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.

The company behind the Windows PC software reported revenue of £19.1bn ($24.1bn) in the three months to December 31, up on the £18.9bn it generated in the same period last year, an increase driven by the firm's cloud-based products, Mr Nadella said. Since taking over as chief executive in 2014, Mr Nadella has shifted Microsoft's focus to its cloud business and software and away from hardware including smartphones. "Our customers are seeing greater value and opportunity as we partner with them through their digital transformation," he said of the latest figures, which also included £4.1bn in net income.

In this presentation, Team Jasper discusses why today all stars are aligned to disrupt the recruiting industry using AI. In the first part, we explain how our direct experience with job seekers and businesses helped us realize the importance of "conversational UI" in the recruiting process. In the second part, our AI team explains our innovative approach towards building an intelligent agent who communicates with users via natural language. Jasper is an AI-powered bot who recruits engineers. Team Jasper is comprised of Omid Aminfar (founder & CEO) former engineer and project manager in aerospace companies, Farzad Qassemi (co-founder & Chief AI Scientist) former machine learning specialist at Wolfram, and Sadegh Salehi (Machine Learning Intern) PhD student and machine learning researcher at Northeastern University.

Apple's iOS 10.3 software describes how Apple wants to gather iCloud data to improve services. Apple long has argued in favor of customer privacy, but the company wants to do more with your personal data so services like Siri voice recognition can get smarter. A new option in its iOS 10.3 software, released earlier this week for beta testing, asks iPhone and iPad users to share iCloud account data. Privacy is a thorny issue for tech companies. It sounds nice in principle, but it's technically complicated. And until an FBI investigator arrives, we're more likely to care about how well our phones steer us around traffic and flag important messages than we are about whether a tech company's data center is peering into our personal lives.

The latest version of Apple's mobile software, iOS 10.3, is out now in public beta form, and while some incoming features like a lost AirPods locator are easy to pick out, other additions may not be so obvious. A new feature in iOS 10.3 lets users send Apple data gathered from iCloud, giving the tech giant the resources to improve its products and services, according to TechCrunch. The feature's description also explicitly names Apple's digital assistant Siri as one of the services that would directly benefit from iCloud Analytics. This feature is coming to light right after it was revealed Apple is a founding member of the Partnership on AI, a consortium of businesses including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that collaborate on advancing and advocating artificial intelligence technology. The partnership - combined with the data potentially available to Apple following the full release of iOS 10.3 - could greatly bolster the iPhone maker's AI development and help Siri stay competitive against the likes of Microsoft's Cortana or Amazon's Alexa.

This project is maintained by Jiwei Li. This repo will continue to be updated. After training, the trained models will be saved in save_t_given_s/model*. Decoding given a pre-trained generative model. The pre-trained model doesn't have to be a vanila Seq2Seq model (for example, it can be a trained model from adversarial learning).

Artificial intelligence will come to the forefront this year in marketing departments across the world. But do marketers really understand what AI is in marketing and how to best implement it in their marketing strategies? A Demandbase and Wakefield Research AI survey asked just these kinds of questions of marketers and found some very interesting results. To understand the results of this survey at a deeper level, I spoke with Aman Naimat, SVP of Technology at Demandbase. Naimat has a very extensive background in data science.

Over the last two decades, banks and financial institutions have achieved significant efficiencies through outsourcing, offshoring and labor arbitrage. Those levers can only go so far, however, when it comes to further cutting costs and simultaneously growing revenues -- particularly at a time when disintermediation is increasing and budgets are diminishing. To address this, enter the "bots": Financial services institutions including retail banks, investment banks, custodians, commercial banks and insurers are turning to digital labor, which represents a new wave of technologies such as robotics process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation. "Bots" are not the electromechanical robots with arms and legs one may have seen in sci-fi movies. Instead, this refers to software configured to interact with computers and applications just like a human would, performing high-volume, repetitive processes and tasks.