There is good content in this book, but its reliability is called into serious question by some very irritating and careless errors. In more than one place, the book gives a link for "extras" that are allegedly available. This link is invalid; there is no such page at the dummies.com This is so egregiously over the line that I am being generous in giving this book more than one star. How careless can you be not to ensure that a link on your own site works?

Deep learning efforts today are run on standard computer hardware using convolutional neural networks. Indeed the approach has proven powerful by pioneers such as Google and Microsoft. In contrast neuromorphic computing, whose spiking neuron architecture more closely mimics human brain function, has generated less enthusiasm in the deep learning community. Now, work by IBM using its TrueNorth chip as a test case may bring deep learning to neuromorphic architectures. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in August (Convolutional networks for fast, energy-efficient neuromorphic computing), researchers from IBM Research report, "[We] demonstrate that neuromorphic computing, despite its novel architectural primitives, can implement deep convolution networks that approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy across eight standard datasets encompassing vision and speech, perform inference while preserving the hardware's underlying energy-efficiency and high throughput."

Major technology firms have joined forces in a partnership on artificial intelligence, aiming to cooperate on "best practices" on using the technology "to benefit people and society." Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Google-owned British AI firm DeepMind on Wednesday announced a non-profit organization called "Partnership on AI" focused on helping the public understand the technology and practices in the field. The move comes amid concerns that new artificial intelligence efforts could spin out of control and end up being detrimental to society. The companies "will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology," according to a statement. Academics, non-profit groups, and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the board of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI).

Machine learning is a discipline aimed at having computers discover patterns or trends in some set of data without being explicitly programmed to recognize the pattern or trend. A counter example will help to explain the technique. Target is famous in the retail industry for having employed statisticians and data scientists to use purchase behavior to identify shoppers who were pregnant and then market to them. Presumably, those statisticians and data scientists used data from Target's baby registry system to identify pregnancy-driven buying patterns. These patterns were then used to write algorithms that could identify pregnant shoppers and offer discounts or coupons that were likely to make that shopper more loyal to Target.

HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, won the Award for Best AI Innovator at the 2016 AIconics Awards, which celebrate drive, innovation, and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community. HCL won for Satori, a DRYiCE(TM) module that is an AI-enabled web application combining the functions necessary for traditional and 21st-century enterprises, such as content and document management, personal profiling, enterprise social networking, enterprise search, business intelligence, workflow management, and an enterprise application store. The category for Best AI Innovator celebrates the company that is at the front-end of AI innovation, investing significantly in R&D, and committed to advancing the industry. HCL's high placement in these awards underscores the company's commitment to bringing innovative automation and AI solutions to the enterprise. In May, the company won for Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the London AIconics Awards.

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -0.38 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.75 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.22 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan will kick off South by South Lawn: A White House Festival of Ideas, Art and Action, which starts Monday morning with Govan's breakfast conversation with light-and-space artist James Turrell and architect David Adjaye. The event is a White House riff on the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals, where President Obama appeared this year in a keynote conversation. Govan's talk with Turrell and Adjaye, architect of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, will take place at the nearby Newseum. "I'm excited the arts are a lead in the White House's efforts to get us all to think big," Govan said by email. "James Turrell and David Adjaye are two big thinkers who have worked persistently to pursue their art and make meaningful contributions to our culture."

In the previous article in the series Hidden Markov Models were introduced. They were discussed in the context of the broader class of Markov Models. They were motivated by the need for quantitative traders to have the ability to detect market regimes in order to adjust how their quant strategies are managed. In particular it was mentioned that "various regimes lead to adjustments of asset returns via shifts in their means, variances/volatilities, serial correlation and covariances, which impact the effectiveness of time series methods that rely on stationarity". This has a significant bearing on how trading strategies are modified throughout the strategy lifecycle.

Africa's wildlife is in a constant state of danger. Between 2009 and 2015, Tanzania and Mozambique lost more than half of their elephants, many of them to poaching for ivory smuggling. The decline has propelled African vulture populations, who feed on elephant carcasses, toward extinction too. And attempts at curtailing poaching and ivory smuggling haven't helped the dwindling elephant population. In South Africa, rhinos are a prized poaching target too, for their horns.

The Terminator isn't arriving anytime soon, but concern is growing that artificial intelligence is already so pervasive in society--and getting more so all the time--that there needs to be more focus on how it's being used and potentially misused (even if by accident). Aside from futuristic killer robots, there are already real dangers ranging from faulty autonomous cars to algorithms used in hiring or recruiting that have an inadvertent bias against women or ethnic groups. The giants of artificial intelligence, especially as it affects consumers and businesses, have just joined together to form a nonprofit called the Partnership on AI, with founding members Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. It's the latest effort to keep a collective eye on how AI is developed and used.OpenAI, founded in December 2015, has a similar goal of conducing research and conferences to promote responsible use of AI. "This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century," reads part of a statement from IBM's AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi. The Partnership on AI announcementlays out an ambitious agenda for research to be conducted or funded by members, in partnership with academics, user group advocates, and industry experts.