Deckard's photo-enhancing gear in Blade Runner is still the stuff of fantasy. However, Google might just have a close-enough approximation before long. The Google Brain team has developed a system that uses neural networks to fill in the details on very low-resolution images. One of the networks is a "conditioning" element that maps the lower-res shot to similar higher-res examples to get a basic idea of what the image should look like. The other, the "prior" network, models sharper details to make the final result more plausible.

Much of our curriculum is based on feedback from corporate and government partners about the technologies they are looking to learn. But we wanted to develop a more data-driven approach to what we should be teaching in our data science corporate training and our free fellowship for masters and PhDs looking to enter data science careers in industry. What are the most popular ML packages? Let's look at a ranking based on package downloads and social website activity. The ranking is based on average rank of CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) downloads and Stack Overflow activity (full ranking here [CSV]).

Cyber threats are an ever-present danger to global economies and are projected to surpass the trillion dollar mark in damages within the next year. As a result, the cybersecurity industry is investing heavily in machine learning in hopes of providing a more dynamic deterrent. ABI Research forecasts machine learning in cybersecurity will boost big data, intelligence, and analytics spending to $96 billion by 2021. ABI Research finds the government and defense, banking, and technology market sectors to be the primary drivers and adopters of machine learning technologies. User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) along with Deep Learning algorithm designs are emerging as the two most prominent technologies in cybersecurity offerings, especially in innovative hot tech startups.

Summary: For those of you traditional data scientist who are interested in AI but still haven't given it a deep dive, here's a high level overview of the data science technologies that combine into what the popular press calls artificial intelligence (AI). We and others have written quite a bit about the various types of data science that make up AI. Still I hear many folks asking about AI as if it were a single entity. AI is a collection of data science technologies that at this point in development are not even particularly well integrated or even easy to use. In each of these areas however, we've made a lot of progress and that's caught the attention of the popular press.

South by Southwest has unveiled its list of featured speakers for the upcoming fest, which includes the cast of Veep, Seth Rogen and exec producers of AMC's, Better Call Saul's Bob Odenkrik, John Cena, and more. The fest, which runs from March 10-19, will feature discussions from fields in tech, film, music, television, business, literature, government and journalism. Check out the list below. Jessica Shortall (Social Impact) – Jessica is the Managing Director of Texas Competes, a coalition of more than 1,200 Texas companies making the data-driven case for Texas to be welcoming to LGBTQ people. This business-oriented voice has become a national model.

People can finally talk to their houses by shouting at their cars. Amazon and Logitech have announced that they will bring the Alexa voice assistant to the ZeroTouch app. That means that people can set up their phones in their car and use it to talk to the voice assistant without using their hands – and in doing so give instructions to everything from their lights to their heating. Logitech has long sold ZeroTouch, a special mount for people's phones that gives access to a personal assistant that can be used without being touch and so is intended to keep people from being distracted while driving. But the company has now announced that the app will include Amazon's Alexa, a voice assistant that can be used with a wide range of features.

Companies building applications that leverage speech recognition have a new machine-learning based tool to improve their work. Microsoft is opening the public beta for its Custom Speech Service, the company said Tuesday. The service, formerly known as CRIS, allows customers to train a speech recognition system to work in a specific scenario, allowing it to produce more accurate results. For example, the Custom Speech Service can be trained to provide better results in a noisy airport or set up to work better with voices from a particular group, like kids or people with different accents. Right now, the Custom Speech Service works with English and Chinese, but one of its advantages is that it can be trained to work with accents from non-native speakers. Microsoft is making it available as part of its suite of Cognitive Services, a set of cloud-based tools aimed at opening up the fruits of the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning research to the rest of the world.

What does a computer company want with a bunch of meteorologists? A few weeks ago, IBM announced it was acquiring The Weather Company, which owns Weather.com and Weather Underground, and the Wall Street Journal reported they were paying more than $2 billion for the privilege. According to The New York Times, while The Weather Company employs many atmospheric scientists and meteorologists, nearly three-quarters of its scientists work in data and computers. The Weather Company was already storing most of its data with IBM's cloud computing platform, and now Big Blue has access to all that data, which they can now sell to other companies who need to know about the weather. The ability to reliably predict the weather has always been important, but people wrongly assume that weather data is only useful to a handful of industries, like agriculture and transportation.

Sameer Gupta knows about electronic markets. The former COO for J.P. Morgan's global electronic equities trading and Americas high touch and program trading business has been steeped in trade mechanization since graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. He's worked as a programmer at Goldman, a business development executive at NYSE Euronext and an electronic trading implementer at J.P. Morgan. Now, he's C.O.O. of iSentium, a company that uses intelligent algorithms to turn social media sentiment into tradeable data. And he says banks are getting their approach to artificial intelligence (AI) all wrong.

The problem we face is so clear to me. Humans on spaceship earth are paralyzed by an inability to trust whether we are making the right decisions for our world, communities, companies and individual lives. This paralysis is a symptom of our innate human need to be connected with each other. We have a serious, yet very treatable condition called cognitive overload. Our desire for constant connectivity is producing more data and content than we have ever produced before.