Channel charting is a recently proposed framework that applies dimensionality reduction to channel state information (CSI) in wireless systems with the goal of associating a pseudo-position to each mobile user in a low-dimensional space: the channel chart. Channel charting summarizes the entire CSI dataset in a self-supervised manner, which opens up a range of applications that are tied to user location. In this article, we introduce the theoretical underpinnings of channel charting and present an overview of recent algorithmic developments and experimental results obtained in the field. We furthermore discuss concrete application examples of channel charting to network- and user-related applications, and we provide a perspective on future developments and challenges as well as the role of channel charting in next-generation wireless networks.

In the abundance of information, both machines and human researchers need tools to navigate and process it. Structuring and formalization of data into hierarchies, such as trees, may establish the relations between the data required for efficient machine processing and may make the information more readable for data analysts. Yet, in more complex domains, such as in natural language processing, relations between concepts go beyond simple hierarchies and form thesaurus-like networks. For such cases, researchers use ontologies as common vocabularies for specialists who need to share information in a domain. Ontologies were first defined as "explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them" (Gruber 1993) and, more specifically, "a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization" (Studer et al. 1998) and are used in a number of applications, including the following, as specified by Noy and McGuinness (Noy and McGuinness 2001): Ontologies are the tools to provide comprehensive description of the domain of interest with respect to the users' needs It is something that we see when, for example, medical information is published on, several different websites.

In the abundance of information, both machines and human researchers need tools to navigate and process it. Structuring and formalization of data into hierarchies, such as trees, may establish the relations between the data required for efficient machine processing and may make the information more readable for data analysts. Yet, in more complex domains, such as in natural language processing, relations between concepts go beyond simple hierarchies and form thesaurus-like networks. For such cases, researchers use ontologies as common vocabularies for specialists who need to share information in a domain. Ontologies were first defined as "explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them" (Gruber 1993) and, more specifically, "a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization" (Studer et al. 1998) and are used in a number of applications, including the following, as specified by Noy and McGuinness (Noy and McGuinness 2001): Ontologies are the tools to provide comprehensive description of the domain of interest with respect to the users' needs It is something that we see when, for example, medical information is published on, several different websites.

Andrew Studer was admiring a massive lava fire hose at Hawaii Volcanoes national park when he spotted something unusual: a small quadcopter drone flying very close to the natural wonder pouring hot molten rock. "There were other visitors sitting out relaxing in somewhat of a meditative state, just trying to enjoy this phenomenon," said Studer, who recently captured a viral image of a drone hovering near the lava. "I do feel like drones are extremely obnoxious, and I'm sure it was frustrating for some of the people there." In recent years, there have been growing concerns about technology invading national parks, with drones and other noisy gadgets disrupting wilderness areas, wildlife habitats and other recreational areas. While the boom in drones has increasingly spoiled the natural sound that the National Park Service (NPS) is charged with protecting, there has also been a rising number of reports of social media use leading hikers to snap inappropriate and dangerous selfies, threatening wildlife and the environment in the process.

FinancialForce's latest high profile hire, Fred Studer, says the more time they can give back to customers, the better. Studer is the first chief marketing officer (CMO) of cloud ERP vendor FinancialForce, joining long-time friend and mentor Tod Nielsen who was recently appointed chief executive. AccountingWEB caught up with Studer, a former Oracle, Microsoft and NetSuite executive, to find out more about his accounting roots and his future vision for FinancialForce. Studer exudes enthusiasm and marketing flair, declaring at one point in our interview his quest to "bring sexy back to accounting", but he remains rooted in accounting and helping transform and evolve finance. Studer said he was drawn to the FinancialForce role in part due to his background studying finance and accounting, and then working as a managerial accountant rising up to assistant controller.

We develop a new model and algorithms for machine learning-based learning analytics, which estimate a learner's knowledge of the concepts underlying a domain, and content analytics, which estimate the relationships among a collection of questions and those concepts. Our model represents the probability that a learner provides the correct response to a question in terms of three factors: their understanding of a set of underlying concepts, the concepts involved in each question, and each question's intrinsic difficulty. We estimate these factors given the graded responses to a collection of questions. The underlying estimation problem is ill-posed in general, especially when only a subset of the questions are answered. The key observation that enables a well-posed solution is the fact that typical educational domains of interest involve only a small number of key concepts. Leveraging this observation, we develop both a bi-convex maximum-likelihood and a Bayesian solution to the resulting SPARse Factor Analysis (SPARFA) problem. We also incorporate user-defined tags on questions to facilitate the interpretability of the estimated factors. Experiments with synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Finally, we make a connection between SPARFA and noisy, binary-valued (1-bit) dictionary learning that is of independent interest.

Knowledge portals provide views onto domain-specific information on the World Wide Web, thus helping their users find relevant, domain-specific information. The construction of intelligent access and the contribution of information to knowledge portals, however, remained an ad hoc task, requiring extensive manual editing and maintenance by the knowledge portal providers. To diminish these efforts, we use ontologies as a conceptual backbone for providing, accessing, and structuring information in a comprehensive approach for building and maintaining knowledge portals. We present one research study and one commercial case study that show how our approach, called seal (semantic portal), is used in practice.