Tech News

Last week was lined up with many exhilarating product releases from Amazon at their AWS re:Invent. Releases pertaining to Machine learning, IoT, Cloud services, databases, and many more were unveiled, which gave an altogether new outlook. Amidst all these, Amazon Web Services announced a fast and a reliable graph database built exclusively for the cloud. Presenting Amazon Neptune! Well, Amazon isn’t entering into our solar system. By Amazon Neptune, it means a fully managed graph database for end users, which makes building and deploying applications a cakewalk. It also allows organizations to identify hidden datasets within a highly connected environment. Let’s explore some of the benefits: It is built exclusively to cater a high-performance service for storing billions of relationships and for running graph queries within a millisecond. Neptune backs the famous graph models such as Property Graph and W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF). It also supports their corresponding query languages such as Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. It allows customers to build queries with ease. Also, these queries can be efficiently steered through highly associated datasets. It has availability of more than 99.99%. Neptune continuously monitors data and backs it up to Amazon S3. It enables a point-in-time recovery from physical storage failures. Neptune is fault-tolerant and includes a self-healing storage within the cloud, which means, it can replicate six copies of data across three Availability Zones. It offers scalable database deployment with instance, types ranging from small to large--as per your needs. Neptune is highly secure with different levels of security for each database. It makes use of Amazon VPC for network isolation, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption at rest, and TLS for encryption in transit. Lastly, known as fully managed, Neptune excellently handles database management tasks, be it software patching, hardware provisioning, configurations, backups, and many more. One can also monitor the performance of their database using Amazon CloudWatch. Neptune in action: Possible use cases In social Networks: With the help of Amazon Neptune, one can easily set up large scale processing of user profiles and interactions in order to build applications for social networks. Neptune offers graph queries that are highly interactive and provides a high throughput for bringing social features within any application. For instance, notifying the user with latest updates from their family or close friends’ zone. In Recommendation Engines : As Neptune features a highly available graph database, it allows one to store relationships between information such as customer interests, purchase history, and so on. It can also draft a query to fire personalized and relevant recommendations. For instance, add a friend recommendation based on your mutual friends. In fraud detection: A graph query can be built which allows easy detection of relationship patterns such as multiple people making use of a similar e-mail id, or people using similar IP address. In this way, Neptune consists of a fully managed service, which helps in detecting possible fraud cases by analyzing buyers who make use of fraudulent e-mail and IP addresses. In knowledge graphs: Neptune allows you to store information within a graph model and makes use of graph queries to let customers easily navigate through information. For instance, a person interested in knowing about The Great Wall of China, can also know the other wonders of the world and where each of them are located. Additionally, it can recommend other places to visit in China, and so on. Thus, with a knowledge graph one can give additional information based on varied topics. In Network/IT operations: By building a graph pattern, Neptune can track the origin of a malicious file i.e the host that spread the malicious file and the host that downloaded it. Though in its infancy, Amazon Neptune can shoot up to great heights as and when it is absorbed by many organizations. Although, it has many competitors, but it would be exciting to see how it paves a way amidst all, and shines as the brightest ‘graph database’ planet.  

This could be Amazon’s yet another shot across the bow to Oracle. The undisputed cloud king is well aware its database segment is a small fish in a pond dominated by Oracle. But as more number of enterprises move from on-premise to the cloud, Amazon's database market share could improve. One of the standout announcement from this year’s re:Invent conference was a “serverless database” based on and expanding upon the company’s fully managed Aurora database architecture. Aurora Serverless will let customers create database instances that only run when needed and automatically scale up or down based on demand. If a database isn’t needed at all, it will shut down until it is needed. This way, users will be able to pay by the second for the Aurora Serverless computation that they use – they won’t end up footing the bill for a database sitting idle overnight. In essence, Aurora was itself a pretty good database model in itself, in an environment where the workload was predictable. But the Amazon Web Services (AWS) eventually realized the workloads can be intermittent in some cases, and equally unpredictable at other times as requests may arrive in a span of few minutes or hours per day or per week. This is where the new variant of Aurora comes into the picture. Aurora Serverless has been designed keeping in mind workloads that are highly variable and subject to rapid change. Further, you are paying on a second-by-second basis, for the actual database resources you use. “Because storage and processing are separate, you can scale all the way down to zero and pay only for storage. I think this is really cool,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said, describing the serverless model that builds on a clean separation of processing and storage (an intrinsic part of the Aurora architecture). So in use cases when you have a low-volume blog site which is only used for a few minutes several times per day or week, or applications which peak for around 30 minutes each day or several times per year such as the HR budgeting and operational reporting forms, Aurora Serverless auto-scales to the capacity requirements. There could also be cases when the peak of activity is hard to predict, such as a traffic site which may get all of a sudden ‘active’ when it starts raining. Here again, the serverless database meets the needs of peak load, and then scales back down when the surge is over. This is a rather upright feature that has been introduced. Your developers may be using databases during work hours but they certainly don’t need them on nights or weekends. Thanks to Aurora Serverless, your database automatically shuts down when not in use. On the other hand, manually managing database capacity for each application is not a sensible approach – it can take up valuable time and lead to inefficient use of database resources. With Aurora Serverless, you simply create a database endpoint, optionally specify the desired database capacity range, and connect your applications. The endpoint is a simple proxy that routes your queries to a rapidly scaled fleet of database resources. This allows your connections to remain intact without disruptions, even as scaling operations take place behind the scenes. You can also migrate between standard and serverless configurations with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Such  an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration where the database automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales up or down capacity based on your application's needs, Aurora Serverless is truly how you ‘reinvent’ an Aurora database. 2018 will make it more clear how the new database is actually implemented. Meanwhile, you can sign up for the preview of Aurora Serverless by filling up this form.

