Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

Digital-related investment in industrial production is growing fast. Through 2020, enterprises expect to pump $907 billion annually into digital technologies on the industrial floor, according to PwC's Industry 4.0 research. That investment is expected to increase revenues by $493 billion annually and reduce costs by $421 billion each year. But where and how those dividends will be unearthed is only now coming into view. PwC sees enterprises following a path that spans prediction, prescription, optimization, and new business models.

Every day, K–12 educators juggle a bevy of tasks: teaching, developing lesson plans, grading papers, writing tests. And often, they battle with technology to do all of these things. With its more streamlined G Suite for Education -- formerly known as Apps for Education -- Google has updated its commonly used applications, hoping to save teachers a bit of time and energy with their everyday tasks. As announced in a blog post by Jonathan Rochelle, the director of product management at Google, G Suite's goal was to harness the intelligence of computers to create a smarter, easier and more efficient technology experience for educators and students. "G Suite for Education is the same set of apps that you know and love -- Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more -- but designed with new intelligent features that make work easier and bring teachers and students together," writes Rochelle.

In a previous lesson I showed you how to do a K-means cluster in R. You can visit that lesson here: R: K-Means Clustering. Now in that lesson I choose 3 clusters. I did that because I was the one who made up the data, so I knew 3 clusters would work well. Choosing the right number of clusters is one of the trickier parts of performing a k-means cluster.

UPDATE: Mar 20, 2016 - Added my new follow-up course on Deep Learning, which covers ways to speed up and improve vanilla backpropagation: momentum and Nesterov momentum, adaptive learning rate algorithms like AdaGrad and RMSProp, utilizing the GPU on AWS EC2, and stochastic batch gradient descent. We look at TensorFlow and Theano starting from the basics - variables, functions, expressions, and simple optimizations - from there, building a neural network seems simple! Deep learning is all the rage these days. What exactly is deep learning? Well, it all boils down to neural networks.

While both have gained a lot of attention this year, these techniques have been around for quite some time, but no more so than now, has it felt so promising. Over the past few years, there has been a monumental shift in technology and how it's being applied to everyday life. From robots to search engines, deep learning and machine learning are being raved about as the tech fuelling our new innovations, but many are left wondering what truly differentiates these two models. Broadly speaking, both machine learning and deep learning are forms of Artificial Intelligence, the intelligence exhibited by machines using cutting-edge techniques to perform cognitive functions that we associate with intuitive learning; however, each application is unique and offers an array of benefits to the end-user, whether it's solving unique problems for a particular business case, aiding in speech/facial recognition, speeding up web applications or protecting against breaches or hacks. While the concepts of machine learning and deep learning have been around as early as the 1960s, each model has changed drastically over the years, creating a greater divide between the two.

Data science interviews are notoriously complex, but most of what they throw at you will fall into one of these categories. Data science interviews are daunting, complicated gauntlets for many. But despite the ways they're evolving, the technical portion of the typical data science interview tends to be pretty predictable. The questions most candidates face usually cover behavior, mathematics, statistics, coding, and scenarios. However they differ in their particulars, those questions may be easier to answer if you can identify which bucket each one falls into.

In this post you discovered artificial neural networks for machine learning. How neural networks are not models of the brain but are instead computational models for solving complex machine learning problems. That neural networks are comprised of neurons that have weights and activation functions. The networks are organized into layers of neurons and are trained using stochastic gradient descent. That it is a good idea to prepare your data before training a neural network model.

Organizations create style guides to capture the rationale of their design decisions and help other teams build great experiences. You might have read gov.UK's service manual or the U.S. Digital Services Playbook. I wanted to do the same for chatbots built on the Facebook's Messenger platform. At Sure, we are creating an online assistant that helps you find food and drinks that are better for you and the planet. It is still very early days for bots, so I wanted to take the opportunity to share some of our early learnings.

The best services have one thing in common: a superb customer experience. Banking services are no exception to this rule, and indeed the quest for an effortless, well informed, and personalized customer experience is one of the main goals of today's innovation in digital banking services. According to what Maslow has described in his "pyramid of needs", customers are seeking a more intimate and meaningful experience where banking services can actively assist the customer in performing and managing their financial life. Predictive APIs have a fundamental role in all this, as they enable a new set of customer journeys such as automatic categorization of transactions, detecting and alerting recurrent payments, pre-approving credit requests or provide better tools to fight fraud without limiting legitimate customer transactions. In this talk, I will focus on how to provide better banking services by using predictive APIs.