Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including standouts like Bosch, Harma, Slack, Intel, Amazon Alexa and Samsung. That brings the total number of hiring partners for Udacity to over 30, which means a lot of potential soft landings for graduates of its nanodegree programs. The nanodegree offered by Udacity is its own original form of accreditation, which is based on a truncated field of study that spans months, rather than years, and allows students to direct the pace of their own learning. It also all takes place online, so students can potentially learn from anywhere. For Udacity, hiring partners help prove the value of their program to potential students, as they're effectively votes of confidence made by exactly the kinds of companies where students are looking to get jobs.

When you throw an event hoping to draw 400 people but an audience of 29,000 shows up, do you think it's a good sign indicating you're onto something? That incredible interest is what happened in Beijing the week of 28 November 2016 at the International Summit on Machine Learning and Industry Application. The event's 20 speakers gathered from across industries and academia to offer their insights about machine learning trends and new directions. For the keynote address, Dinesh Nirmal, vice president, analytics development, at IBM, teamed up with Kent Ting, vice president, IBM Analytics Global Consulting Group, at IBM. Nirmal and Ting talked about the IBM focus on machine learning and the company's efforts to enable developers in China and elsewhere. Of particular interest to the audience was their demo of IBM Watson Machine Learning, a full-service IBM Bluemix platform offering.

Sebastian Thrun smiles a little awkwardly as he explains why he no longer believes in the educational revolution he sold to the world just a few years ago. The lean, balding robotics pioneer has been instrumental in convincing investors, governments, and colleges to splurge millions on the online college education platforms dubbed MOOCs, or massive online open courses, billed as opening up quality education to anyone on Earth (see "The Crisis in Higher Education"). Thrun, a Stanford professor, helped birth the frenzy when he put his introductory artificial intelligence course online in 2011, accidentally attracting 160,000 students. Amazed by the response, he took time out from Stanford and also from a side job working on autonomous cars and other research at Google to found Udacity, a company offering MOOCs in computing, math, and physics. It attracted $160 million in venture capital investment and teamed up with San Jose State University to offer courses valid for college credit. But within two years of Udacity's launch, Thrun began to question whether MOOCs could make much of a mark on the world in their current form.

Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including standouts like Bosch, Harma, Slack, Intel, Amazon Alexa and Samsung. That brings the total number of hiring partners for Udacity to over 30, which means a lot of potential soft landings for graduates of its nanodegree programs. The nanodegree offered by Udacity is its own original form of accreditation, which is based on a truncated field of study that spans months, rather than years, and allows students to direct the pace of their own learning. It also all takes place online, so students can potentially learn from anywhere. For Udacity, hiring partners help prove the value of their program to potential students, as they're effectively votes of confidence made by exactly the kinds of companies where students are looking to get jobs.

One of our greatest challenges in today's society is responding to the impact of technology automation. Over the last decade, technology has increasingly displaced jobs resulting in a reduction of the middle class and the widening gap of income inequality. Other factors such as offshoring play a role in job loss but the impact of technology is in full steam and there is no end in sight. My concern is that our society hasn't come to appreciate the extent of the issue and doesn't have a thoughtful plan to address it. The future of the middle class depends on our ability to comprehend the changing world technology has presented, and how we respond to close the jobs gap.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

From MOOCs (Massive open online courses) to the use of iPads in schools, there's no doubt that technology is changing the way that we learn. Chatbots could have a similar effect, too -- by offering a means by which children can better interact with the subjects they're studying. That was the conclusion reached by UK-based tech company rehabstudio. During a recent hackathon event, they came up with the idea of creating an "edubot" that would enable kids to ask questions to a tyrannosaurus rex (called Tina) using Facebook Messenger. The finished product was a collaboration between rehabstudio (providing the tech) and National Geographic Kids (providing the data.)

One day we will "think about machine learning the way we think about electricity: It's hard to imagine the world without it," said SAP Chief Innovation Officer Juergen Mueller at the recent SAP TechEd Barcelona. Under Mueller, SAP has embarked on a journey to bring machine learning to business around the world, essentially "electrifying" all applications with this technology. For the uninitiated, machine learning takes Big Data, runs it against sophisticated algorithms and helps applications to learn from this information. Massively improved computing power makes this possible in real time. Most importantly, it allows applications to "think" and independently resolve problems – going beyond what they were explicitly programmed to do, and often what humans can do.

Edtech, from artificial intelligence to cloud computing and augmented reality, is sweeping through the higher education sector. And as online learning providers continue to challenge the oldest and best-known institutions, the world's top business schools are racing to adopt cutting-edge learning technologies. "Innovations by vendors have led to the use of more advanced technologies such as simulations, cloud-based solutions, and AR," says Jhansi Mary, lead analyst at Technavio, the consultancy. At the forefront of the innovation wave is artificial intelligence, which has already permeated social media, stock picking and even transport. Advocates say AI can be applied in education through the tracking of students, to predict and optimize learning and performance.

This course aimed at students with beginner to intermediate skill in F#, basic understanding of the F# syntax and a light functional understanding would be beneficial. You'll also need a computer with Linux, OSX or Windows with F# installed and an internet connection. Have you wanted to understand how to'do' machine learning or implement algorithms from a textbook in a programming language, or deploy a library to Nuget? Well, this course includes sections on machine learning using a mathematical theorem known as Bayes' Theorem. We will start by creating a predictive text engine and deploy it to Nuget, while learning how to write some basic unit tests in FsUnit.