ML/AI

Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) content from the past 24 hours.

On the AtScale blog, some old guy says BI-on-Hadoop is dead.

People

— The folks at DataCamp recognize the five top R package maintainers:

• Hadley Wickham (ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr,…)
• Yihui Xie (knitr, bookdown, rmarkdown, shiny, htmlwidgets,…)
• Dirk Eddelbuettel (Rcpp, RPostgreSQL,…)
• Jeroen Ooms (jsonlite, xml2,…)
• Achim Zeileis (colorspace, zoo,…)

— In The Huffington Post, Lolita Taub interviews Dr. Satya Mallick, co-founder of Sight Commerce, who explains image recognition and other aspects of artificial intelligence.

Issues

— Stephen Hawking predicts that automation and AI are going to decimate middle-class jobs. He should stick to physics.  It’s a good example of the Luddite Fallacy in economics, the belief that technological change necessarily produces mass unemployment.

— In a review of Virtual Competition, John Naughton wonders how you throw the book at an algorithm.

Research

— Allison Lynn explains the work of researchers seeking to democratize machine learning.

— Researchers at Dartmouth and the University of Sheffield use an MIT algorithm to map U.S. regions from census data about commuter paths.

Methods and Techniques

— On the Lab41 blog, “Patrick C.” argues that sometimes manual feature engineering is easier than feature learning with deep learning.

— In Part One of a series on the MapR blog, Carol McDonald explains how to use k-means in Spark to cluster Uber trips.

— On his personal blog, data scientist Burak Himmetoglu explains how to stack models for better predictions.

— On the Hyndsight blog, Rob J. Hyndman explains cross-validation for time series in R.

Hardware

— Intel reveals its AI strategy. On the Moor Insights blog, Patrick Moorhead dissects it.

— On the same blog, Karl Freund explains NVIDIA’s approach to reshaping computing.

Applications

— Reuters reports that Facebook has a project underway to detect fake news and offensive videos with machine learning. Linkapalooza here.

— In ZDNet, Bob Violino argues that deep learning will transform the future of the auto industry.

— Daily Mail reports that planetary researchers will use a recommendation engine to search for aliens, thus demonstrating the click bait power of the words “machine learning.”

Companies

— Software AG acquires Zementis for an undisclosed amount. The press release says that Zementis provides software for deep learning. This is incorrect; Zementis offers the ADAPA and UPPI scoring engines, which read PMML documents and produce record-level predictions.

— Apple confirms that it is working on machine learning and autonomous vehicles, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Storylanche ensues.

— Fox Business summarizes the year-to-date stock price change for five AI stocks: Alphabet, Amazon, Baidu, IBM, and NVIDIA. NVIDIA is far and away the winner, up 185%. IBM is #2, up 19%, which demonstrates that even dead cats bounce.

— Media company Valassis partners with cloud analytics company Lityx.

— Uber acquires AI startup Geometric Intelligence for an undisclosed amount.

Bottom Story of the Day

— In a video, Dave Mark demonstrates what happens when you let Amazon Echo talk to Google Home.