Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin typically write a public letter every year to reflect on the company's accomplishments and goals. This year, however, Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai penned the annual note for the first time. Pichai was made CEO of Google after a recent reorganization made the company a subsidiary of umbrella organization Alphabet. Pichai's note delves into Google's accomplishments around search, YouTube, artificial intelligence, and more. He writes that Google will continue to push heavily into the development of artificial intelligence as a means of improving and advancing its most important products.

The Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification recruitment competition ran on Kaggle from December 2015 to April 2016. Dmitrii Tsybulevskii took the cake by finishing in 1st place with his winning solution. In this blog, Dmitrii dishes the details of his approach including how he tackled the multi-label and multi-instance aspects of this problem which made this competition a unique challenge. I hold a degree in Applied Mathematics, and I'm currently working as a software engineer on computer vision, information retrieval and machine learning projects. Yes, since I work as a computer vision engineer, I have image classification experience, deep learning knowledge, and so on.

In this episode of the O'Reilly Podcast, O'Reilly's Ben Lorica sat down with Eliot Knudsen, Field Architect at Tamr. Lorica and Knudsen discuss the role of prescriptive analytics in driving business change, using feedback to train machine learning algorithms, coalescing various sources of business data, and the importance of explaining your algorithms in order to relay their value. The idea behind prescriptive analytics is that you're combining forecasting ability with a specific process or change that folks want to drive in their business--whether it's how they onboard their customers, whether it's how they negotiate with their suppliers, whether it's how they move different products or materials through their supply chain. Feedback is one of these fascinating things, where ultimately there are different ways that these systems are tuning and learning. You're growing, and based upon data and other heuristics, you're changing how your algorithms predict and fit themselves to these points.

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In his 2013 paper, Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics, Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, noted "computers are in the middle of most economic transactions" – to the point that the global economy can no longer function without them. In recent years, computers have moved beyond simple tools to facilitate the movement of money and are now taking a lead role in initiating and managing millions of transactions per day. Process virtualization, driven by Big Data, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has accelerated to the point that computers will dramatically alter the world we live in. What happens when Big Data meets AI? For starters, the confluence leads to new insights and efficiencies for business and customers; and while some occupations will be eliminated, entirely new fields will be created.

In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith's character Detective Spooner harbors a deep grudge for all things technological -- and turns out to be justified after a new generation of robots engage in a full out, summer blockbuster-style revolt against their human creators. Why was Detective Spooner such a Luddite–even before the Robots' vicious revolt? Much of his resentment stems from a car accident he endured in which a robot saved his life instead of a little girl's. The robot's decision haunts Smith's character throughout the movie; he feels the decision lacked emotion, and what one might call'humanity'. "I was the logical choice," he says. "(The robot) calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival. Sarah only had an 11% chance." He continues, dramatically, "But that was somebody's baby. A human being would've known that."

A bevy of robocar-oriented companies has founded a lobby--a move than provides the single clearest sign that the industry is maturing. The lobby's chief, David Strickland, would like all regulatory decisions to be coordinated by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Strickland sure knows what to do: he's a former administrator of NHTSA--and yet another example of Washington's revolving door. The lobby is called the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, and it includes Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft. It looks as if Google is the prime mover here. Yesterday, at a public hearing that NHTSA held at Stanford University, Google's robocar chief Chris Urmson emphasized the importance of uniform regulations.

Baidu launched a Silicon Valley office to house its Autonomous Driving Unit. The company revealed it aims to hire at least 100 researchers and engineers for the site. On March 15, Baidu's Chief Scientist Andrew Ng revealed that China's leading search engine company is looking into expanding its autonomous car business -- just like Google -- and that it has set its sights on testing its self-driving car in the United States. True to its word, the Chinese company announced on April 22 that it has already formed a self-driving car research, development and testing team, launching its R&D Center in Silicon Valley, very close to Google's office. "Baidu is fully committed to making self-driving cars a reality [...] Baidu's Silicon Valley car team will play a significant role in building the car of the future," Jing Wang said, Baidu's senior vice president and general manager of the Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU).

First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. We've talked a lot about how Person of Interest is one of the best science fiction shows on TV … Read more Read more In any case, the season premiere is brilliant, and I'm now desperate to see the rest of the season. And I think this season we'll see Amy Acker's character, Root, imploring him to not only rebuild it but to take the limiter off, what it's capable of. One of the biggest reasons why a lot of people are desperate to see the final season of Person of Interest is the relationship between super-hacker Root and the badass assassin, Shaw.

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.