Paul Taylor, former head of the text-to-speech group at Google and a serial entrepreneur specialising in speech, language and artificial intelligence has announced the launch of a startup which builds blockchain-based operating systems for banks and financial institutions. The startup, called ThooughtMachine led by CEO Paul Taylor, is launching its first blockchain-based operating system called Vault OS, which allows banks to run their core functions in the cloud. The core concept of Vault OS is to utilize smart contracts on a centralized and permissioned cryptographic ledger to settle all bank transactions, products, and settlements including payments, deposit accounts, savings, mortgages, loans, and credit card accounts. By relying on a scalable cloud platform, financial institutions will be able to rely on faster and more secure end to end banking systems to manage most of their operations online. Taylor believes that the Vault OS will replace outdated financial and banking systems that are still in use by the world's major banking groups.

I thought I'd write up an explanation of how Latent Semantic Indexing works since I used it in my most recent project PUBmatch.co PUBmatch.co is a tool I thought of while I was at Metis Data Science Bootcamp. You can see my slides from my presentation here. This post has a companion python notebook if you'd like to follow along here: Latent Semantic Indexing Notebook Latent Semantic Indexing appealed to me because it involves the use of Singular Value Decomposition. Singular Value Decomposition is at the heart of signal processing.

In one month from now, the second edition of the Data Science Game, an international competition of data science for students, will start (more info here). Students in last year of Masters or PhDs from all around the world will be challenged through an online competion (June 17 to July 10) and a final hackathon (september 10-11). The first 20 teams of the online phase will come to Paris to demonstrate their skills and abilities to solve a data science challenge and meet professional data scientists coming from leading companies in Data Science (Microsoft, CapGemini, Axa Data Innovation Lab, etc.). We think our participants would love to learn from your data challenge experience since you were the former top ranked kaggler. But first of all, can you quickly introduce yourself?

The recent Hadoop Summit had an amazing number of great talks, and fortunately for everyone, those are now available on YouTube! Dozens of hours of amazing content for learning every Big Data topic you can imagine from HDFS to Hive to HBase to Calcite to Spark to NiFi and beyond. The first ten videos are must watch and the rest are highly recommended. It is very hard to rate these as they are all great. Pick your topic from Machine Learning to Deep Learning to Streaming to Ingest to Security to Performance to Optimization to Programming and more.

Today Alphabet-owned Nest is launching its latest product with the debut of the previously rumored Nest Cam Outdoor, as well as a redesigned app and new features. The most notable enhancement over the original, indoor-only version of Nest Cam is necessary weatherproofing for outdoor use. With a brand new, completely weatherproof industrial design created for permanent outdoor use, Nest Cam Outdoor extends security outside the home… The weatherproof design of Nest Cam Outdoor meets the demands of a broad range of temperatures and conditions faced by outdoor cameras. There's a 1080P HD camera that gives you a 130 view and night vision via 8 built-in infrared LEDs, and a built-in speaker and microphone for talking to those outside your home. The camera has a magnetic base that Nest says is for ultimate adjustability for viewing angles, but it also means someone can technically remove the camera from the base screwed into your wall.

The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests. The test currently can't determine if a person is talking to another human being or a robot if the person being interrogated simply chooses to stay silent, new research shows. While it's not news that the Turing test has flaws, the new study highlights just how limited the test is for answering deeper questions about artificial intelligence, said study co-author Kevin Warwick, a computer scientist at Coventry University in England. "As machines are getting more and more intelligent, whether they're actually thinking and whether we need to give them responsibilities are starting to become very serious questions," Warwick told Live Science. "Obviously, the Turing test is not the one which can tease them out." The now-famous Turing test was first described by British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to address questions of when and how to determine if machines are sentient.

We entered the VentureBeat Botathon contest in SF, and after lots of weekend hacking, we won! Our entry is Botender, a bot that helps you order at a restaurant, log what you order to Fitbit for your diet tracking and even pay for your food and drinks. Now Omar Sharif and I are one of 6 international finalists for the Botathon competition, selected from regional hackathons and an online contest. Tomorrow the final choice is made, during the VentureBeat MobileBeat event. Pingpad has Pingbot, a Slack bot that gets smarter every day in it's quest to help teams capture shared knowledge and act on it.

Early this year AI system AlphaGo cracked the ancient Chinese game Go, one of the most complex that ever existed. If there is one thing that fuels the speed of AI development, it's data. In 2011, Benjamin Grosser launched his Interactive Robotic Painting Machine, which paints abstract pictures with oil on canvas and responds to the sounds in its environment. That way Google's AI will be able to learn how creative people work, making itself more creative in the process.

Recently an AI-written novel made it past the first screening round of a Japanese national literary prize. True, the AI still had help from humans and no, it did not win the prize in the end. But what's groundbreaking here, is that AI is starting to display forms of creativity that have the potential to change the face of humankind. Many of us believe that creativity is one of the last beacons of humanity. It's what we believe distances us from animals and robots.

Learning needs to be less like memorization, and more like…Angry Birds. Half of school dropouts name boredom as the number one reason they left. The post is about why the future of education will be about flipping our current model on its head and about how key exponential technologies like AI, VR and gamification are going to drive a revolution in education. In the traditional education system, you start at an "A," and every time you get something wrong, your score gets lower and lower. You start with zero, and every time you come up with something right, your score gets higher and higher. It completely flips the way we currently learn, and it's addictively fun.