We all know that the Internet of Things (IoT) represents game-changing transformation in the industrial application of technology...or at least we think we do. Perhaps more accurately, we sense that denying IoT's significance would be foolishly contrarian. And while we might have an innate sense of why IoT is so important, we also might come up short when pressed to describe specific applications of IoT technology. That's why I love learning about real use cases, especially ones that veer off the path of domains like preventive maintenance, which are almost cliché. Recently, I had the chance to learn of one such IoT application.

Daniel Tran is an IBM Co-op Student working as a Technical Curriculum Developer in Toronto, Ontario. He develops courses to improve the education of customers who seek knowledge in the Big Data field. He has also reworked previously developed courses, updating them to be compatible with the newest software releases, as well as work at the forefront of recreating courses on a newly developed cloud environment. He has worked with various components that deal with Big Data, including Hadoop, Pig, Hive, HBase, MapReduce & YARN, Sqoop, Oozie, and Phoenix. He has also worked on separate courses involving Machine Learning.

Google's DeepMind is teaming up with the makers of the StarCraft video game to train its artificial intelligence systems. The AI systems "playing" the game will need to learn strategies similar to those that humans need in the real world, DeepMind said. Its ultimate aim is to develop artificial intelligence that could solve any problem. It has previously taught algorithms to play a range of Atari computer games. StarCraft II, made by developer Blizzard, is a real-time strategy game in which players control one of three warring factions - humans, the insect-like Zerg, or aliens known as the Protoss.

Mathematicians have long wondered at the logical structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's music, attempting to distill it into fractals or understand his "rational and consistent system" of composition. In particular, Bach's chorale harmonizations are ripe for systems like artificial intelligence to understand: They always consist of four parts (a melody and three harmonies), are short in duration (about a minute long), and are based off simple melodies that were popular in Lutheran hymns. These consistent traits allowed a deep neural network built by Sony's Computer Science Laboratories to break down the patterns found between 352 of Bach's chorales and generate new harmonies. The machine's goal isn't to make an original melody, but instead generate the thee supporting harmonies around a supplied melody. It writes each harmony separately, its goal to predict which note Bach himself would write given the preceding note, the notes adjacent in the melody and other harmonies, and the beat the note lands on. Its prediction is made by looking at what Bach did in similar situations, the 352 chorales used to train the AI.

Many people have found the table above to be useful for understanding two conceptual distinctions in the practice of data analysis. The article that discusses the table, and many other issues, is now in press. The in-press version can be found at OSF and at SSRN. Abstract: In the practice of data analysis, there is a conceptual distinction between hypothesis testing, on the one hand, and estimation with quantified uncertainty, on the other hand. Among frequentists in psychology a shift of emphasis from hypothesis testing to estimation has been dubbed "the New Statistics" (Cumming, 2014).

Many current fears around AI and automation center around the idea that superintelligence could somehow "take over," turning streets around the globe into scenes from The Terminator. While there is much to be gained from discussing the safe development of AI, there's another more imminent danger: Autonomous weapons. On Friday, after three years of negotiations, the UN unanimously agreed to take action. At the Fifth Review Conference of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, countries around the world agreed to begin formal discussions--which will take place for two weeks at the 2017 UN convention in Geneva--on a possible ban of lethal, autonomous weapons. Talks will begin in April or August, and 88 countries have agreed to attend.

Though Intel is the leader in data centers microprocessor market, with more than 90% market share, it has more recently lagged in the market for coprocessors, where Nvidia has generated momentum. Whereas Intel is dominant in the microprocessor market at large, Nvidia has successfully identified this coprocessor niche where it has garnered significant market share. This is reflected in their recent growth rates. While Intel witnessed a mere 13% year over year growth in its revenue from the Data Center Group in Q3 2017, Nvidia data center revenues nearly tripled during the same period. Of course, Intel's data center revenues are a vast multiple of Nvidia's.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At least they have robots to get some actual work done. If anyone can use some automation to boost production, it's Santa: That must have taken a ridiculous amount of helium.

Toronto worker Kristy Milland looks for data jobs that she can pick up to make ends meet. Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Download this article as a PDF (free registration required). Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk."

This is one of a network of sites dedicated to support the AI community. For more information see Informed.AI If you are a company or agency that has one or more job openings related to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning you are free to post them onto this site. We are a new site, but have a strong network and community of people who are interested in this field.