Last week saw the virtual running of the 12th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML). The event had been due to be held in Thailand, but instead went online and the organisers decided to make all content freely available. You can watch all of the invited talks, tutorials, workshops, and video presentations of the contributed papers. Also, find out who won the conference awards. There were four invited speakers: Suriya Gunasekar (Microsoft Research, USA) Rethinking the role of optimization in learning This talk presented an overview of recent results towards understanding how we learn large capacity machine learning models.

This event will be highly interactive. Dr Suzanne Little will give a short talk followed by group break-out sessions to discuss the topic in more depth. About the speaker: Dr Suzanne Little is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing, Dublin City University and SFI Principal Investigator, Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Before moving to the School of Computing at DCU in 2015, Suzanne was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at DCU. Suzanne originally joined the CLARITY research centre at Dublin City University in February 2012 and was principally responsible for the SAVASA project (Standards based Approach to Video Archive Search and Analysis). In 2013, CLARITY evolved to become Insight where Suzanne worked on and managed a number of projects in video analytics, motion analysis and data collection.

Young people have stopped picking up the phone to complain. Instead, they're increasingly likely to do business over webchat, messenger or Twitter. As artificial intelligence advances, it's likely we'll all be chatting with even more automated and intelligent bots - even if they appear on the surface like a human customer service agent. In February, the chief executive of Citigroup, Mike Corbat, suggested that "tens of thousands" of people who are currently working in their American bank centres are likely to be replaced by machines. A few days later, a report from two economists at University College Cork suggested that two in five Irish jobs might be supplanted by AI, with administration and customer service roles at particular risk, although another economist later suggested that their report was "overstated" and "fear-inducing."

Mathieu d'Aquin is a Professor of Informatics specialised in data analytics and semantic technologies at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics of the National University of Ireland Galway. He was previously Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, where he led the Data Science Group. In this interview, he speaks about research on semantic web technologies and specific application of web data technologies, which are two key areas of his work interest. You have been working for years on Semantic Web/Linked Data technologies. What will shape our future the most?

The industrial revolution was a major turning point in history. Until the advent of steam engine technology, economic growth and wealth-creation were stagnant. After 1800, economic growth statistics accelerated, and they have continued to do so ever since. This happened initially in industrial nations across Europe and North America, but everywhere else soon followed. In the centuries since we have witnessed subsequent revolutions in industrial technology, from chemistry and electricity in the 19th century to computer technology in the 20th. Today artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling the next industrial revolution, but this one is very different to what has come before.

Professor Barry O'Sullivan is an award-winning academic working in the field of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. He is the founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork, and a Principal Investigator at the Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing which is based at the University of Limerick. Professor O'Sullivan is a Fellow and current Deputy President of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EurAI), one of the world's largest AI associations with over 4500 members in over 30 countries. Professor O'Sullivan was President of the International Association for Constraint Programming from 2007-2012. In 2013 he received a UCC Leadership Award and won the Association for Constraint Programming Distinguished Service Award in 2014.

The Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCD has announced a new colloborative research project with Samsung Electronics estimated to be worth approximately €4 million. The Insight Centre for Data Analytics is a joint initiative between researchers at UCD, NUI Galway, UCC, DCU, and other partner institutions. The €75 million Research Centre is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and a wide range of industry partners. The research project is set to centre around artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems, such as recommender systems, play an important role in today's information rich world and in many aspects of our lives.

Algorithm selection is of increasing practical relevance in a variety of applications. The interested reader is referred to a recent survey for more information (Kotthoff 2014). All submissions were required to provide the full source code, with instructions on how to run the system. In alphabetical order, the submitted systems were ASAP kNN, ASAP RF, autofolio, flexfolio-schedules, sunny, sunny-presolv, zilla, and zillafolio. The overall winner of the ICON challenge was zilla, based on the prominent SATzilla (Xu et al. 2008) system.