One of the most fascinating developments in computer user interfaces in recent years is the rise of "bots". Some people hail it as the "new command line", but it is much more than that. It is an Artificial Intelligence "robot" in messaging applications. You can message it as if it is a human user, and ask it to do things for you or have a conversation with you. With the rising popularity of messaging apps, users are increasingly interested in this mode of communication -- some see this as the next step of the continuous user interface evolution from text command line to GUI to web apps to mobile apps and then to "bots". There are already many innovative uses of bots, and people are coming up with new ways every day!

The DGX-1 is a 129,000, desktop-sized box with eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, 7TB of SSD storage and two Xeon processors. That nets 170 teraflops of performance, equivalent to around 250 servers. Moreover, the parallel architecture is ideal for OpenAI's deep learning algorithms. NVIDIA said it cost around 2 billion to develop. OpenAI, founded to ensure that machines don't destroy us, will use the DGX-1's extra power to read the nearly 2 billion Reddit comments in months, rather than years.

More than a century after introducing the Model T, Ford hopes to once again change how the masses move. The company announced this morning that it will have thousands of fully autonomous vehicles in urban car-sharing and ride-hailing fleets by 2021. To achieve that goal, the company will double, to 300, the number of people at its Silicon Valley research center and add 60 autonomous vehicles to the fleet of 30 already deployed there. Google, Nissan, and Mercedes-Benz see autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020, and Chinese tech giant Baidu says it will have the technology in 2019. But none of them has made promises as specific as those Fields made today.

For the first time ever, Ireland will have a field hockey team participating in the Summer Olympics. To make sure its athletes are performing at the highest level, the national team is getting some help from an Ireland-based startup that develops biometric measurement technology to identify players at risk for injury. Kitman Labs, based in Dublin with offices in Silicon Valley, is working with both the Irish national field hockey team and the South African rugby team as they compete in this month's Summer Olympics. The company's "Athlete Optimization System" analyzes athlete data collected from multiple systems including wearable trackers that show workload information and other data related to sleep, hydration, diet, mood, stress, and perceived muscle soreness. Coaches can look at the analytics to help drive decision-making related to the amount of training an athlete should be doing.

During the last two years, Microsoft has upped the ante on Machine Learning and Analytics. From hiring top notch data scientists to acquiring niche startups, Redmond has made the all the right moves to transform Azure into one of the best analytics platforms. These investments have started to pay off for the company. It has been successful in articulating and demonstrating the value of data-driven insights to governments, medical institutions, and public sector organizations. Emerging markets that are turning technology savvy are becoming the hotbed for evaluating the upcoming trends such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

From May to July 2016, over one thousand Kagglers competed in Facebook's fifth recruitment competition: Predicting Check-Ins. In this challenge, Kagglers were required to predict the most probable check-in locations occurring in artificial time and space. As the first place winner, Tom Van de Wiele, notes in this winner's interview, the uniquely designed test dataset contained about one trillion place-observation combinations, posing a huge difficulty to competitors. Tom describes how he quickly rocketed from his first getting started competition on Kaggle to first place in Facebook V through his remarkable insight into data consisting only of x,y coordinates, time, and accuracy using k-nearest neighbors and XGBoost. I have completed two Master programs at two different Belgian universities (Leuven and Ghent), one in Computer Science (2010) and one in Statistics (2016).

In this example we are going to look at a classification analysis of eye movement patterns. Although complex preprocessing steps can be performed to extract higher-order features from the raw coordinate timeseries provided by an eye-tracker, we are keeping it simple. It contains coordinate timeseries of 144 trials (recorded with 350 Hz), where subjects either looked at upright or inverted images of human faces. Each timeseries snippet covers 3 seconds. This data has been pre-processed to remove eyeblink artefacts.

The technologies on Gartner Inc.'s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2016 reveal three distinct technology trends that are poised to be of the highest priority for organizations facing rapidly accelerating digital business innovation. Transparently immersive experiences, the perceptual smart machine age, and the platform revolution are the three overarching technology trends that profoundly create new experiences with unrivaled intelligence and offer platforms that allow organizations to connect with new business ecosystems. The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Gartner Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that business strategists, chief innovation officers, R&D leaders, entrepreneurs, global market developers and emerging-technology teams should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios. "The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among most Hype Cycles because it distills insights from more than 2,000 technologies into a succinct set of must-know emerging technologies and trends that will have the single greatest impact on an organization's strategic planning," said Mike J. Walker, research director at Gartner. "This Hype Cycle specifically focuses on the set of technologies that is showing promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years."

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)