Last year ride-share apps made over one billion passenger trips. This year that number is poised to grow significantly. So, how do taxi and limousine companies compete with global juggernauts and take back those billions of rides? Arghon transport is free software that is produced in partnership between Arghon Inc., an Artificial Intelligence technology company, and taxi and limousine companies around the globe. The software is easy to use, yet is the most advanced of its kind anywhere.

Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 together with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines for their central role in establishing the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. The US-based political activist is known across the world for her efforts to enhance understandings of security and related issues in the world today. She is also the chair of the Noble Women's Initiative that she founded in 2006 together with five other women Nobel Peace laureates. She, along with 20 of her fellow Nobel Peace laureates have called for a preemptive ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)--weapons that could operate without human supervision once activated even in matters of killing human beings. The UN's Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) held their third informal government's meet in Geneva from 11-15 April.

As British Airways flight BA727 from Geneva approached the runway at London's Heathrow airport on Sunday, something unexpectedly hit the front of the plane. On board were 132 passengers and five crew. Thankfully, the aircraft was not damaged and landed safely. But a police investigation has been launched and, if the object is confirmed as a drone, it will be the first known collision of its kind in the UK. What can be done to stop this happening again?

A financial trading firm's plan to make millions by building a mast higher than the Shard in rural Kent has suffered a setback after its proposals were challenged by Dover council. Vigilant Global is one of two companies hoping to build a communications mast designed to boost profits by shaving milliseconds off the time it takes to beam information to European markets. But the council questioned the tactics used by the firm in the planning process and cast doubt on whether local people would see the benefits that Vigilant says they will. In a 20-page document, council officials said Vigilant had provided "only scant detail of the purpose of the mast", instead choosing to focus on the potential benefits to the local community. "Of primary concern is the lack of detail of the main function and purpose of the mast," the council said, adding that the plan "appeared to relate to improvements in the financial field".

Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school. It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.

Machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in the modern data-driven world. It is used extensively in many fields such as search engines, robotics, self-driving cars, and more. Through this book, you will learn how to perform various machine learning tasks in a range of environments. If you want to develop machine learning applications or implement machine learning in existing systems, Python is an excellent language to do so. Machine learning with Python is currently the most used standard to perform machine learning and is a great alternative for developers because of its wide selection of libraries and developer-friendly ecosystem.

Google has announced a new machine learning platform for developers at its NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference. Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, explained that Google believes machine learning is "what's next." There are two parts to Google's Cloud Machine Learning platform. The first allows developers to build machine learning models based on their own data stored in tools such as Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Datalab. The pre-trained models include existing APIs like the Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API, but also new services like the Google Cloud Speech API.

Amy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar and was cc-ed on correspondence, why couldn't it do the work for you? After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her "humanlike tone" and "eloquent manners." But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human--someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin. Calvin, who worked as an AI trainer for X.ai before he said he quit in October, was part of the reason Amy never tripped up, sending the sort of blind response that reveals she's a bot.

Seems like Google's RankBrain AI is a Skynet in making because even the engineers working on it are unable to understand it. According to Paul Haahr, one of the company's top engineers working on the Google Search team said that Google's new RankBrain AI engine is actually more complex than thought before, and even some of Google's own staff is clueless how it is exactly working. The statement was made by Haahr at SMX West, a search marketing conference that was scheduled in San Jose, California between March 1 and 3. Google understands how RankBrain works but not really what it is doing. Haahr was responding to queries about Google's search products in general during the event's keynote, when someone questioned him about the company's latest addition, the RankBrain AI. The engineer's answer, as Barry Schwartz, SERoundtable reporter, and many other conference attendants confirmed on Twitter, was that many of Google's own engineers don't quite fully understand how the new RankBrain algorithm works. Google started working on RankBrain, an artificial intelligence system, during the past years under the supervision of top engineer John Giannandrea, an AI expert.

There was more about Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures by Hanan Samet being too detailed, Stack Overflow being too high-level, and more hand-wringing after that, too. The email was pleading for some book or series of blog posts that would somehow educate data science folks on more fundamental issues of data structures and algorithms. Perhaps getting them to drop some dimensions when doing k-NN problems or perhaps exploit some other data structure that didn't involve 100's of columns. I'm guessing because -- like a lot of hand-waving emails -- it didn't involve code. If there is a lack of awareness of appropriate data structures, the real place to start is The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena.