memberships, Palantir is actually one of the most successful privately-held startups in Silicon Valley. Started by a group of former PayPal people about a decade ago, Palantir is now worth 15 billion 5. They focused on one core product – machine augmented6 data analysis – and built an almost-exclusively engineering team to make it happen.

By learning how to pitch his bot idea while driving a robot, Button.ai Organized by VentureBeat, the international botathon took place July 9-10 in New York, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco. A fifth finalist category was made for people participating online elsewhere in the world. Finals for popular vote and judges' categories were held Tuesday in San Francisco at MobileBeat, a two-day gathering of chatbot and AI leaders, held July 12-13 at The Village. Skoolbot won the portion of the competition decided by judges Phil Libin, an investor in bots from General Catalyst; SmarterChild creator Robert Hoffer; and Alfred Lin, an investor at Sequoia Capital.

DARPA has been mostly focusing on making new things, pushing the boundary of what is possible to build. Case in point: This new challenge it issued to hackers. DARPA has just started the final round of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a competition among seven fully-autonomous computers to defend themselves and point out flaws in a DARPA computer. The challenge aims to solve a persistent problem in computer systems. Flaws in software often go unnoticed for around 312 days, time which can be exploited by hackers.

In the 1980s, astronomers discovered that objects falling into black holes in our galaxy throw off flickering X-rays before they vanish. Why this happened was a mystery. A discovery by the European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton (aided by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission) has proved the existence of a "gravitational vortex" around a black hole, which solves the flickering mystery. The image above is an artist depiction of of the accretion disk around a black hole as the orbit of the material changes orientation around the central object.

In this talk, I will introduce the audience to the emerging area of computational social science, focusing on how machine learning for social science differs from machine learning in other contexts. I will present two related models -- both based on Bayesian Poisson tensor decomposition -- for uncovering latent structure from count data. The first is for uncovering topics in previously classified government documents, while the second is for uncovering multilateral relations from country-to-country interaction data. Finally, I will talk briefly about the broader ethical implications of analyzing social data. Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.