KOLKATA, India -- Across a bustling intersection from one of the first dead-letters offices, a pale blue sign beseeches pedestrians to join the future. Several hundred feet separate old, colonial India from the promise of a new, technologically transformed country. An Uber sign urges traffic safety and a gentle nudge for the ride-sharing service, which is wildly popular here. In Kolkata, capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, there are traces of the future amid decaying buildings and staggering poverty. Samsung Electronics and Dell signs mark the entrance to a dilapidated Victorian structure in the heart of the city. Kolkata is India's untold story in tech.

SAN FRANCISCO - Alphabet may be working on its own version of Amazon's increasingly popular voice recognition device the Echo. According to a report in The Information, one of the products that Alphabet's Nest division is working on is a "Google voice recognition device" designed to compete with Amazon Echo. The Echo has been a surprising hit. It is a Wi-Fi-enabled cylinder roughly the size of a Pringles equipped with powerful microphones and speakers. The runs a voice recognition digital assistant named Alexa that allows users to ask questions, call up music, order items on Amazon and a growing list of other tasks simply using their voice.

Many people around the world have more Denisovan DNA than previously thought, which has contributed to their sense of smell and ability to thrive at high altitudes, according to a study released Monday. Researchers know that modern humans with ancestry outside of Africa inherited up to 2.1 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. But far less was known about Denisovans, who are believed to have shared origins with Neanderthals and account for up to 5 percent of DNA in some present day populations. The latest work, from a research team at Harvard Medical School and UCLA, developed a world map of ancient DNA. In doing so, they found that populations in Oceania populations had the highest percentage of ancient DNA – 2 percent Neanderthal and 5 percent Denisovan - while South Asians had more Denisovan DNA – 0.1 percent in Sherpas - than expected.

A lot of the computational plumbing that powers Google owes something to Jeff Dean. He built early versions of the company's Web search and ad systems. And he invented MapReduce, a system for working with big data sets that triggered a major shift across the computing industry. Dean is now laboring to reinvent the inner workings of Google and the wider world all over again. He leads the Google Brain research group, which aims to advance machine learning--the art of making software figure out how to do things for itself instead of being explicitly programmed.

If you're unsure whether a politician really disagrees with an issue, then just look for the'not face'. The facial expression has been discovered to be a universal sign for anger, disgust and contempt. Consisting of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, the expression is found among many cultures, including those who speak English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. If you're unsure whether a politician really disagrees with an issue, then just for the'not face'. The facial expression has been discovered to be a universal sign for anger, disgust and contempt.

They died out more than 40,000 years ago but the legacy left by two prehistoric species of early humans is far more widespread than had been previously believed. Scientists have discovered a surprising number of bloodlines around the world carry fragments of DNA from Neanderthals or their sister species, the mysterious Denisovans. Their analysis suggests that our modern human ancestors appear to have interbred with the Denisovans just 100 generations after their trysts with Neanderthals. Scientists have produced new maps showing the levels of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry around the world. And the study has unearthed some surprising new benefits these illicit encounters have gifted to modern humans living today.

As it turns out, other techniques including website path analysis, text analysis of customer feedback, sentiment analysis of social media, and graph analysis --all distinctly different analytics techniques with each delivering insights complementing the others--revealed a fuller picture: people weren't complaining about price, preferring the cheaper item, or any of the things that the retailer expected. Instead, customers were complaining about how hard it was to find designer jeans on the website. It was a website navigation issue. And the issue was invisible until the retailer made sense of analytics from a variety of sources.

You've probably heard plenty about companies using text analytics to track of their brand on social media, or pull insights from product reviews, but the same software can predict far more serious occurrences than a dissatisfied customer. We've invited Karthik Dinakar, PhD candidate and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT, to speak at our Human Language Technology Conference (HLTCon) March 31st to discuss how text analytics can save lives. Karthik will present his research that applies text understanding to five areas--online cyberbullying; online adolescent distress; crisis counseling on text hotlines; ways to model, predict and treat self-harm; and "cardiolinguistics" to model atypical angina in coronary heart disease. For example, natural language processing technology can "read" texts written in social media or on chat helplines and find signals that alert doctors or counselors to a person who is threatened by cyberbullying or in imminent danger of directed self-harm. Similarly, heart attacks in women are often undiagnosed because their description of symptoms may not "present" as a heart attack.

How can businesses integrate imperfect machine-learning algorithms into their workflow? With Microsoft's Azure ML and IBM's investment in Watson, making models is easier than ever. Companies no longer need a Google-size R&D budget to make machine learning applicable to their business. The new challenge for businesses is how to integrate an imperfect machine-learning algorithm into their existing workflow. Original Post Bio: Lukas Biewald is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdFlower.

Recently, the Google RankBrain system has started to garner quite the buzz within the SEO community -- but to a large degree, it's not entirely being understood. We've even had some somewhat link-baity post titles that didn't help things either. And of course, Google didn't do itself any favors including the word "rank" in the name. So, let's start with a statement by Google's Gary Illyes: " Lemme try one last time: Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. No affect on crawling nor indexing or replace anything in ranking" – via Twitter The core, from what we understand, is more about better assessment of queries and the classifications therein.