While the big gurus of futurism are talking about artificial intelligence as a threat to humanity, with this post I would like to focus your attention on a short term amazing application of it. Your next personal assistant will be virtual, cheap and live on your walls. There are three major trends colliding: the first is the development of artificial intelligence, the second is the promise of OLED screens that can be folded, and the third is the cloud. If you are a fan of AI, you probably know a lot about its recent developments. What I see from my observatory is that more and more AI is moving from a top-down to a bottom-up approach, using neural networks.

Dentons turns to platform-as-a-service technology, analytics and artificial intelligence to build a better framework for legal research and processes. Although the legal profession has advanced considerably through the use of digital technology, many tasks remain deeply rooted in the past. In most cases, firms use an array of ad hoc and disconnected tools to do their job. It's not surprising, then, that the introduction of artificial intelligence and analytics could revolutionize the field. "Firms are searching for ways to build a better framework for legal research and processes so that they can operate faster and keep costs down," says Joe Andrew, the global chairman of Dentons, which operates more than 125 offices in over 50 countries.

The only way to keep up with this IoT-generated data and gain the hidden insights it holds is using AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the last mile of IoT. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1955, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" In an IoT situation, AI can help companies take the billions of data points they have and boil them down to what's really meaningful. The general premise is the same as in the retail applications – review and analyze the data you've collected to find patterns or similarities that can be learned from, so that better decisions can be made. The data collected, combined with AI, makes life easier with intelligent automation, predictive analytics and proactive intervention.

The possibilities that IoT brings to the table are endless. IoT continues its run as one of the most popular technology buzzwords of the year, and now the new phase of IoT is pushing everyone to ask hard questions about the data collected by all devices and sensors of IoT. IoT will produce a tsunami of big data, with the rapid expansion of devices and sensors connected to the Internet of Things continues, the sheer volume of data being created by them will increase to an astronomical level. This data will hold extremely valuable insights into what's working well or what's not. Also, IoT will point out conflicts that arise and provide high-value insight into new business risks and opportunities as correlations and associations are made.

Returning to Short of the Week for a third time, creative studio Factory Fifteen serve-up this enticing science-fiction short that centres around a worker in a futuristic car manufacturing plant as he starts to experience problems with the artificial intelligence that runs the production line. A 4-minute introduction to a world the talented team are currently developing into a larger project, ANA dazzles with its impressive aesthetic but really hooks its audience in with its intriguing narrative take on the singularity. Aiming to put a new twist on a popular science-fiction storyline and make their concept more relatable by showing how such a situation could affect the "ordinary" man, ANA explores one vignette from a world where technology is rising-up against those that created it. Produced as a way to entice an audience into the universe they are currently evolving into a longer piece, Factory Fifteen's Paul Nicholls spoke to Short of the Week about the aims of the project: "We had multiple ambitions with the film. A short-term ambition was to create a really high-end piece of drama, mixing performance and VFX. For us the design of the world (Jonah, Chupan Chupai, The Bug) is as important as the performance in our projects, to create a believable world. Working with Richard Brake (Game Of Thrones, Batman Begins, Doom), we knew we had the performance down, it was then up to us and the rest of the team to deliver the rest. The long-term goal was to develop this as a teaser to a larger project, which is currently in development".

A near miss between a drone and a Lufthansa aircraft landing at Los Angeles International Airport may give impetus to moves to regulate consumer drones more closely, including by using technologies like geofencing. "This is one more incident that could have brought down an airliner, and it's completely unacceptable. A near-miss of 200 feet should serve as a stark reminder of the dangers posed by reckless drone use," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, in a statement. The senator said the Senate must pass legislation she introduced last year, called the Consumer Drone Safety Act, which would require safety features for consumer drones and strengthen the federal laws that govern their operation. The bill would, among other things, direct the Federal Aviation Administration to require safety features for newly manufactured consumer drones, such as geofencing to govern the altitude and location of flights and collision-avoidance software.

Japan is spending more than 1 billion to resurrect the area around the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant as the country's "Innovation Coast." The region is trying to capitalize on technology developed in the five years spent cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, including Hitachi Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. robots that slither like snakes or cruise through radioactive water like speed boats to investigate the flooded reactors. Fukushima Prefecture -- like Beirut or post-bankruptcy Detroit -- is ripe to develop a strong tech community, according to Samhir Vasdev, an innovation consultant at the World Bank. "To lead the future from Fukushima, we must overcome our failures," Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori said at the Foreign Press Center in Tokyo last month. "Creating new industries will attract new people, which will be vital to revitalizing the region."

"Winning a data science competition needs skills that are not relevant to a data science job" That explains why I am very good at the job I don't have;)

Originally published by Jason Brownlee in 2013, it still is a goldmine for all machine learning professionals. The algorithms are broken down in several categories. Here we provide a high-level summary, a much longer and detailed version can be found here. Below is a much smaller version. I would add HDT, Jackknife regression, density estimation, attribution modeling (to optimize marketing mix), linkage (in fraud detection), indexation (to create taxonomies or for clustering large data sets consisting of text), bucketisation, and time series algorithms.

"Winning a data science competition needs skills that are not relevant to a data science job" That explains why I am very good at the job I don't have;)