Samsung, announced that it has agreed to acquire Viv Labs, the intelligent interface to everything. Viv has developed a unique, open artificial intelligence (AI) platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into renowned applications and services. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. The deal showcases Samsung's commitment to virtual personal assistants and is part of the company's broader vision to deliver an AI-based open ecosystem across all of its devices and services. With Viv, Samsung will be able to unlock and offer new service experiences for its customers, including one that simplifies user interfaces, understands the context of the user and offers the user the most appropriate and convenient suggestions and recommendations.

President Obama thinks that artificial intelligence will be one of the thorny issues awaiting his successor in the White House. The implications of recent advances in AI were a major theme at a technology conference organized by the White House and held in Pittsburgh today. Speaking on stage, Obama said self-driving Ubers, which are being tested with passengers in Pittsburgh, were a good example of the coming complexities. Although welcome and useful, vehicles that drive themselves will have some downsides. "A huge percentage of the American population makes its living, and often a pretty good living, driving," Obama said.

Hurricane Matthew's record rains were but the first of many obstacles faced by millions of evacuees in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas this past week. Roads were blocked by chest-high floodwaters and downed trees. Gas stations ran out of fuel. And traffic sat backed up for miles along interstate highways as floodwaters overtook what appeared to be tens of thousands of households. Most did make it to safety, thanks to evacuation orders, well-planned emergency procedures, and traffic managers switching up lanes to move a glut of vehicles (contraflow for the win).

A gift from internet retailer and cloud computer giant Amazon has moved the UW's future computer science and engineering building 10 million closer to its 110 million fundraising goal. Funded by a combination of public and private partnerships, the 130,000-square-foot building will provide the space necessary to double the number of degrees awarded annually by the department of computer science and engineering (CSE) to 600. The project currently stands at 86 million according to Ed Lazowska, UW's Bill & Melinda Gates Chair for Computer Science and Engineering. "Amazon's gift will have a significant impact in helping UW CSE to grow, to educate many more Washington students in computer science and computer engineering," wrote Hank Levy, chairman in CSE at the UW, in an email. "We are honored to be part of a community of individuals and companies that work together to make our region strong and to create employment for students."

President Obama joined a chorus of those warning of the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. In an interview with Wired Magazine, Obama spoke of redesigning the social compact and starting a conversation around fair wages. He cited teachers as being underpaid, and called for a reexamination of what we value, and what we'll pay for. Obama addressed basic income, a proposal for all citizens to receive a government stipend in order to meet their costs of living. The idea has gained recent support among some futurists and economists, given concerns over how technology will eliminate jobs and impact salaries in coming years.

Yahoo is today announcing the release of a large-scale data set that describes people's usage of news feeds on several of the company's web services, including Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The idea is to empower machine learning researchers in academia with very rich data. The release of data is not, in and of itself, new for Yahoo -- there have been 56 previous releases in the Yahoo Labs Webscope program, which encompasses advertising, image, social, and ratings data, among other categories. This data set in particular covers 20 million people over the course of four months in 2015, and shows the types of devices people used to visit pages, how far down they got in the articles, and the top subjects of articles. There is data on people's locations, their ages (in some cases), and their gender -- all in an anonymized way.

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.

Machine Learning Deep learning start-up MetaMind has published details of a system that is more accurate than other language processing methods. The company is developing technology designed to be capable of a range of different artificial-intelligence tasks. Google and Facebook, are investing huge sums into the research and development of improved artificial intelligence algorithms for processing language. Around the world, various research groups are making steady progress toward improving a computer's language skills especially using recent advances in machine learning. "The insight--and it's almost trivial--is that every task in NLP is actually a question-and-answer task."

This is another installment of Spare5's "Conversations in Machine Learning" blog series. Each week, our content human, Cassie, shares a summary of a recent conversation we had with a machine learning team and potential customer--what they're building, how they're handling training data today, etc. Read more about the series here. This week I'm featuring a technology that, when I learned about it I said, man I love when people think of stuff like this! Great idea, you technologically inclined people you. So imagine you're flipping through a magazine and see an ad for these great shoes and you're like, those are perfect shoes. You could head to Google, search for the brand, pull up their website, browse for the shoes there… Or you could just snap a picture of them with your phone and let the machine learning-based app we're highlighting today do all the work for you.

This time next week, on Tuesday 11 October at Bletchley Park, sees the launch of an initiative to celebrate women in maths and computing. As a new branch of the existing Suffrage Science scheme, it will encourage women into science, and to reach senior leadership roles. Women make up no more than four in ten undergraduates studying maths (London Mathematical Society), and fewer than two in ten of those studying computer science (WISE report, 2014). Despite much effort, there has been little sign of improvement. In fact, the number of women studying computer science at the undergraduate level has been in decline since the 1980s.