Over the past few years the field of Machine Learning has entered the general parlance. From free massive open online courses to image recognition benchmarks being broken and decades of Atari games being mastered. During the same period developers have witnessed the release of several popular open source frameworks and libraries. The chart below shows different open source machine learning projects by initial commit date and programming language. The size represents the popularity of a project based on number of Github stargazers.

Influence Maximization is an active topic, but it was always assumed full knowledge of the social network graph. However, the graph may actually be unknown beforehand. For example, when selecting a subset of a homeless population to attend interventions concerning health, we deal with a network that is not fully known. Hence, we introduce the novel problem of simultaneously influencing and mapping (i.e., learning) the graph. We study a class of algorithms, where we show that: (i) traditional algorithms may have arbitrarily low performance; (ii) we can effectively influence and map when the independence of objectives hypothesis holds; (iii) when it does not hold, the upper bound for the influence loss converges to 0. We run extensive experiments over four real-life social networks, where we study two alternative models, and obtain significantly better results in both than traditional approaches.

It's also critical to understand the differences between a Data Analyst and a Machine Learning engineer. In simplest form, the key distinction has to do with the end goal. As a Data Analyst, you're analyzing data in order to tell a story, and to produce actionable insights. The emphasis is on dissemination--charts, models, visualizations. The analysis is performed and presented by human beings, to other human beings who may then go on to make business decisions based on what's been presented.

When Moocs burst onto the scene five years ago, many predicted business schools' demise. Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich wrote Moocs are a "Trojan Horse" with the potential to "destroy" the full-time MBA. But rather than killing the campus, they have become an example of the whizzy digital innovations being embraced by even the oldest Ivy League institutions. "You can expect us to take engaged learning to another level where we implement technology. We're already moving in that direction," says Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University Of Michigan's Ross School of Business. "Online education is one part of it," says Soumitra Dutta, dean of Cornell University's Johnson School of Management.

When we first began working on Leada, we sought to better understand the data science industry by interviewing professionals in the field. As students simply wanting to learn more about data science, we ultimately created a free resource to inform both undergraduates and professionals about the data science industry. We accomplished this by having Q & A interviews with experts such as Mike Olsen, Hal Varian, Tom Davenport, and data scientists at LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp, and more. The Data Analytics Handbook was not only instrumental in giving us the understanding we needed to feel confident in what we were creating; but was downloaded over 25,000 times, gave us dozens of contacts, and an immediate group of early adopters. Some experts took longer to contact than others (I emailed Hal Varian over 8 times) but you would be surprised who you can get 25 minutes of time to help inform others.

Very interesting collection of resources compiled by DistrictDataLabs, featuring books, online courses, articles across multiple categories: data science, probability and statistics, machine learning, R, Python, big data, DataViz, and NLP.

This class is self paced. You can begin whenever you like and then follow your own pace. It's a good idea to set goals for yourself to make sure you stick with the course. Take a look at the "Class Summary," "What Should I Know," and "What Will I Learn" sections above. If you want to know more, just enroll in the course and start exploring.

If venture capital and research funding are any indication, artificial intelligence will play a leading role in shaping our future. And few tech innovators in the private or public sector have been as prominent in defining that role as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at China's search giant Baidu. Ng has taught AI at Stanford, led the Google Brain project, founded online education pioneer Coursera, and just last year took his post at "China's Google" in hopes of figuring out how to teach computers to see and hear, and to do that for the world's most populous country. Small wonder why China represents such a huge opportunity for machine intelligence applications. Baidu is the world's fifth most trafficked website.

Zipfian Academy has graduated more than 50 alumni, placing graduates into data science roles at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber, Square, Coursera, and many more Silicon Valley companies. Participants in our program come from backgrounds in engineering, data analysis, statistics, and occasionally professional poker. Here, we share an interview with Alex Mentch, a graduate from our Winter 2014 Cohort. Alex hails originally from Idaho, and studied electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Looking for a career transition into data science, Alex attended our Winter 2014 cohort where he built a search engine for state legislation.

Statistics.com, a provider of online education in statistics and analytics, announces a partnership with CrowdANALYTIX, a predictive modeling "managed crowdsourcing" company, offering a new online course, "Applied Predictive Analytics in partnership with CrowdANALYTIX", which will run from Oct. 11 to Nov 8, 2013. The goal of this course is to teach users (who have basic knowledge of R programming, predictive analytics and statistics) to apply machine learning techniques in real world case studies. This course provides a hands on approach, presenting the opportunity to participate in a private educational competition hosted by CrowdANALYTIX. Business Case Study: We will study data from the "daily deals" industry (consisting of websites like Groupon, Living Social etc. which source local deals to offer each day). The daily deals industry is emerging and highly competitive.