Samsung Electronics Co. is "actively looking" to acquire developers of artificial intelligence and other software as the world's biggest smartphone maker tries to overcome flat-lining sales for its devices. Samsung, which has 61 billion in cash and equivalents, wants to morph into more of a software-driven company, Executive Vice President Rhee In Jong said in an interview. The South Korean consumer-electronics giant also is spending more to develop its own services because the global market for gadgets is saturated and can't be counted on for significant revenue growth, he said. "We are actively looking for M&A targets of all sorts in the software area," said Rhee, who runs the mobile division's software research-and-development business. "We are open to all possibilities, including artificial intelligence. Intelligence is no longer an option -- it is a must."

Spatial Visualization Using R: One of the less understood aspects of R is in spatial data visualization. The below article will outline two case studies on using R to spatially visualize data. Our first step is figuring out how to use the Census API within R. Given below are the key data Source Details from the Census ACS Data We use the acs.lookup function & use the keywords to find the required data across all ACS tables. For example, the following are the search results for the keywords owner, occupied, and median. Using the Choroplethr package make it really easy to create thematic maps in R.

Recommender systems are among the most fun and profitable applications of data science in the big data world. Training data (corresponding to the historical search, browse, purchase, and customer feedback patterns of your customers) can be converted into golden opportunities for ROI (i.e., Return On Innovation and Investment). The predictive analytics tools of data science yield a bonanza of mechanisms to engage your customers and enrich their customer experience. What better loyalty program can there be if not the one that offers the customer what they want before they ask (and sometimes, even before they think of it for themselves). Yes, we know of some cases that have gone bad (such as the secretly pregnant teen and the targeted coupons that Target sent to her father), and we recognize that there is a fine line between being intimate with your customers versus being intimidating, but usually people do like to receive offers for great products that they love.

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.

The idea behind the show is that surely a technology company that has pushed boundaries in tech can offer fine artists an app or two? The show, held in a refurbished cinema in the city's Mission district, displayed a series of manipulated, photographic works created using one of the tech firm's artificial intelligence programs. In an opening address and an accompanying online essay, Blaise Ag?era y Arcas, a Google machine-intelligence developer, likened the artistic use of such programs to photography, or the employment of optical instruments by Renaissance artists – tools which may have had their detractors, yet are now an accepted part of art history. "Faced with a new technical development in art, it's easier for us to quietly move the goalposts after a suitable period of outrage," Arcas argued, "re-inscribing what it means for something to be called fine art, what counts as skill or creativity, what is natural and what is artifice, and what it means for us to be privileged as uniquely human." To reposition those posts would be mistake, in Arcas' view: "We believe machine intelligence is an innovation that will profoundly affect art."

Read more ... », alerted everyone to the combinational possibilities of networksGoogle Advances Artificial Intelligence with Open-sourced TensorFlow. Read more ... » of small satellites, machineA startup that helps police track criminals using bitcoin just raised 5 million.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The sadly embarrassing end to Microsoft's public experiment with a chatbot that would mirror millennial attitudes provides some critical lessons about designing machine learning systems. Imagine if you will that Edgar Rice Burroughs had taught his famous character Tarzan how to type and then dropped him into a room with nothing but a computer attached to Twitter. That computer would be the young Tarzan's only window to the outside world. You'll remember that Burroughs' fictional Tarzan (the character in the book, not the movie Tarzan who yodeled among jungle greenery) was a very fast learner who had limited context with which to judge humanity. If you think of Microsoft's Tay machine learning project as being roughly equivalent to Tarzan, it makes it easier to understand what happened when Microsoft had to take its teenaged chatbot off the Internet after the Web's creepier denizen's taught it to spew anti-Semitic rants.

Business leaders are fast recognizing the potential of advanced robotic process automation (RPA) systems to boost the performance of their managers. These "intelligent machines" are able to perform a variety of complex tasks and free managers to concentrate on more strategic endeavours. Furthermore, their ability to understand and learn from the activities they perform enables them to provide managers with quick, well researched and carefully analyzed advice. These intelligent RPA systems, which use the latest cognitive computing technology, have huge potential to step up management effectiveness. To be successful, however, they must have the support of the managers they're intended to help.

"Data science is so new that there are no textbooks on the subject, and no university curricula designed to turn out data scientists.