Yesterday morning I woke up, put on a pot of coffee, and checked the news. I wanted to revisit the New Hampshire primary results that had rolled in the night before. I opened Quartz's new app and was greeted with a text message: "Yep, it's really happening: Trump and Sanders won big in New Hampshire." Below it appeared side-by-side portraits of Trump's scowl and Bernie's grin. To read more, I tapped a ready-made text reply containing a donkey, an elephant, and an American flag emoji.

Effective data governance consists of protocols, practices, and the people necessary for implementation to ensure trustworthy, consistent data. Its yields include regulatory compliance, improved data quality, and data's increased valuation as a monetary asset that organizations can bank on. Nonetheless, these aspects of governance would be impossible without what is arguably its most important component: the common terminologies and definitions that are sustainable throughout an entire organization, and which comprise the foundation for the aforementioned policy and governance outcomes. When intrinsically related to the technologies used to implement governance protocols, terminology systems (containing vocabularies and taxonomies) can unify terms and definitions at a granular level. The result is a greatly increased ability to tackle the most pervasive challenges associated with big data governance including recurring issues with unstructured and semi-structured data, integration efforts (such as mergers and acquisitions), and regulatory compliance.

Fresh off its promotion at Facebook's F8 developer conference, Poncho announced today that it has raised 2 million for its personalized weather forecasting service. The round was led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures and will be earmarked for improvements to Poncho's natural language processing, in addition to building artificial intelligence and data science technology into its bots and apps. Participating investors include Greycroft Partners, Comcast Ventures LP, Venture51 Capital Partners, RRE Ventures, Betaworks, Broadway Video Ventures, Ore Ventures, and several angel investors. Started two years ago out of Betaworks, Poncho offers a weather forecast alternative to Yahoo Weather, AccuWeather, and The Weather Channel. The company seeks to dominate what CEO Sam Mandel calls "thin content," which is activity that "takes place within the notification layer and also on a messaging platform that's contextually relevant, customized, and comes at the right time, but with enough polish to be engaging and cause a happy emotion."

Everyone knows about the giant skills gap that is haunting the IT sector worldwide. According to IoT company PTC, it is estimated that in the next ten years more than two million IT and communication jobs will be unfulfilled. To address this, several universities have come up with degrees that address the different skills needed in the IoT market, including user interfaces, networks, artificial intelligence, networking, and others. CBR lists ten courses being taught in the UK institutions. Offering both a full time or part time (12 and 24 months respectively) course, University of London's Royal Holloway has built a degree based on computer science, technology and engineering.

Lots of activity among tech stocks Friday, as several companies' shares are on the move. Revenue and earnings were down for the tech giant during the third quarter, as it continues its push toward mobile and cloud computing. Microsoft reported earnings of 47 cents a share, down 25% year-over-year. All those investments in self-driving cars and broadband Internet are costing the tech giant. Operating losses from the division behind Alphabet's "moonshots" widened to more than 800 million.

Socio-economic maps contain important information regarding the population of a country. Computing these maps is critical given that policy makers often times make important decisions based upon such information. However, the compilation of socio-economic maps requires extensive resources and becomes highly expensive. On the other hand, the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, is generating large amounts of spatiotemporal data that can reveal human behavioral traits related to specific socio-economic characteristics. Traditional inference approaches have taken advantage of these datasets to infer regional socio-economic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach whereby topic models are used to infer socio-economic levels from large-scale spatio-temporal data. Instead of using a pre-determined set of features, we use latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract latent recurring patterns of co-occurring behaviors across regions, which are then used in the prediction of socio-economic levels. We show that our approach improves state of the art prediction results by 9%.

Churn happens when a customer leaves a brand or stop using its services. Brands reduce their churn rates by identifying and retaining potential churners through customer retention campaigns. In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying micro-posts as churny or non-churny with respect to a given brand. Motivated by the recent success of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in word representation, we propose to utilize RNNs to learn micro-post and churn indicator representations. We show that such representations improve the performance of churn detection in microblogs and lead to more accurate ranking of churny contents. Furthermore, in this researchwe show that state-of-the-art sentiment analysis approaches fail to identify churny contents. Experiments on Twitter data about three telco brands show the utility of our approach for this task.

In the past decade, social and information networks have become prevalent, and research on the network data has attracted much attention. Besides the link structure, network data are often equipped with the content information (i.e, node attributes) that is usually noisy and characterized by high dimensionality. As the curse of dimensionality could hamper the performance of many machine learning tasks on networks (e.g., community detection and link prediction), feature selection can be a useful technique for alleviating such issue. In this paper, we investigate the problem of unsupervised feature selection on networks. Most existing feature selection methods fail to incorporate the linkage information, and the state-of-the-art approaches usually rely on pseudo labels generated from clustering. Such cluster labels may be far from accurate and can mislead the feature selection process. To address these issues, we propose a generative point of view for unsupervised features selection on networks that can seamlessly exploit the linkage and content information in a more effective manner. We assume that the link structures and node content are generated from a succinct set of high-quality features, and we find these features through maximizing the likelihood of the generation process. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our approach can select more discriminative features than state-of-the-art methods.

We investigate the problem of repacking stations in the FCC's upcoming, multi-billion-dollar "incentive auction". Early efforts to solve this problem considered mixed-integer programming formulations, which we show are unable to reliably solve realistic, national-scale problem instances. We describe the result of a multi-year investigation of alternatives: a solver, SATFC, that has been adopted by the FCC for use in the incentive auction. SATFC is based on a SAT encoding paired with a wide range of techniques: constraint graph decomposition; novel caching mechanisms that allow for reuse of partial solutions from related, solved problems; algorithm configuration; algorithm portfolios; and the marriage of local-search and complete solver strategies. We show that our approach solves virtually all of a set of problems derived from auction simulations within the short time budget required in practice.

To whom correspondence should be addressed; Email: artitw@gmail.com Customer temporal behavioral data was represented as images in order to perform churn prediction by leveraging deep learning architectures prominent in image classification. Supervised learning was performed on labeled data of over 6 million customers using deep convolutional neural networks, which achieved an AUC of 0.743 on the test dataset using no more than 12 temporal features for each customer. Unsupervised learning was conducted using autoencoders to better understand the reasons for customer churn. Images that maximally activate the hidden units of an autoencoder trained with churned customers reveal ample opportunities for action to be taken to prevent churn among strong data, no voice users.