Week at a Glance (9th Dec – 15th Dec 2017): Top News from Data Science

This week saw conversations spark around ethics, regulation, governance, and formulation of standards for ML systems even as nations, tech giants and large government agencies pick up momentum in forming partnerships and plans to dominate the AI race.

The trend of making ML/AI development more accessible as well as making ML/AI products more competitive remain on top of all tech companies from Google, Amazon, Microsoft to Kubernetes to newcomers like Landing.ai.

NIPS Special Coverage – Part 2

• A deep dive into Deep Bayesian and Bayesian Deep Learning with Yee Whye Teh
• How machine learning for genomics is bridging the gap between research and clinical trial success by Brendan Frey
• 6 Key Challenges in Deep Learning for Robotics by Pieter Abbeel

For the complete coverage, visit here.

News Highlights

• • NASA’s Kepler discovers new exoplanet using Google’s Machine Learning
  • Q# 101: Getting to know the basics of Microsoft’s new quantum computing language
  • Generative Adversarial Networks: Google open sources TensorFlow-GAN (TFGAN)
  • “The future is quantum” — Are you excited to write your first quantum computing code using Microsoft’s Q#?
  • Is space the final frontier for AI? NASA to reveal Kepler’s latest AI backed discovery
  • AlphaZero: The genesis of machine intuition
  • “The Blockchain to Fix All Blockchains” – Overledger, the meta blockchain, will connect all existing blockchains

In other News

15th Dec.’ 17 – Headlines

• Andrew Ng starts “Landing.ai” to bring AI into manufacturing, Foxconn joins in
  BlockSci version 0.3 announced with big performance gains, SegWit support, and numerous bugfixes
• Announcing Apache Hadoop v3.0.0
• Announcing free trials for IBM Spectrum Conductor Deep Learning Impact version 1.1
• Industrial Internet Consortium and Plattform Industrie 4.0 collaborate to facilitate interoperability of Industrial Internet systems
• Microsoft introduces “Insights” in Excel, “Acronyms” on Word, “Time to leave” on Outlook, Microsoft Whiteboard Preview, and “Text in image search” features into Office 365 suite
• Microsoft’s “AI Factory” initiative may boost the emergence of artificial intelligence market in France
• ARM releases pre-trained TensorFlow models and code for their speech keyword recognition code
• China develops three-year action plan to accelerate the industrial development of artificial intelligence
  

14th Dec.’ 17 – Headlines

• Microsoft makes Azure Bot Service and LUIS generally available for developers to build better conversational AI tools
• Microsoft announces new AI-powered search features for Bing with improved image search and object recognition, machine reading, and a more conversational auto-complete function
• Denso, Toyota conducting a trial to see if quantum computers can be used to analyze IoT data with commercial applications
  Introducing Model Server for Apache MXNet (MMS)
• IEEE releases version 2 of Ethically Aligned Design for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS), invites industry inputs

13th Dec.’17 – Headlines

• IBM releases 120 code patterns for building AI, blockchain, IoT and chatbots
  NVIDIA announces release of CUDA Toolkit version 9.1
• Accelerite launches ShareInsights 2.0, an end-to-end, self-service approach for big data analysis
• Google reduces prices of its cloud machine learning offerings
• Seattle plans for new machine learning apps and algorithms seeking inspiration from a Facebook Hackathon

12th Dec.’ 17 – Headlines

• Bitcoin price steadies, albeit a little, as first futures contracts begin trading on Cboe exchange
• Introducing Kubeflow to bring composable, easier to use stacks with more control and portability for Kubernetes deployments for all ML, not just TensorFlow.
• Lexalytics launches new pipeline for building machine learning-based, artificial intelligence applications for natural language processing

11th Dec.’ 17 – Headlines

• Practix using IoT tracking device in its Gyms for real-time data analytics
• Numba 0.36.1 announced with LLVM 5, the stencil decorator, and built with Anaconda Distribution 5 compilers
• Apple open sources ‘Turi Create’ machine learning framework on Github

Gensim 3.2.0 released: new Poincare embeddings, speed up of FastText, pre-trained models for download, Linux/Windows/MacOS wheels and performance improvements