A popular statistical technique to predict binomial outcomes (y 0 or 1) is Logistic Regression. Logistic regression predicts categorical outcomes (binomial / multinomial values of y), whereas linear Regression is good for predicting continuous-valued outcomes (such as weight of a person in kg, the amount of rainfall in cm). The predictions of Logistic Regression (henceforth, LogR in this article) are in the form of probabilities of an event occurring, ie the probability of y 1, given certain values of input variables x. As shown in Figure1, the logit function on the right- with a range of - to, is the inverse of the logistic function shown on the left- with a range of 0 to 1. Estimating the values of B0,B1,..,Bk involves the concepts of probability, odds and log odds. The example dataset here is sourced from the UCLA website. The task is to predict which students graduated with honours or not (y 1 or 0), for 200 students with fields female, read, write, math, hon, femalexmath .

According to IBM Security's new "Future of Identity Study," users of both mobile and desktop are wide awake to what's happening with each new high profile breach, and it's made them change their priorities. Strong security and privacy are now at the forefront of the average user's concerns, especially when it comes to banking, financial, online marketplaces, and their email accounts. That's a sharp contrast to research from Gartner in 2008, which also surveyed 4,000 people and found that most consumers didn't want to change the way they did passwords or security, and were highly resistant to using password managers or adopting additional security measures around log-ins. "Despite widespread security concerns," Gartner concluded ten years ago, "consumers continue to rely on service providers to protect their safety and persist in using unsafe password management practices, preferring to maintain the status quo rather than exploring new security methods." IBM's 2018 report surveyed nearly 4,000 adults from around the world. Most respondents were in the US.

In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Peter Corke, distinguished professor of robotic vision from Queensland University of Technology, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. Peter is well known for his work in computer vision and has written one of the books that defines the area. He talks about how serendipity made him build a checkers playing robot and then move on to robotics and machine vision. We get to hear about how early experiments with "Blob Vision" got him interested in analyzing images and especially moving images, and his long and interesting journey giving robots eyes to see the world. The interview ends with Peter adding a new item to the CV, fashion model, when he shows us the ICRA 2018 T-shirt!

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Awww, a SpotMini using its face-arm to help a buddy...adorable! Perhaps Boston Dynamics could release some behind-the-scenes footage (or outtakes!) to show what's going on here?

Humans will actually be very happy to meet aliens, according to new research. Hollywood might have led us to expect that an alien invasion would be greeted with tanks and guns. But some of the first serious research into how people would feel about meeting extraterrestrials shows that we would be far more positive than you might think. "If we came face to face with life outside of Earth, we would actually be pretty upbeat about it," said Arizona State University Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Varnum. "So far, there's been a lot of speculation about how we might respond to this kind of news, but until now, almost no systematic empirical research."

When training a neural network, one typically strives to make the GPU the bottleneck. All data should be read from disk, pre-processed, and transferred to the GPU fast enough so that the GPU is busy 100% of the time computing the next improved version of the model. An increasing trend we see at RiseML is that pre-processing and especially reading the training data from disk becomes the bottleneck. This is caused by multiple factors, including faster GPUs, more efficient model architectures, and larger datasets, especially for video and image processing. As a result, the GPUs sit idle a lot of time, waiting for the next batch of data to work on.

We are all equipped with the best minds in the known universe. Between ourselves and our predecessors, humans have created virtually everything we touch. We achieved this using a tool that represents the absolute pinnacle of intelligence: our brain. On an intelligence scale of zero to one, despite our individual variety, we all fit within the microscopically small space occupied by the right edge of the'e.' We're up there alone, magnitudes away from the also-rans with whom we share this planet. Now we're taking a concerted stab at creating computer programs that are as intelligent as we are.

We are witnessing just the beginning of the artificial intelligence (AI) era. The computer program AlphaGo defeated the world's top player in the complex Chinese board game of Go for the last time in May 2017. The program had run out of human competition. Instead, its developers designed AlphaGo Zero to simply play against itself without the aid of any historical game data. AlphaGo Zero taught itself how to beat all versions of AlphaGo in 40 days.

In this issue, we are pleased to feature expert commentary by Eric Sandosham, Founder and Partner at Red & White Consulting Partners LLP. Formerly Managing Director and Regional Head of Citibank's Decision Management and Analytics function in 14 global markets, Eric is currently based in Singapore. Specializing in Human Capital Analytics, Red & White Consulting Partners has client engagements across Manufacturing, Banking and Non-Profit organizations in Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. Eric and Marcia discuss the role of data analytics in Human Resources--and more. What exactly is the CHRO's role today? Neeraj Sanan's People Matters article, "How contextual intelligence is empowering CHROs," contends that today's businesses demand more strategic direction from HR that requires "an assertive, data-driven CHRO."

On February 8, we released the Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress, which enables you to easily voice content and publish podcasts directly from your website. By leveraging audio, you can provide your readers with an alternative way to consume your content and meet the needs of a larger audience. Today, we're excited to announce that the Amazon Polly plugin is now available on the popular Bitnami Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). On the AWS Marketplace, you can find the up-to-date WordPress image packaged by Bitnami and WordPress Multisite image packaged by Bitnami, which come preinstalled with the Amazon Polly WordPress plugin. Other Bitnami solutions, such as WordPress for Production or WordPress Multi-Tier, will also include the plugin soon.