From robotics to virtual reality technologies to 3-D printers, advanced, cutting-edge technology was on display at this year's Educational IT Solutions Expo, which kicked off Wednesday in Tokyo's Koto Ward. The seventh such expo, this year's event featured a special section to showcase "the learning of the future" for the first time. Some 50 companies are using the opportunity to display what they believe the future of education will look like with advancements in new information technologies. The highlight of the expo is programming education, as the education ministry is working to incorporate computer programming into the curriculum of all public elementary schools by 2020. Lego Japan Ltd., which has been involved in programming education for 15 years, showcased the WeDo 2.0 robotics kit for elementary school students.

Queen Elizabeth II donned an ermine-trimmed robe and diamond-studded crown Wednesday to announce government promises to put Britain at the cutting edge of technology and social progress in the 21st century. Plans for prison reform, a sugar tax and commercial spaceports were among 21 bills announced in the Queen's Speech, an annual tradition that mixes lavish pomp and modern politics. Prime Minister David Cameron called it a "progressive, one-nation" program, but some measures are sure to meet resistance -- and next month's referendum on European Union membership is casting a shadow over the government's plans. The annual State Opening of Parliament is steeped in centuries-old symbolism of the power struggle between Parliament and the British monarchy. In a display of regal wealth and finery, the queen traveled from Buckingham Palace in the horse-drawn Diamond Jubilee State Coach, and delivered the speech -- written for her by the government -- wearing the Imperial State Crown, studded with 3,000 diamonds.

THE best manufacturers used to be the firms that made the best widgets. As the "internet of things" spreads to the factory floor, products are being packed with ever more sensors and connected to the internet. That is transforming manufacturing--and the mindset that firms need to succeed. The first shift is from products to services. By one estimate the number of wirelessly connected products in existence (excluding smartphones or computers) will rise from 5 billion today to 21 billion by 2020.

Major corporations use this kind of artificial intelligence to help with the complexities of serving a massive, often international audience -- and now Amazon is making its machine learning software open source. The company's Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine -- otherwise known as DSSTNE and pronounced "destiny" -- is now available to anyone who's interested in tinkering with it. Amazon hopes that outside influences will help make the platform even more powerful than it already is, according to a report from Engadget. "DSSTNE is built for production deployment of real-world deep learning applications, emphasizing speed and scale over experimental flexibility," reads documentation that accompanies the files released by Amazon. Internally, DSSTNE is used to deliver purchase recommendations to consumers based on their order histories. Product recommendations are big business for Amazon, as having such a daunting catalog of merchandise is really rather worthless unless customers are able to discover items that are relevant to their interests.

Attention-based models are firstly proposed in the field of computer vision around mid 20141 (thanks for the remindar from @archychu). And then they spread into Natural Language Processing. In this post, I will mainly focus on a list of attention-based models applied in natural language processing. The first one should be the "guy" innovately and successfully bringing in attention mechanism from computer vision in to NLP. Although called RNNsearch by themselves in this paper, the model is in nature and inspired by the attention-based model as what they said in Section 3.1: Intuitively, this implements a mechanism of attention in the decoder.

Note: The title of this post is circular. But I use/abuse it because of the post linked below. I noticed on the Hacker News front page (and via multiple reshares on twitter), a discussion on why logistic regression uses a sigmoid. The article linked in the story talks about the log-odds ratio, and how it leads to the sigmoid (and gives a good intuitive plug on it). However, I think that the more important question is – Why do you care about log-odds?

Artificial intelligence, popularly known as AI is slowly taking over the industry. More and more companies and brands turn to AI to give their customers better service. According to new reports, eBay is also considering AI to improve product searches on their site. According to Forbes, eBay is very aggressive in fulfilling its goal of making its platform simple and more efficient. Their website is a popular buy and sell platform.

Google I/O Extended 2016 Denver, Colorado is a place where developers and Google fans can experience Google I/O remotely. Check out photos from the 2015 event put on by GDG Denver (Google Developers Group Denver). Google I/O 2016 Extended is made possible by an amazing Denver tech community, including hard working volunteers, smart GDG members, and really wonderful companies that support us ... We have a pretty good idea what is going to happen, but everything is subject to change. Note our new venue does not permit alcohol, so no keg like years past. But the proverbial beer mug is half full, we will have air conditioning, a gorgeous patio and panoramic window views, and sound that will not leave your ears buzzing!

Horse betting is harder than it looks. At the 142nd Kentucky Derby last week, only one of five experts from Churchill Downs Racetrack correctly predicted the winner. None of them correctly predicted the top four horses. Known as a superfecta, this latter bet came with 540 to 1 odds, meaning 100 down would return 540,000. And although the experts failed to predict the finishing order, an anonymous group of internet users did.

Cogitai, a new company aimed at developing and commercializing core artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, today announced a strategic investment from Sony Corporation. Tokyo: Japan's Sony Corp said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence (AI) business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a US startup. TOKYO (Reuters) -- Japan's Sony said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence (AI) business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a U.S. startup. Japan's Sony Corp said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence (AI) business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a U.S. start-up.