Add Google to the list of companies with big fall announcements. The Android-maker and search engine giant announced late Monday that it will be holding an event on October 4 in San Francisco. In invitations sent out to media, the company was fairly vague as to what it would be showing off, though it was a bit more revealing in teaser on the company's website, madeby.google.com, Google has long used fall events to showcase its latest versions of Android, often introducing new variants to its Nexus line of phones and tablets. This year, the company is expected to follow a similar path, with new devices built by HTC said to be on the way.

The U.S. Department of Transportation released long-awaited guidelines Tuesday for the testing and deployment of self-driving vehicles, giving manufacturers and researchers some clarity for the future, but providing only a vague sense of the federal government's exact responsibilities. At a Tuesday morning news conference, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx described the 116-page policy document as "the most comprehensive national automated vehicle policy that the world has ever seen." However, he added that the policy is a "living document" and leaves room for "more growth and changes in the future." "One of reasons we take great pains not to be so prescriptive" is because the technology is "dynamic" and changing fast, he said, so the government needs to be "flexible." In the document, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration emphasized that it did not intend to write the "final word on highly automated vehicles" with these guidelines.

With driverless cars on the horizon, the government is adding its two cents on the matter. On Tuesday, the U.S. Transportation Department (DOT) released a four-part policy outlining safety measures to ensure all vehicles are ready to be on the road. The four sections of the policy--created in consultation with experts in the field, state governments, safety advocates and more--include a 15 point safety assessment, a Model State policy, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) current regulatory tools and modern regulatory tools. According to the DOT, the goal of the policy is to provide car makers with a framework. "Automated vehicles have the potential to save thousands of lives, driving the single biggest leap in road safety that our country has ever taken," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in a statement.

A typical GoPro camera launch is much how you'd imagine it to be: Extreme sport athletes perform for the press at a beautiful outdoorsy location. But where I am today is not a typical GoPro launch. That won't happen for a few weeks yet, when CEO and Founder Nick Woodman will present the company's much-anticipated Karma drone to the world. Karma's reveal will be the climax to one of GoPro's most scrutinized business moves yet. After multiple delays and much investor speculation, it's important that GoPro get this one right.

This is almost like part two of my macOS Sierra review. I had a chance to test Apple's newest desktop operating system at the beginning of the summer, just before it was released in a public beta. The software hasn't changed much since, but a few of the headline features were missing from that earlier build; Apple said they wouldn't be available until the final version shipped in the fall. As it happens, Sierra arrives today as a free upgrade, so I'm picking up right where I left off. What follows is my full review of Sierra, though if you read my earlier preview, or have been using the software yourself, you won't find many big surprises here.

Emotions can be detected remotely using a device that emits wireless signals to help it measure heartbeat and breathing, say researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The new device, named "EQ-Radio," is 87 percent accurate at detecting whether a person is excited, happy, angry or sad--all without on-body sensors or facial-recognition software. "We picture EQ-Radio being used in entertainment, consumer behavior, and healthcare," says the study's lead researcher, Mingmin Zhao. "For example," says Zhao, a graduate student, "smart homes could use information about your emotions to adjust the music or even suggest that you get some fresh air if you've been sad for a few days." Zhao adds that remote emotion monitoring could eventually be used to diagnose or track conditions like depression and anxiety."

O'Neil is the author of the blog mathbabe.org. She was the former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tow Center and was employed as Data Science Consultant at Johnson Research Labs. O'Neil earned a mathematics Ph.D. from Harvard University. Topics discussed include her book "Weapons of Math Destruction," predictive policing models, the teacher value added model, approaches to auditing algorithms and whether government regulation of the field is needed. You can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via our RSS feed, and they are available via SoundCloud and iTunes.

SAS says its new visual data mining and machine learning software, available later this month, will "feed this need for smarter analytics". The company was speaking about its new solution at its Analytics Experience conference in Las Vegas attended by more than 10,000, on-site and online, to discuss business issues. "SAS Data Mining and Machine Learning is built on the company's solid expertise and reputation of delivering scalable and adaptable analytics that solve real business problems and yield measurable business value," said Jonathan Wexler, SAS analytics product manager. "This software helps provide positive outcomes to increase profitability, better understand customer behaviour and decrease the cost of doing business." Wexler said advanced analytics offer insight to businesses, but "machine learning and deep learning algorithms take it deeper, insights that were previously out of reach".

Calls for Proposals with a blind reviewing process are more common to academic conferences than industry ones, but there are several important web conferences such as RailsConf that use the same kind of process (we actually use their open source system -- see our previous article). The idea is that proposals are reviewed by members of the program committee who do not know who the authors are, nor which organizations they're from (hence "blind reviewing"). This year we had 2 program chairs who succeeded to Francisco Martin (our '14 and '15 program chair) and who were in charge of turning reviews into decisions of acceptance/rejection: Keiran Thompson and Florian Douetteau. Those decisions are based on average ratings and on "Strong Accepts" given by reviewers. I invited Florian and Keiran to be program co-chairs after consulting with the PAPIs advisory board, and this was before Dataiku became a sponsor of the '16 edition -- it goes without saying that invitations to the committee are unconditional to sponsorship of any kind.

Wondering what we these numbers are? These stats depict the active users, of the above mentioned social media platforms, globally. This basically means that almost everyone is active on some or the other social media platform at a given point of time. Social Media is giving voice to the general mass. People discuss issues, debate, opine and review.