In this post, I'll introduce you to the Julia programming language and a couple long-term projects of mine: Plots for easily building complex data visualizations, and JuliaML for machine learning and AI. Easily create strongly-typed custom data manipulators. "User recipes" and "type recipes" can be defined on custom types to enable them to be "plotted" just like anything else. We believe that Julia has the potential to change the way researchers approach science, enabling algorithm designers to truly "think outside the box" (because of the difficulty of implementing non-conventional approaches in other languages).

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has led one of the most notable efforts in this regard, developing a system called AI2, an adaptive cybersecurity platform that uses machine learning and the assistance of expert analysts to adapt and improve over time. The system uses near-real-time analytics to identify known security threats, stored data analytics to compare samples against historical data and big data analytics to identify evolving threats through anonymized datasets gathered from a vast number of clients. Combining this capability with the data already being gathered by IBM's threat intelligence platform, X-Force Exchange, the company wants to address the shortage of talent in the industry by raising Watson's level of efficiency to that of an expert assistant and help reduce the rate of false positives. This technique gives the cybersecurity firm the unique ability to monitor billions of results on a daily basis, identify and alert about the publication of potentially brand-damaging information and proactively detect and prevent attacks and data loss before they happen.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.

A resident expresses her anger about police-involved shootings in South Los Angeles. A resident expresses her anger about police-involved shootings in South Los Angeles. Prop 64 divides medical marijuana community, the battle to seize Mosul, the vice presidential debate is tonight, and Southern California's earthquake fears. Prop 64 divides medical marijuana community, the battle to seize Mosul, the vice presidential debate is tonight, and Southern California's earthquake fears.

Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. The South Korean electronics company, which has been grappling with extended fallout from its recalled Galaxy Note 7, announced Wednesday that it was buying Viv, the machine-learning virtual assistant company started by Siri founder Dag Kittlaus. Where interactions with many of today's virtual assistants still requires users to dumb down their requests into somewhat robotic language, the AI goal is natural language interaction with a virtual assistant that can process layered requests and remember contextual user details. Dag Kittlaus, founder of AI company Viv, was also the man behind Siri, which he sold to Apple.

Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum will head the new AI division, according to GeekWire. In addition to his old department, the new group will include products like Cortana and Bing with the Ambient Computing and Robotics teams, as well as the company's Information Platform Group. It's similar to how Microsoft internally pivoted to collectively harness the Internet in the mid-90s, GeekWire points out. Hopefully, byproducts from the AI division's R&D will produce fewer missteps like last March's foul-mouthed Twitterbot and more advancements like their pilot project using AI to discover cancer treatments.

Besides being a major player in the earthquake prediction method discussed here, the ionosphere is important because it's the layer of the atmosphere that reflects electromagnetic waves back to Earth and enables radio communication. There was increased ionization over Japan before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and a spike in radio wave emissions near Haiti before the 2010 quake there. Enough historical data linking ionospheric activity to earthquakes needs to be collected in order to generate patterns, and the patterns then need to be matched to real-time data. When the Tohoku earthquake hit, Tokyo residents received a one-minute warning via Japan's earthquake early warning system.

If you are NOT using Model Evaluation Library you may skip this release. CNTK (http://www.cntk.ai/), the Computational Network Toolkit by Microsoft Research, is a unified deep-learning toolkit that describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. In this directed graph, leaf nodes represent input values or network parameters, while other nodes represent matrix operations upon their inputs. This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is betting on Google Assistant. SAN FRANCISCO -- The star of Google's splashy launch event in San Francisco was the one with the speaking part: The super-smart digital helper Assistant whose task is to maintain the Internet giant's tight grip on consumers and their wallets as their attention shifts to smartphones and Internet-connected devices. Assistant will create a "two-way conversation between our users and Google," CEO Sundar Pichai said at a splashy launch event in San Francisco. It's a major transition from the days of typing a query into the Google search engine, allowing the Internet giant to show lucrative ads.

After all, consider that bees' markings are instantly distinctive to each other and across species as a biological imperative. The idea of the brand goes from optimistic (bees were a brand, man!) Will we ever start to see distinct, convincing personalities emerge as brands--or at least a few decent archetypes? Because right now, I don't think that most of us could really distinguish a Siri response from a Cortana response from an Alexa response, beyond the specific voice.