Roundup Hello, here's a short but sweet round up of news from the world of machine learning beyond what we have already covered on El Reg.

A study of the ultrasonic vocalizations of several adult male BALB/c mice in the presence of a female, is undertaken in this study.

Quick tip for those who prepare an interview for an internship or a PhD or a postdoc in the academia: be able to answer some simple linear algebra exercises. Machine learning research is something different from gluing some python code found on stack overflow, and professors are desperate to find people that understand what they are doing.

It's no longer a secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. What once was a puzzling and rather niche area of computer science, has suddenly started to take over our lives with its many applications. As a result, due to this mysterious and unknown characteristic of AI and its more prominent child, machine learning, news sites, and the press, in general, has taken a liking on overstating the reality behind the successes or advances in the field. This phenomenon often leads to articles of an unsavory nature that seems to sensationalize and even fearmonger what's genuinely going on. In this essay, I want to shed some light on this issue.

The 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (#IROS2019) is being held in Macau this week. The theme this year is "robots connecting people". The conference accepted 1,127 papers for oral presentation, 148 late breaking news posters, and 41 workshops and tutorials. For those who can't make it in person, or can't possibly see everything, IROS is launching IROS TV, an onsite conference television channel featuring a new episode daily that is screened around the conference venue and online. The TV shows profile the research of scientists, educators, and practitioners in robotics, and provide an opportunity to learn about advances in robotics.

IBM Watson is considered to be the first-ever commercialized cognitive computing platform, designed specifically for underpinning the development of various enterprise solutions. IBM Watson services continue to tap immense opportunity in the rapidly evolving cognitive computing field, which has been reshaping the nature of business operations, thereby determining their growth. Fact.MR's recent study projects the IBM Watson services market to record a spectacular rise in the period of forecast (2018-2028). Over US$ 20,000 Mn worth of IBM Watson services are estimated to be sold globally by 2028-end. Although cognitive computing is yet at its nascent phase, the technology is expected to have a significant influence on transformation of various businesses and industrial sectors.

ML is all about creating algorithms and systems to analyze the process and learn from data. It is the fundamental science technology which processes more data and gives better results. Every business has data which they need to analyze, but the vast amount of data will be difficult to handle manually. So AI comes in the rescue, and its branch ML works in this direction. The businesses are getting benefits of using its applications.

With its thought-provoking storylines, intelligently written characters, and balletic action sequences, Westworld has proven to be one of the most engaging series to watch right now. Based on the film of the same name and written and directed by Michael Crichton (best-selling author of Jurassic Park), the HBO series explores the possibilities of visitors living out their every fantasy in a theme park filled with robots who help simulate the Old West. The series offers compelling quandaries about ethics, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of our increasingly-automated world. David Eagleman is the renowned neuroscientist who has advised the show since its first season, helping the creators develop a near-future (30 years from now, to be exact) that is a possible extension of our own. But can we really expect to see robots that we might confuse with humans?

Netflix just announced the open-source launch of Polynote, a new Polyglot notebook type that supports multiple languages, including Python, with Apache Spark integration, first-class Scala support, as-you-type autocomplete, and more. Polynote was created to support machine learning and data science professionals through a notebook environment to integrate the JVM-based ML platform with Python's machine learning and data visualization libraries.