Dimensionality reduction techniques play an essential role in data analytics, signal processing and machine learning. Dimensionality reduction is usually performed in a preprocessing stage that is separate from subsequent data analysis, such as clustering or classification. Finding reduced-dimension representations that are well-suited for the intended task is more appealing. This paper proposes a joint factor analysis and latent clustering framework, which aims at learning cluster-aware low-dimensional representations of matrix and tensor data. The proposed approach leverages matrix and tensor factorization models that produce essentially unique latent representations of the data to unravel latent cluster structure -- which is otherwise obscured because of the freedom to apply an oblique transformation in latent space. At the same time, latent cluster structure is used as prior information to enhance the performance of factorization. Specific contributions include several custom-built problem formulations, corresponding algorithms, and discussion of associated convergence properties. Besides extensive simulations, real-world datasets such as Reuters document data and MNIST image data are also employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

IBM's Watson is pitching in to tackle California's drought. The supercomputer, which may be best known for destroying human opponents in games like Jeopardy and Go, has been enlisted by environmental consulting firm OmniEarth to track water use across California. OmniEarth announced the partnership on Friday. But for over a month, the company has been tapping into Watson's computing power to scan satellite and aerial images of California's lush valleys and barren deserts to figure out how Californians are using their dwindling water reserves. Even without OmniEarth or Watson's help, Californians are working to track and cut down their water consumption.

Like iPhone's Siri on steroids, ROSS promises to cut down the time it takes to retrieve complex legal data from hours to minutes. He also learns and gets better with each use. ROSS is not a physical bot in the office but a complex AI system; it doesn't have the physical presence of an R2-D2 or Wall-E, but could easily outmaneuver them mentally. "Before, the human had to go through (and) read all the cases. The case could be 30 pages to find those three, four sentences they needed," said Arruda.

IBM's voice-recognition AI ROSS,' powered by the Watson supercomputer, has just landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice.

The Expo Line, which opens today, will get you from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica in 50 minutes. That's the same as the old Red Car system took more than a half-century ago. Some experts say speeding up Metro's rail lines is crucial to the goal of getting more commuters out of their cars and using mass transit. San Francisco's police chief stepped down under pressure amid growing controversies over allegations of corruption and racially biased behavior on the part of the department. There was another fatal shooting that generated debate hours earlier.

Unless you've been living under a rock (which will likely be affected by climate change soon, by the way), you know that between forest fires, illegal deforestation, poaching, and other crimes, an enormity of environmental issues puts our ecosystems in danger. According to the National Science Foundation, a century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed in the wild. Now, there are as few as 3,000 remaining. While human patrols can directly protect endangered animals, many protection agencies lack the resources necessary to cover the appropriate amount of ground, especially in large national parks where many of these illicit activities might occur. In 2011, Eve McDonald-Madden and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia lamented that a lack of money limits the impact that management strategies can have on preventing the extinction of a species.

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration released Thursday a list of voluntary privacy best practices for commercial and non-commercial drone users, in the wake of concerns that drones could encroach on individual privacy and open a new front in the collection of personal data for commercial use. The privacy guidance, arrived at in consensus with drone organizations and companies like Amazon and Google's parent Alphabet, recommends that drone operators who collect personal data should have a privacy policy that explains what personally identifiable information they will collect, for what purpose the data is collected and if it will be shared with others, including in response to requests from law enforcement agencies. The guidelines also encourage drone operators to avoid using or sharing personal data for marketing purposes without consent of the individual. Drone operators should also not use personal data without consent for "employment eligibility, promotion, or retention; credit eligibility; or health care treatment eligibility other than when expressly permitted by and subject to the requirements of a sector-specific regulatory framework." Data collected should also not be held beyond a reasonable period, without the consent of the individual, or in exceptional circumstances, such as legal disputes or safety incidents.

Last month, law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that it would employ IBM's artificially intelligent lawyer, Ross, to help ease its tedious workload. In a statement, the firm's chief technology officer said, "we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients." Ross, a system built on the back of IBM's Watson, claims to be able to interpret questions lawyers ask it, and read "through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly." But the first thing I noticed about Ross wasn't how many legal documents it can search at once, or how accurate it claims to be. It was the name: Ross.

In December 2015 Leman Solicitors hosted the Future of Law event for 100 corporate counsel. We spoke about IBM's Watson which is being used to build A.I. applications in several sectors, notably ROSS in law. It's part of a disruption that we say is going to fundamentally change the way legal services are delivered. Another article in today's Business Insider UK reports: "Ask ROSS to look up an obscure court ruling from 13 years ago, and ROSS will not only search for the case in an instant -- without contest or complaint -- but it'll offer opinions in plain language about the old ruling's relevance to the case at hand." The article can be found here.

After a group of researchers scraped up a dataset using open profiles on OkCupid, they argued that the data was "public" and therefore fair game. Not so, writes professor of law Woodrow Hartzog. "This justification is fundamentally wrong. Not just because we should be able to expect a certain amount of privacy in public, but because, despite frequency of use and seeming self-evidence, we actually don't even know what the term public even means," Hartzog argues. "It has no set definition in privacy law or policy."