Geosocial apps are having a bit of a moment. Tinder, Bumble, and a host of other services have emerged in recent years, promising to foster connections with real people, nearby. But online dating paved the way for these apps -- and even supposedly platonic services like Bumble BFF have struggled to shrug off the romantic connotation. So where does that leave people who aren't looking for love, but do want to use new technology to make friends? That question -- or "shower thought," as he puts it -- motivated Antoine Daher to create Patook, an app that connects people based on common interests.

In this talk, I will introduce the audience to the emerging area of computational social science, focusing on how machine learning for social science differs from machine learning in other contexts. I will present two related models -- both based on Bayesian Poisson tensor decomposition -- for uncovering latent structure from count data. The first is for uncovering topics in previously classified government documents, while the second is for uncovering multilateral relations from country-to-country interaction data. Finally, I will talk briefly about the broader ethical implications of analyzing social data. Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Today, Pål Sundsøy at Telenor Group Research in Fornebu, Norway, says he's worked out how to determine literacy rates using mobile phone call records. He starts with a standard household survey of 76,000 mobile phone users living in an unidentified developing country in Asia. Sundsøy then matches this data set with call data records from the mobile phone company. "By deriving economic, social, and mobility features for each mobile user we predict individual illiteracy status with 70 percent accuracy," he says, pointing out that this allows areas with low literacy rates to be mapped.

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

Gowild Intelligent Technology held the press conference, entitled "When it comes to AI, we are different", for the launch of its new product in Beijing, China on July 8. The event received widespread attention from thousands of people in academia as well as in the technology, gaming, media and entertainment sectors across China and around the world. Gowild released its first generation AI-based 3D holographic product, holoera, that integrates the latest AI engine and VR technology. Transforming the artificial intelligence sector, holoera is the survival carrier on earth of the two dimensional beauty Amber. Amber not only comes equipped with training programs for daily living and learning, but can also receive instructions from its exclusive master, and be instructed based a customized training program. Furthermore, with her superior artificial intelligence, she can engage in barrier-free interaction with humans.

That's what Microsoft's Project Malmo, formerly known as DNA Storage Project, is doing right now. Publicly unveiled today on the official Mojang blog, Project Malmo has just made its open source tools available to everyone today in an effort to help others help strengthen AI in various ways. Mojang notes that Minecraft is the perfect way to educate AI when it comes to offering solutions to problems, sharpening spatial and temporal reasoning, and even collaboration. Project Malmo can offer diverse opportunities at teaching artificial intelligence software and act as a research tool that can test these theories as well. If you're interested in seeing what Project Malmo has to offer in addition to testing it out for yourself, you can download the mod for the PC/Mac edition of Minecraft here.

The exponential rise of machine learning is as much a result of technological advancement as it is the active community growing around it. This includes researchers working on core algorithms, as well as practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of how machine learning can be applied. It also includes an increasing number of machine learning enthusiasts with atypical backgrounds who are joining the conversation, bringing in diverse experiences and points of view. The increasingly symbiotic relationship between companies that need machine learning expertise, and data science competition platforms like Kaggle, has greatly impacted how rapid advancement is being achieved. This relationship has also changed the hiring landscape.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella terminology of various technologies, statistical models, algorithms, and approaches aiming to emulate human like intelligence with machines or software. It learns from environment and take action accordingly. Widely popular AI technologies include Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Image Recognition, Voice Recognition, Artificial Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing, and many more. Machine Learning (ML) is sub-field of computer science and a special type of AI technology that involves in the development of self-learning algorithms to solve problem intelligently. All ML is AI but all AI is not ML, for example, symbolic logic, Baysian statistics, evolutionary algorithm etc. are AI but not machine learning (ML).

Take 7 Seconds to Support the OdinText Mission: Help Make Data Science Accessible! I'm excited to announce that OdinText will participate in the IIEX2016 Insight Innovation Competition! The competition celebrates innovation in market research and provides a platform for young companies and startups to showcase truly novel products and services with the potential to transform the consumer insights field. Marketing and research are becoming increasingly complex, and the skills needed to thrive in this environment have changed. To that end, OdinText was designed to make advanced data analytics and data science accessible to marketers and researchers.