"An Introduction to Statistical Learning (ISL)" by James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani is the "how to'' manual for statistical learning. Inspired by "The Elements of Statistical Learning'' (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman), this book provides clear and intuitive guidance on how to implement cutting edge statistical and machine learning methods. ISL makes modern methods accessible to a wide audience without requiring a background in Statistics or Computer Science. The authors give precise, practical explanations of what methods are available, and when to use them, including explicit R code. Anyone who wants to intelligently analyze complex data should own this book.

Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about. In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the most valuable resources - a small list of top resources and starting points. This will be most valuable to any data practitioner who has very little free time.

Something strange happened in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) on Wednesday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook profile that his company has created an AI system that is "getting close" to beating the best humans at Chinese board game Go. Hours later, DeepMind -- a startup based in London that was bought by Google for 400 million in 2014 -- said it had already developed an AI named AlphaGo that had just beaten the best Go player in Europe. DeepMind's breakthrough was splashed across the front cover of science journal Nature yesterday evening and covered by over 200 media titles. "This is the first time that a computer Go program has defeated a human professional player, without handicap, in the full game of Go - a feat that was previously believed to be at least a decade away," explained the DeepMind research paper -- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search.

Now there's a better way to cheat at crossword puzzles--with artificial intelligence. Researchers from three universities designed a system that uses a type of AI known as deep learning to help computers understand language more quickly and effectively. As a bonus, the researchers built a web-based tool that's handy when a particularly baffling crossword clue comes around. The crossword assistant is just a demo of how deep learning is improving machines' ability to understand language, said Felix Hill, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and lead author of a paper describing the research. Learning language is challenging for computers because it's difficult to recreate the rich and diverse information sources available to humans when they learn to speak and read, he said. Researchers focused on helping computers understand phrases.

KOMO Portions are Associated Press. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or distributed. KOMO 4 TV provides news, sports, weather and local event coverage in the Seattle, Washington area including Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, Kent, Tacoma, Bremerton, SeaTac, Auburn, Mercer Island, Bothell, Shoreline, lynnwood, Mill Creek and Everett.

The manufacturing hub for the electronics industry, Kunshan, in Jiangsu province, is seeking a drastic reduction in labour costs as it undergoes a makeover after an industrial explosion killed 146 people in 2014. The county, one-seventh the size of neighbouring Shanghai and the mainland's first county to achieve US 4,000 per capita income, was adjudged the best county for its economic performance by Forbes for seven years in a row. However, the blaze, blamed on poor safety standards and haphazard industrialisation, dented Kunshan's pride. More than a year on, the county, which attracts much of its investment from Taiwan, is trying to reinvent its growth strategy. It is accelerating growth by replacing humans with robots and encouraging start-ups.

Deemed by many as the ultimate technology for a smart IoT world, artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited in software that allows machines, devices, services and other'things' to learn and behave like a human. The difference from other systems that do the same is the fact that the AI software can do this without any coding done by a person or any other manual input. AI's main goal is to find solutions to problems. This is done through reasoning, planning, natural language processing, perception, and others. AI itself splits into several different branches.

Technology has been fundamentally reshaping every aspect of our life. From the onset of 21st-century, technology has not left a single prospect of our life untouched. From industries to medical technology, applied science has picked pace towards an era of automation. The next big step in mankind is the evolution of "Internet of Things". Internet of things is built on the intelligence of multiple sensors and connected devices that collect data and make crucial decisions.

The card payments industry is in an ongoing and eternal battle with fraudsters. As financial institutions take steps to close off one avenue to the swindlers, new techniques to cheat the system are uncovered – and so the game of cat-and-mouse goes on. The fraudsters get smarter and arm themselves with increasingly advanced tools while the banks play endless catch-up. In the digital age, computer processing power cuts both ways: it assists banks in their analysis and detection of fraud, but it also opens up new avenues to cheat and steal. The big difference between the warring parties is that the fraudsters move and evolve in real time, whereas fraud mitigation and prevention is typically response-driven.