When Zinedine Zidane, the then French captain, headbutted Italy's Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final, the clash quickly became one of the most infamous incidents in football history. What was not clear was what sparked the Frenchman's ire – Zidane said his mother had been insulted, a charge that Materazzi vigorously denied. The head-butt got Zidane sent off and Italy won the game. However, had there been technology there to identify what was said, the result could have been very different, Dr Helen Bear believes. "If a machine lip-reader was in existence, the other player [could] have got sent off too so it would have been 10 men against each other in a World Cup final," she argues.

Learning better together the background of various Machine Learning topics, their applications, the problems faced in diversified industry use-cases and the work-arounds. Usually, one topic is designated at a time, it may follow a book such as the classical Elements of Statistical Learning book written by the 2 famous Stanford professors Hastie & Tibshirani. Anyone can be up for presenting in the session as long as he/she is prepared and ready, maximum 2 speakers each session, at the end, Q&A as well as panel discussions and everybody votes for the best presenter and chips in 2 bucks to be an assembled prize for the winner. We will pick the majority vote on the interested topics for the following meet-up and pick the people from the 2nd question that can speak on it.

Microsoft today announced that it is making it easier for developers to use its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) to build their own deep learning applications. The company first open sourced this toolkit in April 2015, but at the time, it was hosted on Microsoft's own CodePlex site and was only available under a restrictive academic license. Now, the team is moving the project to GitHub and to the MIT open source license. While Microsoft's old license made the project accessible to academics, it wasn't really geared toward production usage and tinkering outside of the academic environment. With this new license -- and by having the project on GitHub -- Microsoft hopes to attract other users as well.

The DeepFund Agent will make trading decisions directly from raw market data using Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning and Unsupervised Learning. The Agent was ordered to maximize the value of our bank account... The DeepFund Agent learns to trade from its experience and improves itself to a superhuman level.

Singapore: Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a US-based information technology (IT) firm with most of its employees working out of India, expects its business growth in the Asia-Pacific region to outpace the company average this year, maintaining the trend seen in recent years, Jayajyoti Sengupta, vice-president and Asia-Pacific head, said in an interview. Automation, which includes robots, machine learning and artificial intelligence, will be among the new frontiers for Cognizant, as rote and repetitive processes become "digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent", he said. Cognizant has said it expects its revenue growth to slow to between 10% and 14.3% for the calendar year 2016. How do you see the situation in the Asia-Pacific? It would be pertinent to note that Cognizant's growth of 21% in calendar 2015 included revenues from the acquisition of TriZetto.

Artificial intelligence might be coming to asset management faster than you think. Also this week, we discuss marketplace lending, AirBnb as a "credit bureau," an electricity trade via the blockchain and one start-up's approach to selling data to Wall Street. "Eventually the time will come that no human investment manager will be able to beat the computer." These words were uttered last year by David Siegel, co-head of Two Sigma Investments, the 30 billion quant fund that returned 15% in its two flagship vehicles last year. This week, we were reminded of Siegel's prediction upon meeting with a technologist who was still mesmerized by AlphaGo, Google's artificial intelligence Go program that handily defeated Go master, Lee Sedol, last month.

"We (human beings) began as animals, gradually transformed ourselves into the gods of the planet earth, and very soon we may pass this mastery to a complete different lifeform, artificial intelligence (AI) and even disappear completely," said Yuval Harari, author of an international bestseller, in Beijing on April 23. The Israeli historian began this argument while citing the historic five-game match between World Go Champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, Google's computer program, which brought worldwide attention to the power of artificial intelligence. He forecasted that we may witness AI's emergence and domination in the decades to come. "It (AlphaGo) has no conscious or feelings; when it played, it did not feel anxious and while it won, it did not feel joy," said Dr. Harari who is frightened by a situation in which intelligence and consciousness may separate with AI conquering the world. He cited driving as an example, saying that as companies like Google and Tesla all developing AI that can outperform humans in operating vehicles, people may finally free themselves from these actions as the computer programs drive more efficiently, safely and cheaply in a highly-connected system of artificial intelligence that renders accidents and traffic jams a thing of the past.

Intellectual Ventures Laboratory has built a new microscope equipped with artificial intelligence to accurately detect malaria from blood samples. The results of their study were published in IEEE Explore. IVL is the research facility of Intellectual Ventures located in Seattle, which is owned by Charles Delahunt. The development of this new microscope was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates as part of the Global Good Fund. The new microscope is called Autoscope.

The maximum paper length is 10 pages, excluding references, acknowledgements, and supplementary materials. The maximum size is 10 MB. We expect papers to be between 7-10 pages; shorter papers are acceptable as long as they fully describe the work. While section headings may be changed, the margins and author block must remain the same and all papers must be in 10-point Times font. If supplementary materials are included, the paper must still stand alone; reviewers are encouraged but not required to look at the supplementary materials.

You may have heard the news lately from Guangzhou, China about the firing of robots as waitstaff. Out of three restaurants that used robots to serve customers, two have closed and the third fired its robot workers. The robots couldn't effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also claimed that robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table. "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee.