We used to lie awake worrying about how robots will take over the planet. Now, in light of recent news, we feel a lot better about our future robot overlords' softer, gentler sides. A few weeks ago, the Portland Guinea Pig Rescue in Oregon asked a scientist to develop an artificial intelligence animal-namer and the results are amazing. Janelle Shane, according to her blog, used a database of existing guinea pig names to develop a neural network that generates new monikers for the rescue's many piggies. Wouldn't you love to invite Buzzberry and After Pie into your home? "Neural networks are a type of computer program that mimic the way human brains learn," Shane wrote on Tumblr.

How would you perform accurate classification on a very large dataset, by just looking at a sample of it? One of his recent papers is about big data and similarity metrics. In this work Rocco proposes a deterministic method to obtain subsets from Big Data which are a good representative of the inherent structure in the data itself. This allows one to consider only a subset of the entire dataset, still performing at high accuracy if not better than traditional (eg. As you can see, there is always a solution in Big Data.