What next for Google's DeepMind, now that the company has mastered the ancient board game of Go, beating the Korean champion Lee Se-Dol 4-1 this month? A paper from two UCL researchers suggests one future project: playing poker.

The arrival of artificial intelligence and its ilk -- cognitive computing, deep machine learning -- has felt like a vague distant future state for so long that it's tempting to think it's still decades away from practicable implementation at the point of care. And while many use cases today are admittedly still the exception rather than the norm, some examples are emerging to make major healthcare providers take note. Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, for instance, recently examined open source algorithms and machine learning tools in public health reporting: The tools bested human reviewers in detecting cancer using pathology reports and did so faster than people. Indeed, more and more leading health systems are looking at ways to harness the power of AI, cognitive computing and machine learning. "Our initial application of deep learning convinced me that these methods have great value to healthcare," said Andy Schuetz, a senior data scientist at Sutter Health's Research Development and Dissemination Group.

If we tackle a supervised learning problem, my advice is to start with the simplest hypothesis space first. I.e., try a linear model such as logistic regression. If this doesn't work "well" (i.e., it doesn't meet our expectation or performance criterion that we defined earlier), I would move on to the next experiment. I would say that random forests are probably THE "worry-free" approach - if such a thing exists in ML: There are no real hyperparameters to tune (maybe except for the number of trees; typically, the more trees we have the better). On the contrary, there are a lot of knobs to be turned in SVMs: Choosing the "right" kernel, regularization penalties, the slack variable, ... Both random forests and SVMs are non-parametric models (i.e., the complexity grows as the number of training samples increases).

Autonomous cars use a variety of technologies like radar, lidar, odometry and computer vision to detect objects and people on the road, prompting it to adjust its trajectory accordingly. But these tools can drive up the cost of driverless cars, and still aren't as effective as the human brain in visually distinguishing some objects from pedestrians. To tackle this problem, electrical engineers from University of California, San Diego used powerful machine learning techniques in a recent experiment that incorporated so-called deep learning algorithms in a pedestrian-detection system that performs in near real-time, using visual data only. "We're aiming to build computer vision systems that will help computers better understand the world around them," said Nuno Vasconcelos, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California San Diego who led the study, quoted in a story posted by UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. The findings, which were presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Santiago, Chile, are an improvement over current methods of pedestrian detection, which uses something called cascade detection.

Actually I've known about MXnet for weeks as one of the most popular library / packages in Kaggler, but just recently I heard bug fix has been almost done and some friends say the latest version looks stable, so at last I installed it. I think that the most important feature of MXnet is its implementation of not only Deep Neural Network (DNN) but also Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) in R, because as far as I've known there has been no R packages implementing CNN (and/or RNN). In the original post of my blog, I tried a CNN {mxnet} R package with a short version of MNIST handwritten digit datasets whose maximum accuracy may be less than 0.98 for its small sample size. As a result, CNN of {mxnet} performed accuracy 0.976: this is better than Random Forest (0.951), Xgboost (0.953) or DNN by {h2o} (0.962). MXnet is a framework distributed by DMLC, the team also known as a distributor of Xgboost.

The following interview is one of many included in the report. As part of my ongoing series of interviews surveying the frontiers of machine intelligence, I recently interviewed Yoshua Bengio. Bengio is a professor with the department of computer science and operations research at the University of Montreal, where he is head of the Machine Learning Laboratory (MILA) and serves as the Canada Research Chair in statistical learning algorithms. The goal of his research is to understand the principles of learning that yield intelligence. Yoshua Bengio: I have been researching neural networks since the '80s.

I believe almost all readers of this blog already know well about Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)... so here I just show you a brief overview. CNN is a variant of Deep Learning and it has been well known for its excellent performance of image recognition. In particular, after CNN won ILSVRC 2012, CNN has gotten more and more popular in image recognition. The most recent success of CNN would be AlphaGo, I believe. Indeed, we already have a lot of implementation of CNN as libraries / packages.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the convenient future. It is one of the most promising and transformative opportunities of our time. We are closer to the near future where virtual assistants, bots, and software agents will act more and more like people. Some the biggest advances in AI are being developed inside tech giants such as Google (Deep Mind) and IBM (Watson). But there are still a lot of great opportunities for young startups to explore.

That's an interesting question, and I try to answer this is a very general way. The tl;dr version of this is: Deep learning is essentially a set of techniques that help we to parameterize deep neural network structures, neural networks with many, many layers and parameters. And if we are interested, a more concrete example: Let's start with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) … On a tangent: The term "perceptron" in MLPs may be a bit confusing since we don't really want only linear neurons in our network. Using MLPs, we want to learn complex functions to solve non-linear problems. Thus, our network is conventionally composed of one or multiple "hidden" layers that connect the input and output layer.

What happens when we teach a computer how to learn? Technologist Jeremy Howard shares some surprising new developments in the fast-moving field of deep learning, a technique that can give computers the ability to learn Chinese, or to recognize objects in photos, or to help think through a medical diagnosis. Get caught up on a field that will change the way the computers around you behave … sooner than you probably think. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.