Google Taps Former Snapchat Research Chief, Stanford University AI Lab Director To Head ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

If you're not using big data, you're about to fail fast How Google's new Cloud Jobs API uses machine learning to help companies fill jobs Why machine learning could change customer engagement, as we know it. Is Machine Learning Making Your Data Scientists Obsolete? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

As I wrote in March of this year, the Databricks service is an excellent product for data scientists. It has a full assortment of ingestion, feature selection, model building, and evaluation functions, plus great integration with data sources and excellent scalability. The Databricks service provides a superset of Spark as a cloud service. Databricks the company was founded by the original developer of Spark, Matei Zaharia, and others from U.C. Berkeley's AMPLab. Meanwhile, Databricks continues to be a major contributor to the Apache Spark project. In this review, I'll discuss Spark ML, the open source machine learning library for Spark.

As I found myself unexpectedly snowed in this weekend, I decided to take on a weekend project for fun. While searching for something to catch my fancy, I ran across an old Slate article claiming that they found a foolproof strategy for finding Waldo in the classic "Where's Waldo?" book series. Now, I'm no Waldo-spotting expert, but even I could tell that the strategy they proposed there is far from perfect. That's when I decided what my weekend project would be: I was going to pull out every machine learning trick in my tool box to compute the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo. I was going to crush Slate's supposed foolproof strategy and carve a trail of defeated Waldo-searchers in my wake.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has revealed the Australian government will be among the first in the world to deploy artificial intelligence "bots" to deal with inquiries from citizens. As the tech giant looks to lead in the new era of cognitive computing, Mr Nadella told a technology developers' conference in Sydney on Wednesday morning that increasingly intelligent technology would allow human-like interaction with complex business systems. Mr Nadella told The Australian Financial Review after the speech that the Department of Human Services had completed the largest deployment of the Windows 10 operating system in the Asia-Pacific region and was now working on AI-powered applications. He said the DHS was working to create a smart software-driven conversational bot, which could help in reducing the amount of time citizens had to wait to speak to human staff.

There has been a lot of press coverage over the summer about robots and more generally Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world of work. BBC news has recently run a special feature on it which included an interactive test to check if your job is at risk (Will a robot take your job?). What is AI and how will it affect recruitment specifically? Artificial Intelligence is the science of how to make machines that can think for themselves according to Stanford University. Increasingly, machines have been able to learn and improve their own performance to produce results that until recently was only thought possible to obtain using human intelligence and social experience.

Nonprofit organization Women Who Tech, is awarding women-led virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) startups with $50,000 cash and other startup friendly services. Women Who Tech who describes itself as a nonprofit organization working to break down barriers to women in the tech industry, announced the fourth Women Startup Challenge pitch in partnership with Craig Newmark of craigslist and the Craig Newmark Foundation. The event is also sponsored in part by startup investors Fred and Joanne Wilson. "VR, AR, and AI are the new frontier in tech and it's vitally important that women and their companies get funded so that their perspective on these life changing products is brought to market," said Allyson Kapin, founder of Women Who Tech, which organizes the competition. "It's estimated that there will be 170 million VR users by 2018. Every major tech company is investing heavily in AI, and it's critical that women-led ventures claim their stake in the space."

The AI that learns by PLAYING: Google DeepMind is making machines'feel' their way around virtual objects Researchers created virtual environment for training artificial intelligence AI learned through a series of experiments where it'played' with objects By manipulating virtual building blocks in a simulation it could work out hidden properties, learning like a child AI learned through a series of experiments where it'played' with objects Google's DeepMind is teaching machines to learn through play, by exploring objects through simulations to work out their properties The ultimate guide to the biggest supermoon in living... Hundreds more species than we thought may be endangered... Alien hunters say they have... Move over James Bond: World's first commercially available... The ultimate guide to the biggest supermoon in living... Hundreds more species than we thought may be endangered... Alien hunters say they have... Move over James Bond: World's first commercially available... If a child were presented with two blocks painted black, one made of wood and one made of lead, they could work out their basic properties through playing with them. So why can't machines learn the same way? Earlier this week, researchers in Italy launched a new project to develop robots which learn by themselves, using a form of open open-ended machine learning.

All around us people are slowly (or sometimes quickly) transitioning into the future of work. The full-time job (9 to 5, traditional career, etc.) is about to become a rarity; only available to a select group of people who represent the core of an organization, or who possess a very specific skill set. Because we live in a society increasingly shaped by tech. Automation will take over many of the tasks previously assigned to people. And the youth of today (and tomorrow) will have no problem transitioning into that situation.

Intel today unveiled new hardware and software targeting the artificial intelligence (AI) market, which has emerged as a focus of investment for the largest data center operators. The chipmaker introduced an FPGA accelerator that offers more horsepower for companies developing new AI-powered services. The Intel Deep Learning Inference Accelerator (DLIA) combines traditional Intel CPUs with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), semiconductors that can be reprogrammed to perform specialized computing tasks. FPGAs allow users to tailor compute power to specific workloads or applications. The DLIA is the first hardware product emerging from Intel's $16 billion acquisition of Altera last year.