You can visualize your elevation ( 242 ft) and price per square foot ( $1776) observations as the boundaries of regions in your scatterplot. Homes plotted in the green and blue regions would be in San Francisco and New York, respectively. Identifying boundaries in data using math is the essence of statistical learning. Of course, you'll need additional information to distinguish homes with lower elevations and lower per-square-foot prices. The dataset we are using to create the model has 7 different dimensions.

Magna International Inc. chief executive officer Don Walker has a colourful description of what artificial intelligence (AI) is going to mean to the auto industry. A car with a human at the wheel swerves to avoid a ball that rolls across the road, and an experienced driver knows to watch for a child chasing the ball, Mr. Walker told a conference Wednesday. Upgrade that car with AI, and it will automatically avoid the ball, and know to check for a child, by using its own sensors and by networking with AI systems in nearby cars that may have a better view. To continue reading this article, you must be a Globe Unlimited subscriber. Click here to get full access to Globe Unlimited.

How much of your time is actually spent on productive pursuits? Probably a lot less than you think. A recent Singlehop survey of IT pros revealed that those professionals spent only 36 percent of their average workweek on new projects and proactive tasks. That means they likely spend 64 percent of that same workweek on ongoing projects and routine functions. Wasting time like this isn't a problem unique to IT pros: Even at the C-suite level, according to a McKinsey report, 20 percent of the average CEO's time is spent on tasks that could be classified as ordinary to the point of automatic -- jobs like status report reviews and staff assignments.

As storage and collection technology has become cheaper and more precise, companies and individuals are eager to extract relevant information from large data sets. This book focuses on the tools of machine learning and statistics in a practical manner, with lots of case studies specific to the challenges of working with healthcare data. By exploring each problem in depth, you'll build your intuitive understanding of machine learning without requiring a strong background in advanced mathematics. You'll be able to recognize when your problems match traditional problems closely, and apply classical tools from statistics to your problems, while working within the legal bounds of the US healthcare system.

Apple Inc. is set to join the Partnership on AI, an artificial intelligence research group that includes Amazon.com Apple's admission into the group could be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation. Representatives at Apple and the Partnership on AI declined to comment. When the nonprofit organization was announced in September, it anticipated gaining additional members. Apple, Twitter Inc., Intel Corp. and China's Baidu Inc. were among noticeable absentees at the time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): the term often brings to mind one of two distinct images of the future. The first: a world in which AI technologies have been implemented further into our daily lives -- improving our productivity by completing menial, time-consuming tasks automatically. The second, in the vein of Terminator or I, Robot, is a more bleak vision of self-driving cars and hyper-intelligent robots plotting against humanity. While a portion of the second scenario has already come to pass by way of automotive advances like Google's self-driving car, artificial intelligence experts and futurist thought leaders do not predict that a conflict between humans and AI is likely to come to pass (Sorry, James Cameron). For instance, Diamandis predicts that we will be able to produce an abundance of resources to meet future human needs through the use of AI technologies. AI technologies have already been integrated into almost every industry, from healthcare to financial trading to digital marketing.

Apple is pushing past its famous secrecy for the sake of artificial intelligence. In December, the Cupertino tech giant quietly published its first AI research paper. Now, it's joining the Partnership on AI, an industry nonprofit group founded by some of its biggest rivals, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon. On Friday, the partnership announced that Apple's head of advanced development for Siri, Tom Gruber, is joining its board. Gruber has been at Apple since 2010 when the iPhone maker bought Siri, the company he cofounded and where he served as CTO.

The use of Apache Spark is dramatically increasing as new workloads create more use cases. The open source cluster computing framework Apache Spark is now being actively used by 54% of people and the majority of them (64%) are finding that it's proving invaluable. That's according to a Cloudera study, conducted by Taneja Group on 7,000 people from technical and managerial roles that are directly involved in big data. According to the study the technology is being used for the most important use cases by 57% of people, when that technology is provided by Cloudera. Those use cases aren't always for the likes of data processing, engineering and ETL workloads that are said to make up 55% of current Spark use.

Despite nature's bewildering complexity, the driving force behind it is incredibly simple. 'Survival of the fittest' is an uncomplicated but brutally effective optimization strategy that has allowed life to solve complex problems, like vision and flight, and colonize the harshest of environments. Researchers are now trying to harness this optimization process to find solutions to a host of science and engineering problems. The idea of using evolutionary principles in computation dates back to the 1950s, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the idea really took off. By the 1980s the approach had crossed over from academic curiosities into real-world fields like engineering and economics.

When the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society was announced in September, it was with the stated goal of educating the public on artificial intelligence, studying AI's potential impact on the world, and establishing industry best practices. Now, how those goals will actually be achieved is becoming clearer. This week, the Partnership brought on new members that include representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the MacArthur Foundation, OpenAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. The organizations themselves are not officially affiliated yet--that process is still underway--but the Partnership's board selected these candidates based on their expertise in civil rights, economics, and open research, according to interim co-chair Eric Horvitz, who is also director of Microsoft Research. The Partnership also added Apple as a "founding member," putting the tech giant in good company: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Facebook are already on board.