Advances in Machine Learning and Data Mining for Astronomy documents numerous successful collaborations among computer scientists, statisticians, and astronomers who illustrate the application of state-of-the-art machine learning and data mining techniques in astronomy. Due to the massive amount and complexity of data in most scientific disciplines, the material discussed in this text transcends traditional boundaries between various areas in the sciences and computer science. The book's introductory part provides context to issues in the astronomical sciences that are also important to health, social, and physical sciences, particularly probabilistic and statistical aspects of classification and cluster analysis. The next part describes a number of astrophysics case studies that leverage a range of machine learning and data mining technologies. In the last part, developers of algorithms and practitioners of machine learning and data mining show how these tools and techniques are used in astronomical applications.

Yahoo today announced its latest open-source release: a model that can figure out if images are specifically pornographic in nature. The system uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like dirty images) and getting them to make inferences about new data. The model that's now available on GitHub under a BSD 2-Clause license comes pre-trained, so users only have to fine-tune it if they so choose. The model works with the widely used Caffe open source deep learning framework. The team trained the model using its now open source CaffeOnSpark system.

Bots will become the next version of mobile apps, creating the emotional connection between brands and consumers through artificial intelligence (AI) and search, according to Ryan Gavin, GM at Microsoft for search, cloud and content. During Advertising Week, Gavin told Search Marketing Daily that bots will replace mobile applications. The conversations on bots will occur more often and will become the new app for brands; and natural language will become the use interface, he said. Microsoft this week announced a new group that will help accelerate the use of AI. About 500 computer scientists and engineers will support the team and will include Microsoft Research along with the company's Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana -- natural language processing -- product groups, along with its Ambient Computing and Robotics teams.

Microsoft is working to infuse all of its products with artificial intelligence capabilities to bring more smarts to its applications and technologies portfolio.

Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.35 % took advantage of the departure of an influential executive to reorganize efforts around artificial intelligence, one of its strategic priorities. The company announced Thursday that it is concentrating its artificial-intelligence operation in one group. The move comes as Qi Lu, a highly regarded executive in charge of the Office products and Bing search-engine businesses, recovers from a bicycle injury sustained a few months ago. His recovery has been slow, a person familiar with the matter said. Harry Shum, who led the company's research efforts, now will lead artificial intelligence efforts as well, Microsoft said.

Popular literature is replete with scary renditions of Artificial Intelligence. Numerous articles, stories, and novels depict an Eeeeeeeevil AI taking over the world to the detriment of humanity. . From my perspective it appears that all of HollyWeird and most of the legacy publishers to include the Hugo wanna-bes have bought into this meme. The world is doomed if we let the evil machine overlords take over. . I suggest that we have been in a war with a form of artificial intelligence since shortly after the Agricultural Revolution. .

No one would accuse Google Translate, the favored tool of unscholarly high school language students everywhere, of being an inaccurate interpreter. The 10-year-old internet interpreter can fluently translate more than 100 tongues, recognize foreign restaurant menus and signage, and differentiate between dialects in real time. The project is called Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT, and it isn't strictly speaking new. It was first employed to improve the efficiency of single-sentence translations, explained Google engineers Quoc V. Le and Mike Schuster, and did so ingesting individual words and phrases before spitting out a translation. But the team discovered that the algorithm was just as effective at handling entire sentences -- even reducing errors by as much as 60 percent.

H2O.ai, a startup that offers commercial support for open-source machine learning software, last week laid off 10 percent of its employees, mainly in sales, VentureBeat has learned. Cofounder and chief executive Sri Ambati confirmed the move -- which affects nine people, including contractors, out of a total of roughly 90 -- in an interview with VentureBeat. Ambati put the layoffs in the context of broad strategic changes at H20. The startup has stopped trying to generate revenue from lots of users of its free open-source software and is instead seeking to work very closely with a few major customers. Then, next year, Ambati said, H20 can introduce new cloud services that can be promoted through more conventional sales and marketing tactics.

Spansion adds a pair of HyperBus capable microcontrollers to their collection. The two new FM4 systems are based on the ARM Cortex-M4. One includes a 2D graphics engine with on-board VRAM while the other includes voice recognition software and hardware support. The graphics family includes support for Spansion's HyperBus, a fast, off-chip memory access system (see "How HyperBus Delivers 330 Mbyte/s Using A Dozen Signals"). Both families support QSPI and SPI memories and peripherals.

For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now, five of the world's largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of AI to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of AI on jobs, transportation and even warfare. Tech companies have for long promised what artificially intelligent machines can do.