Detecting bird sounds in audio is an important task for automatic wildlife monitoring, as well as in citizen science and audio library management. The current generation of software tools require manual work from the user: to choose the algorithm, to set the settings, and to post-process the results. This is holding bioacoustics back in embracing its "big data" era: let's make this better! In collaboration with the IEEE Signal Processing Society we propose a research data challenge for you to create a robust and scalable bird detection algorithm. We offer new datasets collected in real live bioacoustics monitoring projects, and an objective, standardised evaluation framework – and prizes for the strongest submissions.

Technology is playing an ever-important role in the shopping side of the holiday season. Logistics aside, which is of course critical at this time of year, tech is also proving increasingly key from an experiential and a customer service perspective both online and offline. Leading that charge for 2016 are virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Google has employed the former this year, for instance, to allow consumers to'walk' along Fifth Avenue in New York to experience all the holiday window displays. Window Wonderland, as the initiative is called, is a VR experience that lets users view 18 different retailers including Bloomingdale's, Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany & Co, Burberry and more.

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.

Sites selection for warehouses to minimize distribution costs (proximity to vendors, balanced against proximity to consumers). How many warehouses are needed, and what capacity each of them should have. Selection of optimal routes, schedules, and products groupings, to minimize delivery costs (using graph theory) Supply chain optimization (III). Minimize time spent by drivers in traffic jams (requires traffic prediction) while optimizing delivery speed, gas usage and other factors (better be stuck 20 minutes in a traffic jam than a costly detour, or departing later?) Pricing and profit optimization (per-product price elasticity studies needed; may require products to be aggregated in categories, to create buckets that yield statistical significance) Fraud detection for credit card transactions (use decision tree methods).

PayPal fights fraud with machine learning consuming more than 1.1 petabytes of data for 169 million customer accounts at any given moment. Airbnb uses Aerosolve Machine Learning package to help owners set a price for rental based on features of home, time of year, demand etc. Amazon's recommendation engine is one example where machine learning drives a lot of economic value Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Google Prediction APIs, Amazon ML and IBM Watson Developer Services come with ready made algorithms that allow businesses to extract patterns from data, predict trends, identify language translations, understand social media sentiments, just to name a few. Apple Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana-like digital personal assistants are making use of Machine Learning for speech recognition to become smarter & creative therefore knowing more about you and your needs. By connecting the sensors and systems in each of their elevators to the cloud, ThyssenKrupp, a Garman Elevator Manufacturer, has been able to move beyond preventative maintenance to offer predictive and preemptive services, a service that has not been possible before in the elevator industry. Today after 56 years even the Barbie doll is going to become interactive and internet connected, that can talk to children and respond to their questions.

Artificial Intelligence 1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence 2. Artificial General Intelligence 3. Artificial Super Intelligence 4. Computational Science Computational biology Computational Chemistry Computational PhysicsAll accelerated with Moore's Law AND autonomous AI programing worldwide 5. These three together will change… what we think is possible Artificial Intelligence Moore's Law Computational Science 6. Increasing Intelligence: both Individual and Collective Intelligence EU, US, China Human Brain Projects; Google & IBM artificial brain projects 7. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates 1991 By 2030 billions of people could be augmented geniuses, and what could they create? If Then Nano- technology Synthetic Biology Artificial Intelligence Robotics 3-D Printing Augmented Reality Nano- technology xxx Synthetic Biology xxx Artificial Intelligence xxx Robotics xxx 3-D Printing xxx Augmented Reality xxx Emerging Technologies Matrix 14. IoT AI Contact Lens – always in Virtual Reality connected to the word Hands-free, phone free, laptop free, AI-human symbiosis 15. Humans becoming cyborgs Conscious-Technology Age Built environment becoming intelligent When the distinction between these two mega trends becomes blurred, we will have reached the Post-Information Age 16. Simplification/Generalization of History and an Alternative Future Age / Element Product Power Wealth Place War Time Agricultural Extraction Food/Res Religion Land Earth/Res Location Cyclical Industrial Machine Nation-State Capital Factory Resources Linear Information Info/serv Corporation Access Office Perception Flexible Conscious- Technology Linkage Individual Being Motion Identity Invented 17. Consciousness Technology Technology Changes Consciousness and Consciousness Changes Technology 18. Future Mind: Artificial Intelligence by Jerome C. Glenn Merging the Mystical and the Technological in the 21st Century 1989 19.

Google's search algorithm appears to be systematically promoting information that is either false or slanted with an extreme rightwing bias on subjects as varied as climate change and homosexuality. Following a recent investigation by the Observer, which uncovered that Google's search engine prominently suggests neo-Nazi websites and antisemitic writing, the Guardian has uncovered a dozen additional examples of biased search results. Google's search algorithm and its autocomplete function prioritize websites that, for example, declare that climate change is a hoax, being gay is a sin, and the Sandy Hook mass shooting never happened. The increased scrutiny on the algorithms of Google – which removed antisemitic and sexist autocomplete phrases after the recent Observer investigation – comes at a time of tense debate surrounding the role of fake news in building support for conservative political leaders, particularly US President-elect Donald Trump. Facebook has faced significant backlash for its role in enabling widespread dissemination of misinformation, and data scientists and communication experts have argued that rightwing groups have found creative ways to manipulate social media trends and search algorithms.

Nintendo has launched Super Mario Run, its first game for iOS, and found itself worth $2 billion less than when it started. The game received huge amounts of hype for its combination of nostalgia and excitement, and as a signal that Nintendo might look to move more of its games off its less popular consoles. But it has already been hit by some backlash, over its high price and a mode that means it will only work if players have an internet connection. Those concerns appear to have dragged down Nintendo's share price, which fell by about 5 per cent in the wake of the release. That meant that the value of the company dropped by around $2 billion.

A Real World Exa... Watch a neural network describe what it sees on a stroll through Am... The Difference Between Junior, Mid-Level, And Senior Data Scientist... Data Storage on DNA Can Keep It Safe for Centuries Single Artificial Neuron Taught to Recognize Hundreds of Patterns 7 Reasons why the Algorithmic Business will Change Society Five Forces Pushing Statistics Expertise Out of Data Analysis Encryption Is Being Scapegoated To Mask The Failures Of Mass Survei... Encrypted Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over Possible Role in Pa... Google Just Open Sourced the Artificial Intelligence Engine at the ... Latest Ford Focus electric creates 10 terabytes of data, per hour! Will NoSQL be the undoing of Oracle's database reign? Google's Inbox uses machine learning to speed up email replies Pluto gets a little psychedelic in this week's space photos - Nice image produced with principal components analysis Autism cases in U.S. jump to 1 in 45 - Example of bad analysis: there are more White people with autism than from other races, because there are more Whites than other races in US. When accounted for this fact, the conclusion must be reversed.

For a service provider, being able to anticipate its customer's behaviour has three major benefits. It can generate customer delight, prevent customer exhaustion, and improve the company's ROI. Let's look at each of these benefits through three different use cases in the Customer lifecycle: Complaints Management, Customer Upsell and Customer Retention. A dissatisfied customer, filing a complaint is difficult to manage. He is very often passionate about his claim - whether it is justified or not - and there is sometimes little which can be done to change his perception and his opinion towards the service he initially subscribed to. If however the company could tell precisely which customers are going to complain and when, it could avoid the management of a complaint by calling them pre-emptively to enquire about their satisfaction and offer them an incentive or a boon.