In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

The most recent couple of years have seen a blast of enthusiasm for machine learning innovation and potential applications. As a non-master, you've presumably either needed to survey ML innovation for your item and business or as a potential venture. The language around ML innovation is inconceivable, confounding and, tragically, progressively being commandeered by excessively enthusiastic deals groups. This post is not an introduction on ML innovation; this post won't put on a show to give you a clarification of profound learning or a particular innovation, in light of the fact that these ideas change every now and again and are to a great extent immaterial to a significant part of the basic leadership. Rather, this post will deliver how to evaluate the innovation and figure out whether it will yield down to earth business esteem.

We often get questions about whether to use Python or R – and we've come to a conclusion thanks to insight from our community of mentors and learners. Data science is the sexiest job of the 21st century. Data scientists around the world are presented with exciting problems to solve. Within the complex questions they have to ask, a growing mountain of data rests a set of insights that can change entire industries. In order to get there, data scientists often rely on programming languages and tools.

Earlier this week, Facebook updated its iOS app offering voice descriptions of photographs uploaded by its users. A big step forward for accessibility, but it's far from the only company looking to make the world more inclusive to the visually impaired. In fact, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine vision and image-recognition technology are opening up the digital world to the blind and visually impaired – and helping them to interact with their surroundings. One interesting example is Austrian start-up BLITAB, which has created the first ever tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people, dubbed "the iPad for the blind". As Kristina Tsvetanova, co-founder & CEO at BLITAB Technology, explains, the device looks similar to an ebook but displays small physical bubbles instead of using a screen, which means users can view whole pages of braille text at once, without any mechanical elements.

"YOU are a developer and you've just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user." That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple's boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago. At first few paid it much heed, but it launched one of the fastest-growing software markets ever. Since then over 100 billion apps have been downloaded, generating 40 billion in revenues for developers and billions more in subscriptions and other fees.

Facebook has recently made it easier for blind users to share the same experience as the rest of the community of Facebook users by filling in the Photo Blanks. Facebook introduced on Monday April 6, 2016 an automated alt text which is a new tool that helps blind users to visualize the images as they scroll up and down. "There seems to be a general movement towards making technology more accessible. I think people are recognizing the great opportunities. There are close to 250 million people around the world with visual impairments and almost 40 million who are actually blind," Susan Schreiner, an analyst at C4 Trends said for TechNewsWorld.

In this series, professionals provide advice for the next U.S. president. What do you want POTUS focused on? Over fifty years ago, in March 1964, a document known as the "Triple Revolution Report" landed on the desk of your predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. That report, written by a prominent group of intellectuals that included two Nobel laureates, argued that the United States was on the brink of dramatic social and economic disruption as rapidly advancing industrial automation technology was poised to throw millions out of work. Needless to say, that dire prediction did not come to pass.

A Silicon Valley startup wants to use artificial intelligence to help diabetes patients better navigate health and lifestyle decisions. Suggestic, an application and Internet-based platform, is looking to fuse medical advances with a growing trend of personalized healthcare -- making interventions specific to the individual patient. The company launched a beta version of its technology earlier this month and has a few thousand people signed up in their waiting list to try out the service. "We call it the'lifestyle GPS' because we want it to work as a personal assistant to help diabetic people to have a better lifestyle," Shai Rosen, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Suggestic, told Devex. "We want to give people a virtual presence right next to them 24 [hours a day] and 7 [days a week] to make small habit-changing choices."

Imagining a future where a machine decides which job you're best suited for is frankly frightening. Television shows like Futurama have done their job of reminding us why a future dictated by machine logic is probably best avoided. We understandably become uneasy with this idea because a machine does not think like a human. But what if a machine could think like a human - a more considerate version of Futurama's Bender - what then? Machines with cognitive intelligence are no longer the realm of science fiction.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine vision and image-recognition technology are opening up the digital world to the blind and visually impaired – and helping them to interact with their surroundings. One interesting example is Austrian start-up BLITAB, which has created the first ever tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people, dubbed "the iPad for the blind". As Kristina Tsvetanova, co-founder & CEO at BLITAB Technology, explains, the device looks similar to an ebook but displays small physical bubbles instead of using a screen, which means users can view whole pages of braille text at once, without any mechanical elements. "It offers a completely new user experience for braille and non-braille readers via touch navigation, text-to-speech output and Perkins-style keyboard application. It also enables the direct conversion of any text file into braille and obtains information via NFC tags. BLITAB is not just a tablet, it is a platform for all existing and future software applications for blind readers," she says.