Google once had a reputation for bankrolling moonshots. It spent billions creating a self-driving car, started Google Fiber to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the masses, and acquired the Darpa-backed robotics company Boston Dynamics. But since restructuring itself as a holding company called Alphabet in 2015 and moving many of its bigger ideas outside the core Google business structure, Mountain View's ambitions have become a little more sober and its investment strategy more restrained. As Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat put it during an earnings call last year: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio of products to ensure we efficiently and effectively focus our resources behind our biggest bets across Alphabet." In practical terms, that's meant scaling back Google Fiber and selling off some of its wilder projects, and it's also opened the door for another company–the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank–to take the lead on some of today's most audacious bets in global tech.

Data science and machine learning for domain specific insights are at the core of Alibaba's strategy for global expansions. Apple's iPhone made its debut 10 years ago. Here's a look at how it has impacted business and the enterprise. The war in retail has long ago gone technological. Amazon is the poster child of this transition, paving the way first by taking its business online, then embracing the cloud and offering ever more advanced services for compute and storage to thirrd parties via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Data science and machine learning for domain specific insights are at the core of Alibaba's strategy for global expansions. Apple's iPhone made its debut 10 years ago. Here's a look at how it has impacted business and the enterprise. The war in retail has long ago gone technological. Amazon is the poster child of this transition, paving the way first by taking its business online, then embracing the cloud and offering ever more advanced services for compute and storage to thirrd parties via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Agriculture is the industry that accompanied the evolution of humanity from pre-historic times to modern days and fulfilled faithfully one of its most basic needs: food supply. Today this still remains its core mission, but it's integrated in a more complex than ever mechanism driven by multiple sociological, economic and environmental forces. This $5 trillion industry representing 10 percent of global consumer spending, 40 percent of employment and 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions continues to keep pace with world's evolution, changing tremendously over the past years. Digital and technological advancements are taking over the industry, enhancing food production while adding value to the entire farm-to-fork supply chain and helping it make use of natural resources more efficiently. Data generated by sensors or agricultural drones collected at farms, on the field or during transportation offer a wealth of information about soil, seeds, livestock, crops, costs, farm equipment or the use of water and fertilizer.

IBM and Galvanize have launched the first online Cognitive Builder Course hosted on IBM Cloud and powered by IBM Watson. The course is aimed at enterprise developers and interested university students who seek to build on their fundamental Python programming skills, while gaining knowledge about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Currently, the technology industry is facing a shortage of experienced developers to address the growing demand for cognitive and AI development. Recently'Upskilling India' a study conducted by IBM Institute for Business Value indicates 60 percent of global executives expect that employees will need new and different skills to be successful. The study also highlights that 61 percent of the respondents believe that India's higher education system is slow in responding to the changing social demands and needs, followed by 59 percent of the respondents expressing the challenge in maintaining a relevant curriculum for students.

India is poised for a rapid climb when it comes to grids and factories incorporating self-healing concepts. The energy revolution is manifested in government programmes like access to reliable 24x7 power for all and the renewable energy target of 175GW by 2022. A lot of work is going on to include self-healing as part of the larger smart grid project, integration and balancing of renewable energy and the transmission and distribution (T&D) focus. The blackout and grid failure of 2012 underlined the need for self-healing grids which prevent damage from spreading across regions. From tractors to cement plants, biscuits to motorbikes, Indian industries are implementing sensor pilots or intelligent plant frameworks and driving the fourth industrial revolution.

Washington, DC - A US federal appeals court has thrown out a lawsuit by the families of two Yemeni men allegedly killed as innocent bystanders in a US drone strike in 2012 but one of the judges said US "democracy is broken" after announcing the ruling. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel in Washington on Friday upheld a lower court's finding that it had no say over the president's drone programme. The case began in 2015 when two family members of Faisal bin Ali Jaber, who brought the "wrongful death" case against then-President Barack Obama in 2015, were killed by a drone strike Yemen in 2012. Faisal's nephew Waleed, 26, and brother-in-law Salem, a father of seven and noted anti-extremist imam, were killed in the strike alongwith three others. Faisal's lawsuit requested an apology from the US government and declaration that the strike was unlawful.

A robotics competition team of Afghan girls won't be able to watch their creation compete in person. They were recently denied one-week visas to the United States to come to Washington, D.C., for the First Global Challenge, a new robotics competition that focuses on providing clean water. SEE ALSO: U.S. visa applicants may have to hand over their social media handles The team twice traveled the roughly 500-mile distance to the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, for visa interviews, but officials denied them. "I wanted this to happen badly, I really did," said First Global President Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral and member of Congress. Instead, they'll watch via Skype as their robot competes against creations from over 100 other nations.

Correlated topic modeling has been limited to small model and problem sizes due to their high computational cost and poor scaling. In this paper, we propose a new model which learns compact topic embeddings and captures topic correlations through the closeness between the topic vectors. Our method enables efficient inference in the low-dimensional embedding space, reducing previous cubic or quadratic time complexity to linear w.r.t the topic size. We further speedup variational inference with a fast sampler to exploit sparsity of topic occurrence. Extensive experiments show that our approach is capable of handling model and data scales which are several orders of magnitude larger than existing correlation results, without sacrificing modeling quality by providing competitive or superior performance in document classification and retrieval.

In recent years, AI-based applications have increasingly been used in real-world domains. For example, game theory-based decision aids have been successfully deployed in various security settings to protect ports, airports, and wildlife. This article describes our unique problem-to-project educational approach that used games rooted in real-world issues to teach AI concepts to diverse audiences. Specifically, our educational program began by presenting real-world security issues, and progressively introduced complex AI concepts using lectures, interactive exercises, and ultimately hands-on games to promote learning. We describe our experience in applying this approach to several audiences, including students of an urban public high school, university undergraduates, and security domain experts who protect wildlife. We evaluated our approach based on results from the games and participant surveys.