Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate.

It's been fascinating to watch the storm over Microsoft's AI Twitter chat bot, Tay, which learned extreme racism, homophobia, and drug culture from internet trolls and was hastily taken offline. As one commentator put, it went from saying "humans are super cool", to extolling Nazi values in less than 24 hours – a useful analog of extremism's connection with ignorance in a meme-propelled culture. But were trolls solely to blame? As journalist Paul Mason noted in his Guardian blog, Tay was essentially feeding off the deep undercurrents of prejudice and hate speech that lurk near the surface of many social platforms. Or at least they do in the West.

Peter Brand, the fictional sports analyst in the movie Moneyball, was portrayed to be the stereotypical nerdy number cruncher. This makes a good story line in a movie, but the real life architect of the Oakland A's analytical success in baseball, Paul DePodesta, required more than number crunching ability to succeed. He played both varsity football and baseball at Harvard, worked as a professional baseball scout and later became a general manager in Major League Baseball. Paul exemplifies the "unicorn" that businesses seek as analytics professionals. The term "unicorn," a mythical creature that does not exist, is used to describe the individual that can bridge the gap between the world of technology and the world of practical application. To succeed as an Analytics Professional, one must possess a broad set of skills and personal attributes beyond the technical tool kit.

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists. "A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

The idea is ridiculously simple (perhaps why it is effective?): I don't understand the claim "Remember all the narratives we told about how depth learns hierarchical representations, and higher level representations -- those higher level representations don't seem to matter so much after all.". The net has over 100 layers!?! I imagine that this also works reasonably well in the RNN encoder in an encoder/decoder framework. I wonder if it also applies to generative RNNs.

A humanoid obsessive has built an incredibly realistic female robot from scratch - and it's got more than a passing resemblance to Avengers star Scarlett Johansson. Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old product and graphic designer, has spent more than 50,000 ( 34,000) and a year and a half creating the female robot prototype, Mark 1. The designer confirmed the scarily lifelike humanoid had been modelled on a Hollywood star, but wanted to keep her name under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions, but Ricky says creating it wasn't easy.

I have been trying to use ML for sentiment analysis of sentences, I have been successful with Naive Bayes and SVM but I would like to implement Neural Networks for Sentiment Analysis but couldn't find a way to convert words as input for neural networks. I know that representing word as a numerical is not efficient. How is nlpnet implemented, I tried to understand that but that flew over my head.

Ricky Man, a 42-year-old graphic designer in Hong Kong, spent more than 50,000, and a year-and-a-half designing and constructing an unbelievably lifelike robot...modeled after Oscar-nominated actress, Scarlett Johansson. The robot, who Ricky calls'Mark 1,' has confirmed to be inspired by a "Hollywood star," but Ricky apparently wants to keep the specific name under wraps. Ricky's projection is a culmination of a "childhood dream," and the prototype has, covered in silicone skin, contains a "3D-printed skeleton," which wraps its "mechanical and electronic parts." Despite the isolation in this DIY endeavor, Ricky says he has no regrets, and is hopeful that with the increasing potential of artificial intelligence, he'll be able to sell Mark 1 to a high bidder. Although, something tells me ol' Ricky is going to have a hard time giving up his new friend...

The results are all over the map, but a few of the test images -- like the puppy and Monarch butterfly above -- look pretty good. The algorithms work using a few common sense rules (the sky is typically blue, dirt roads are usually brown and have a similar texture), and "hallucinating" a plausible colorized photo. But the results are far from perfect. For example, the neural net has a hard time coloring within the lines with more complex subjects like vegetables on a plate or keeping a heron bright white. When it does hit the mark, however, it's impressive. In fact, 20 percent of the folks surveyed for a "colorization Turing test" were fooled into thinking that the images weren't monochrome to start.

HONG KONG – Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamed of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by constructing a life-size robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year and a half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps but appears to be Scarlett Johansson. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.