Artificial intelligence is taking over the world whether we want it or not, so we can either make it work for us or against us. But how? That's one of the things we talked about with some fellow startuppers last week. It's good to experience the startup community firsthand from time to time. It helps you keep your finger on the pulse much more effectively than just gathering data online or talking to people on Facebook and Twitter. That's exactly why we decided to go to the SaaS Meetup, to see what the perceived trends in the startup world are, and to talk to some founders to find out whether these trends actually mean something.

With the release of Google Allo last week, we've officially entered the era of the assistant. Every company that owns a major tech platform is now betting that assistants will be an important interface in the post-mobile world. You might think assistants today are trivial or stupid, and you wouldn't be wrong. They often don't understand what we say and can't hold real conversations yet. Mostly they're relegated to simple tasks like playing music, sending texts, or setting timers.

Yahoo is the latest tech company to open source its computer vision code. Yahoo hopes that its convolutional neural net (CNN) will empower others to better guard innocent eyes, but admits that because of the tech's very nature (and how the definition of "porn" can vary wildly), that the CNN isn't perfect. "This model is a general purpose reference model, which can be used for the preliminary filtering of pornographic images," a post on the Yahoo Engineering Tumblr says. "We do not provide guarantees of accuracy of output, rather, we make this available for developers to explore and enhance as an open source project." The code is available on Github at the moment, and if you need any testing material, well, there isn't exactly a shortage of it on Tumblr.

Decision trees are used extensively in machine learning because they are easy to use, easy to interpret, and easy to operationalize. KD Nuggets, one of the most respected sites for data science and machine learning, recently published an article that identified decision trees as a "top 10" algorithm for machine learning. If you are new to machine learning, some of these concepts may be unfamiliar. The goal of this blog is to provide you with the basics of decision trees using Talend and Apache Spark. If you want to learn more about advanced analytics, please see the references section below.(2)

The University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer in Philadelphia, is a world-renowned leader in education, research, and innovation. This historic, Ivy League school consistently ranks among the top 10 universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report survey. Penn has 12 highly-regarded schools that provide opportunities for undergraduate, graduate and continuing education, all influenced by Penn's distinctive interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and learning. Penn offers a unique working environment within the city of Philadelphia. The University is situated on a beautiful urban campus, with easy access to a range of educational, cultural, and recreational activities.

Machine Learning is rapidly becoming a required and critical component of engineering organizations across the tech industry. From movie recommendation algorithms to self-driving cars, it is clearly an exciting and compelling field. Companies are hiring armies of Machine Learning researchers to solve difficult problems like voice and object recognition. What does this all mean to the average software engineer? In many cases, extremely specialized knowledge is necessary to outperform existing state-of-the-art systems.

Greg Linden may not be a household name, but he changed the way we interact with culture and transformed retail forever. An engineer at Amazon in the late 1990s, Linden worked on a curious problem: how to recommend books without human intervention. Until then Amazon relied on editors who wrote hundreds of reviews every year. It was a costly and time-consuming process. Automating recommendations proved trickier than anyone expected.

Volvo has decided to join the ranks of automakers with offices in Silicon Valley. The Swedish car company is in the process of opening a research center in Mountain View, Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo's U.S. division, said in an interview. The company is hiring some 70 engineers for the office, he said. Volvo, which is owned by Chinese automaker Geely but operates largely independently, has had an office in Camarillo for about 30 years that focused on car design, Kerssemakers said. Within the past three to four years, engineers based in that office also started to work on car infotainment systems, he said.

Inside – on enhancing humans, Google deploys neural network to translate languages, Yann LeCun talks about the future of AI, giant battle robot has a hard time and more! Here's What the Future of Human Modification Might Look Like In this discussion (47 minutes long), British philosopher David Pearce, Sci-fi author Richard Morgan, and Nicky Ashwell (who is a pioneering user of a new kind of bionic prosthetic) talk about how our technology will impact the future of society and transform what it means to be human. Very interesting, I recommend watch it. After being fitted with implants that read brain signals, monkeys in a Stanford study were able to transcribe segments of Hamlet at a rate of 12 words per minute. The tech could eventually lead to a new means of communication for the severely disabled.