This report on evaluating machine learning models arose out of a sense of need. The content was first published as a series of six technical posts on the Dato Machine Learning Blog. I was the editor of the blog, and I needed something to publish for the next day. Dato builds machine learning tools that help users build intelligent data products. In our conversations with the community, we sometimes ran into a confusion in terminology.

Let's say you're trying to pinpoint when a particular past event occurred, but your best possible estimate puts it only within a span of 10,000 years. Now imagine if something could shrink that window of "when" to just 30 years. That's the power of a new mathematical tool devised and tested by an international team of scientists, led by two from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The tool, a machine-learning algorithm honed by Abbas Ourmazd and Russell Fung, reduces timing uncertainties during changing events, improving accuracy by a factor of up to 300. It could have numerous applications, from dating past climate-change events with better precision to determining when molecular bonds form or break during chemical reactions lasting only a few quadrillionths of a second.

David Eagleman is one of those rare writers who's as likable in person as he is in his books. His 20-year career as a neuroscientist has been unusual; my personal introduction to his work was his 2010 book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, which combined the bite-sized brilliance of Calvino's Invisible Cities with the wry pathos of Borges. Eagleman was recently the writer and presenter of The Brain, a six-part PBS television series that beautifully illuminates "the most complex object we've discovered in the universe." Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Along with Sum, his books include The Brain: The Story of You (2015) and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2012).

The latest animated video from The School of Life gently postulates that the technology of the future will be able to read moods, detect emotional states and help humans communicate the nebulous world of feelings through the ever-advancing strides being made in artificial intelligence. One such emotional technology tool could be the yet-to-be-invented Socrates Mood Reader. Named after the world's greatest early philosopher Socrates who famously said that the first philosophical priority is to know yourself. Socrates will be a piece of wearable emotional technology that will make up for a failures of self-knowledge in real time. We imagine it as a kind of wearable life coach with the total understanding of our mental health, who we are and what we need to thrive emotionally at key moments.

Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have created a way to realistically colorize black-and-white photos without any human intervention for the first time ever. The team's approach is based on convolutional neural networks -- a type of machine learning originally inspired by the visual cortex of a cat. The researchers used artificial intelligence to classify a full image and then identify parts of that image to label its components before filling them in with the appropriate colors. Previous research efforts in automated colorization fell short of being totally automatic. Most required users to provide a reference image that was similar to the black-and-white image in order to colorize it properly.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup.

"The robots are coming for your jobs!" That was the gist of numerous news reports following the release of the 2016 U.S. Economic Report of the President. My first thought on reading this was that anyone who saw the videos of clumsy robots falling helplessly during the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge must have been incredulous: "That's what's coming after my job!?" My second thought was more sobering. Robots are, after all, only a subset of the computerization leading to the automation of traditional jobs. As engineers we can see steady progress in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data.

Because you can play Minecraft pretty much anywhere, it only makes sense the world-building game would make an appearance in virtual reality. VR company Oculus revealed Wednesday a version of Minecraft is now available for Samsung's Gear VR. According to Oculus, the VR version of Minecraft will support many of the features of the Pocket Edition, available on mobile devices, including creative and survival modes as well as multiplayer. Users have two ways to play: A default theater view where you essentially play as you would on a mobile or home console device; or in first-person, where you can "stand beside your creations." The VR edition will require a separate controller.

Can't reach your smartphone to adjust the lighting in your home theater? Eyesight announced at the Samsung Developers Conference Wednesday that it will embed its computer-vision and deep-learning technology into Samsung's Artik 10 Internet of Things module. The companies say this will enable manufacturers to embed gesture-recognition capabilities directly into products such as smart light bulbs. It will also eliminate the need to grab your smartphone to control a device, and it will significantly reduce response time because the processing power will be on the device itself instead of a server in the cloud. Eyesight said it would demonstrate its technology at the conference by using subtle finger movements to control a set of Phillips Hue LED light bulbs.

YouTube promises to be dramatically smarter and easier to navigate with the latest mobile app update. The Android and iOS versions of the app feature larger images and a simplified interface make the video preview pop out more. The bigger change is behind the scenes, in the recommendation engine. Google says it's tapping into deep neural networks, which enables computers to learn from the information they gather over time. In practice you may see video suggestions that better match what you may want to see based on your viewing history.