In this post you will discover the k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm for classification and regression. After reading this post you will know. This post was written for developers and assumes no background in statistics or mathematics. The focus is on how the algorithm works and how to use it for predictive modeling problems. If you have any questions, leave a comment and I will do my best to answer.

Ensembles of randomized decision trees are widely used for classification and regression tasks in machine learning and statistics. They achieve competitive predictive performance and are computationally efficient to train (batch setting) and test, making them excellent candidates for real world prediction tasks. However, the most popular variants (such as Breiman's random forest and extremely randomized trees) work only in the batch setting and cannot handle streaming data easily. In this talk, I will present Mondrian Forests, where random decision trees are generated from a Bayesian nonparametric model called a Mondrian process (Roy and Teh, 2009). Making use of the remarkable consistency properties of the Mondrian process, we develop a variant of extremely randomized trees that can be constructed in an incremental fashion efficiently, thus making their use on streaming data simple and efficient.

Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook has just rolled out support for bots on its Messenger platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. What can I help you with Jane?

As well as his new upcoming book "The Economic Singularity" that Calum is nice enough to be sharing a review copy of. So what is "Singularity" you ask? Well there are many types Wikipedia puts it this way... Because the capabilities of such a superintelligencemay be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence. "I don't like the term'singularity' when applied to technology. A singularity is a state where physical laws no longer apply because some value or metric goes to infinity, such as the curvature of space-time at the center of a black hole. No one can predict what happens at a singularity."

With technology pioneers Facebook and Microsoft both throwing their multibillion hats into the chatbot ring, it is safe to say the dawn of the bot is upon us. But "what is a chatbot?" we hear you confusedly cry. Well, you're going to hear a lot of noise about them and while the name might explain a lot, let us clear up the many unanswered questions of what they're for, how they work and whether they're the harbinger of the inevitable robopocalypse. In basic terms, a chatbot is a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence software that can converse with humans to answer questions or simply natter to us in as lifelike a manner as possible. The scope and complexity of a chatbot is determined by the creator's algorithmic aptitude.

You may have heard that "conversational interfaces" are the new hotness in digital product design. Why open and close a bunch of apps on your phone to get stuff done when you can invoke a text-message-like window and just say what you want done to a chatbot? Well, here's one reason: what if the bot is annoying or tedious to talk to? In conversational UIs, personality is the new UX. "We want people to enjoy dealing with our software, but now we have a very limited palette with which to design the experience," says Ben Brown, co-founder of Howdy, a "digital coworker" chatbot that runs within the office communication tool Slack and automates things like project-status meetings and taking lunch orders.

At a tech conference recently, I was only partly joking when I said, "Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?" The true promise for the future of technology is for it to find a way to work with humanity such that the two are made better. Ideally, our best traits are amplified by technology. The best of technology is unlocked when humanity is woven into its DNA. I worked at Google when it was still a "startup," before it became a public company.

Microsoft certainly hasn't been scared off doing further experiments with artificial intelligence after the whole racist bot debacle. The tech firm is back with an AI powered API that can identify (or at least try) what's in a picture. Created by Microsoft's Cognitive Services which was also behind the how old robot and the twin or not robot, CaptionBot uses computer vision and natural language to come up with descriptions of the image. Test it out yourself, here (warning, the images you put in will be "held on to" by the bot to learn from).

Microsoft is notching up its Azure Media services platform by a couple of notches. The company is now going to implement its machine learning tools into its collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows. Now, you may wonder at the apparent non-existence of a relation between videos and machine learning. Machine learning after all, is used for data analysis. It can't be used with videos, right?

Something is wrong in the way ML is being taught to developers. Most ML teachers like to explain how different learning algorithms work and spend tons of time on that. For a beginner who wants to start using ML, being able to choose an algorithm and set parameters looks like the #1 barrier to entry, and knowing how the different techniques work seems to be a key requirement to remove that barrier. Many practitioners argue however that you only need one technique to get started: random forests. Other techniques may sometimes outperform them, but in general, random forests are the most likely to perform best on a variety of problems (see Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?), which makes them more than enough for a developer just getting started with ML.