We begin this journey through our favorite articles of the month by discovering and reading one of the most influential paper of natural language processing (NLP). Papers can be intimidating to read. So I liked the author's idea of combining screenshots from the original paper, explanations in plain English and code snippets with an actual implementation of the paper in Python. The article can be read at different levels: from the presentation of encoders, decoders and the attention function to real-world examples including the use of regularization and GPU training. One of the world-famous universities of California -- Berkleley -- launches its new data science program.

Which will win out – robots or human beings? This is a highly topical question. The South Koreans, and many more millions of curious people worldwide, became obsessed with this issue when a match was played between a professional Go player named Lee Se-Dol, and AlphaGo, a computer programme developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind. The match resulted in a 4-1 victory for the machine over the Korean star player. Given that Go was one of the last bastions of the games world to hold out against the learning and analysis techniques employed by cutting-edge computers, this defeat basically symbolises the considerable progress made by deep learning.