FILE - In this Aug. 26, 2016, file photo, a one-month dosage of hormonal birth control pills is displayed in Sacramento, Calif. The Trump administration's new birth control rule is raising questions among some doctors and researchers. They say it overlooks known benefits of contraception while selectively citing data that raise doubts about effectiveness and safety. Recently issued rules allow more employers to opt out of covering birth control as a preventive benefit for women under former President Barack Obama's health care law.(AP

Washington state sued President Trump on Monday over his decision to let more employers claiming religious or moral objections opt out of providing no-cost birth control to women. Gen. Bob Ferguson, who successfully sued to block Trump's initial travel ban early this year, announced his latest lawsuit on Monday, three days after the new rules were issued. Other Democratic-leaning states, including Massachusetts and California, sued on Friday, as did the American Civil Liberties Union. Trump's policy is designed to roll back parts of former President Obama's healthcare law, which required that most companies cover birth control as preventive care for women, at no additional cost. Among those Food and Drug Administration-approved methods is the morning-after pill, which some religious conservatives call an abortion drug even though scientists say it has no effect on pregnant women. The Trump administration touted the new policy as a victory for religious freedom, and the announcement thrilled the social conservatives who make up a key part of the president's supporters.

Machine learning (the subfield of computer science that, according to Arthur Samuel, "gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed") is one of the most innovative and interesting fields of modern science around today. The Bayes' theorem, which describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event, was pretty much left alone until the 1950's when famed scientist Alan Turing managed to create and develop his imaginatively named'Alan Turing's Learning Machine'. This was a huge breakthrough for the field and along with the acceleration of computer development, the next few decades saw a gigantic rise in development of machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks, and explanation based learning. Yes, the explanation based learning algorithm was fairly standard in that it created new business rules based on what had happened before.

Economists are disputing President Donald Trump administration's justification of rescinding a 2015 law that protects U.S. waters, saying it is based on flawed analysis. The Water of the United States (WOTUS) rule was imposed by President Barack Obama to further protect bodies of water. The law broadened the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers over U.S. waters -- more than what the agencies had under the Clean Water Act. Trump and EPA Chief Scott Pruitt have been adamant about repealing the rule. In June, the administration submitted a proposal to rescind WOTUS, limiting the extent of the Clean Air Act.

Question: I've owned and lived in my very small Los Angeles condo complex for 16 years and am president of the association. Many of my neighbors are established professionals, including a couple of financial advisors across the hall. They have lived in the building for more than 40 years and have no plans to move. But they have serious drinking problems and never-ending blowout fights. At all hours of the day and night they scream at each other and throw and slam stuff inside their unit.

The Trump administration officially issued a new rule Friday that weakens the Affordable Care Act's mandate requiring employers to provide free birth control as part of health insurance plans. The final rule resembles a draft that was leaked back in May. It vastly expands the types of employers that can opt out of birth control coverage and eliminates some of the hoops those employers have had to jump through to do so. "With this rule in place, any employer could decide that their employees no longer have health insurance coverage for birth control," Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in an emailed statement. "The Trump administration just took direct aim at birth control coverage for 62 million women." Under the Obamacare provision, some employers with religious affiliations could opt out of the birth control mandate, citing their religious beliefs.

In case you hadn't noticed, the amount of data in the world is increasing at an exponential rate. For example, every minute there are nearly 4.2 million posts uploaded to Facebook, nearly 3 million tweets, and thousands of responses to open-ended survey questions. I'm often asked about all this unstructured data and how companies can make sense of it. Inevitably, the follow up question is, "What's the best approach to implementing categorization using text analytics?". In this post I'm going to dive deeper into these two questions and their answers.

We constantly talk about next-gen manufacturing, Industrie 4.0, IIoT etc, but I think the underlying nervous system supporting all these is connectivity and convergence. Increased connectivity and computational power have converted hype to reality. Previously Cloud, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and analytics were like nebulous concepts at boardroom discussions; but now they are mature enough and ready to be fully integrated into the design, engineering, and operational environment. Digitalization is impacting every aspect of our lives because three forces are reinforcing one another: consumer pull; technology push; and economic benefits. This was the theme of the two-day NASSCOM 2017 edition of the Design & Engineering Summit for which ARC Advisory Group was invited.

FICO's chief analytics officer writes that as criminals start to learn our AI systems we must use defensive AI to thwart the bad guys. I'm convinced we are entering the Golden Age of artificial intelligence (AI). With so much promise and potential in front of us, I am feeling a little like Neo in The Matrix as he swallows the red pill. However, rather than science fiction, my recent work at FICO to make AI better has drawn upon my background in theoretical physics to create what we call defensive AI. I'm talking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- from the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, not Walter White -- which states that "the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa."

Analysis "OK, the error rate is terrible, but it's Artificial Intelligence – so it can only improve!" AI is always "improving" – as much is implied by the cleverly anthropomorphic phrase, "machine learning". Learning systems don't get dumber. But what if they don't actually improve? The caveat accompanies almost any mainstream story on machine learning or AI today. But it was actually being expressed with great confidence forty years ago, the last time AI was going to "revolutionise medicine". IBM's ambitious Watson Health initiative will unlock "$2 trillion of value," according to Deborah DiSanzo, general manager of Watson Health at IBM.