Apache Spark is a leading platform for large-scale data mining, batch processing and stream processing. Touted as a "lightning-fast unified analytics engine," Spark modernizes data analytics with machine learning to help businesses uncover patterns at new levels. Best of all, Spark is included within many other software solutions, so this powerful tool may already be part of your modern data analytics infrastructure. From its inception at the AMPLab at U.C. Berkeley in 2009, Spark has become one of the key big data distributed processing frameworks in the world. It's used by banks, telecommunications companies, games companies, governments, and nearly all major tech giants, including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

A typical way in which network data is recorded is to measure all the interactions among a specified set of core nodes; this produces a graph containing this core together with a potentially larger set of fringe nodes that have links to the core. Interactions between pairs of nodes in the fringe, however, are not recorded by this process, and hence not present in the resulting graph data. For example, a phone service provider may only have records of calls in which at least one of the participants is a customer; this can include calls between a customer and a non-customer, but not between pairs of non-customers. Knowledge of which nodes belong to the core is an important piece of metadata that is crucial for interpreting the network dataset. But in many cases, this metadata is not available, either because it has been lost due to difficulties in data provenance, or because the network consists of found data obtained in settings such as counter-surveillance. This leads to a natural algorithmic problem, namely the recovery of the core set. Since the core set forms a vertex cover of the graph, we essentially have a planted vertex cover problem, but with an arbitrary underlying graph. We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this planted vertex cover problem, based on results in the theory of fixed-parameter tractability, together with algorithms for recovering the core. Our algorithms are fast, simple to implement, and out-perform several methods based on network core-periphery structure on various real-world datasets.

Why bother with a human docent when a robot could give you a guided tour? Last week, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, revealed its new employee -- an interactive robot named Pepper. The 4-foot-tall humanoid robot was created by Softbank, which donated 30 robots to the museum last year. This friendly Pepper robot wants to show you around the Smithsonian museum. "By interacting with museum visitors and providing insight on different exhibits, Pepper will help guide their educational experience through the Smithsonian that they otherwise might have missed out on," Steve Carlin, chief strategy officer of Softbank Robotics, said in a statement.

The telecommunication service provider industry is one of the biggest businesses in the world. It also has historically been a capital-intensive industry with high fixed costs, which has put pressure on telecom operators to control their variable costs, particularly human capital. This tension surrounding profitability is intensifying. Many telecom operators crossed the point where revenue per bit is lower than cost per bit in 2017. Telecom operators are threatened by fast and highly-efficient web-scale companies and are straining under the challenge posed by digital transformation.

The company rolling out Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) has announced entering three-year research and development (R&D) partnerships with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of Melbourne. Under what it called "major collaborative relationships", NBN said it would work with the two universities on Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), smart cities, programmable networks, data analytics and visualisation, wireless technologies, and "technology for social good" R&D projects. "These two new relationships will help NBN Co double down on our strong focus on technology innovation for customer experience and operational excellence," NBN CTO Ray Owen explained. "With these innovative institutions -- UoM and UTS -- we saw a natural fit in helping NBN Co further enable the digital economy." NBN added that the agreements are also expected to cover opportunities such as "student exchanges" and post-doctoral research collaboration by giving the universities "access to real-world telecoms network operational data".

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 104, 19-35.

In this work, we propose a subspace-based algorithm for DOA estimation which iteratively reduces the disturbance factors of the estimated data covariance matrix and incorporates prior knowledge which is gradually obtained on line. An analysis of the MSE of the reshaped data covariance matrix is carried out along with comparisons between computational complexities of the proposed and existing algorithms. Simulations focusing on closely-spaced sources, where they are uncorrelated and correlated, illustrate the improvements achieved.

It sounds paradoxical: can something artificial help us understand what's real and what isn't? Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are pinning their hopes on this possibility in their fight against "fake news." Recently, I had the good fortune to visit an exhibition in Paris entitled "Artists and Robots" with my wife, a former art teacher. As a former artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, it's not often we get to attend an exhibition that can appeal to both artists and scientists. Art is not my strong suit, but I do understand it's not meant to display "reality," but rather, as my good wife instructed me, the artist's "interpretation of reality, designed to appeal to his or her audience."

James Blackman has been writing about the technology sector for over a decade. He edited UK wireless industry trade title Mobile News before joining Chinese telecoms company Huawei, where he led media activity for its devices business in Western Europe. He has since worked on a freelance basis with a variety of private enterprises and news publications, including the BBC, European Communications, Mobile Europe and Solar Media. He is based in London.

Tile's Bluetooth trackers help people keep tabs on their keys, wallets and other items they don't want to lose, and today the company is making it a little easier for some to keep track of their important objects. Tile is teaming up with Comcast so that Xfinity customers with an X1 Voice Remote can simply ask where their item is. All they'll have to do is say something like, "Xfinity Home, find my wallet," or, "Xfinity Home, where are my keys?" And the last known location of the Tile associated with that object will be displayed on their TV screen. This is the first time Tile has offered this type of video and voice control with its trackers.