This week Amazon re:invent, AI-powered bots and cryptocurrencies rule the news. Here is a quick rundown of news that happened this week that’s worth your time! News Highlights Data science announcements at Amazon re:invent 2017 IOTA, the cryptocurrency that uses Tangle instead of blockchain, announces Data Marketplace for Internet of Things Cloudera Altus Analytic DB: Modernizing the cloud-based data warehouses What if robots get you a job! Enter Helena, the first artificial intelligence recruiter ABBYY’s AI-powered Real-Time recognition SDK helps developers add ‘instant’ text capture functionality to mobile apps Meet SAM: World’s first artificial intelligence politician! In other News 1st Dec.’ 17 – Headlines Amazon is putting “Alexa for business” Introducing the AIY Vision Kit: Add computer vision to your maker projects Health Wizz unveils blockchain platform to give patients control of health data H2O.ai secures $40 million to democratize artificial intelligence for the enterprise Impetus Technologies to host meetup on anomaly detection techniques using Apache Spark Uptake raises $117M at $2.3B valuation for industrial predictive analytics CrowdRiff releases ‘smart’ visual content marketing platform 30th Nov.’ 17 – Headlines AWS IoT Analytics: Amazon announces dedicated analytics service for IoT data SageMaker: AWS makes it easier to build and deploy machine learning models AWS DeepLens: Amazon unveils deep learning powered wireless video camera for developers Amazon Translate: A neural machine translation service more accurate and scalable Aurora Serverless: AWS announces a serverless database service where users only pay for the processing when the database is actually doing work Mozilla releases open source Speech Recognition Model and voice dataset 29th Nov.’ 17 – Headlines Bitcoin cryptocurrency smashes through $10,000 record, as experts warn of bubbles Bokeh 0.12.11 released Cloudera announces beta version of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB China’s Baidu, Xiaomi enter pact to create smart connected devices under AI and IoT ecosystem Apache Impala upgraded to Top-Level Project Adobe demonstrates future Photoshop tool that uses machine learning to select image subjects DataScience.com now available on AWS Marketplace as a single-click offering 28th Nov.’ 17 – Headlines Researchers aim for unbreakable encryption in quantum computers as new breakthrough drastically increases the speed of current QKD transmission Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging: Nuance leverages Nvidia’s deep learning for radiology Change Healthcare, Dicom Systems ink strategic partnerships with Google Cloud to apply AI into medical imaging analytics Announcing AWS Machine Learning Research Awards to fund machine learning research Intuit to use AWS as its standard artificial intelligence platform 27th Nov.’ 17 – Headlines Nvidia’s AI processor to be used in GE Healthcare’s medical devices globally EnvoyAI launches with 35 algorithms contributed by 14 newly-contracted artificial intelligence development partners Google may add native dictation support to Chromebooks Lunit Unveils “Lunit INSIGHT,” A New Real-time Imaging AI Platform on the Web at RSNA 2017 Kia Motors America launches AI-powered virtual assistant “Kian” to help customers “Know It All Now” about any Kia Vehicle [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]To get the latest news updates, expert interviews, and tutorials in data science subscribe to the Datahub and receive a free eBook. To receive real-time updates, follow our Twitter handle @PacktDataHub.[/box]

Expert in Focus: Sebastian Raschka On how Machine Learning has become more accessible 3 Things that happened this week in Data Science News Data science announcements at Amazon re:invent 2017 IOTA, the cryptocurrency that uses Tangle instead of blockchain, announces Data Marketplace for Internet of Things Cloudera Altus Analytic DB: Modernizing the cloud-based data warehouses Get hands-on with these Tutorials Building a classification system with logistic regression in OpenCV How to build a Scatterplot in IBM SPSS Do you agree with these Insights & Opinions? Highest Paying Data Science Jobs in 2017 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Transforming the Gaming Industry 10 Algorithms every Machine Learning Engineer should know

Machine Learning was one of the most talked about topic at the Amazon’s re:invent this year. In order to make machine learning models accessible to everyday users, regardless of their expertise level, Amazon Web services launched an end-to-end machine learning service – Sagemaker. Amazon Sagemaker allows data scientists, developers, and machine learning experts to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. The below image shows the process adopted by Sagemaker to aid developers in building ML models. Source: aws.amazon.com Model Building Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to build ML models by easy training and selection of best algorithms and frameworks for a particular model. Amazon Sagemaker has zero-setup hosted Jupyter notebooks which makes it easy to explore, connect, and visualize the training data stored on Amazon S3. These notebook IDEs are runnable on either general instance types or GPU powered instances. Model Training ML models can be trained by a single click in the Amazon SageMaker console. For training the data, Sagemaker also has a provision for moving training data from Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift into S3. Amazon Sagemaker is preconfigured to run TensorFlow and Apache MXNet. However, developers can use their own frameworks and also create their own training with Docker containers. Model Tuning and Hosting Amazon Sagemaker has a model hosting service with HTTPs endpoints. These endpoints can invoke real-time inferences, support traffic, and simultaneously allow A/B Testing. Amazon Sagemaker can automatically tune models to achieve high accuracy. This makes the training process faster and easier. Sagemaker can automate the underlying infrastructure and allows developers to easily scale to train models at petabyte scale. Model Deployment After training and tuning come the deployment phase. Sagemaker deploys the models on an auto-scaling cluster of Amazon EC2 instances, for running predictions on new data. These high-performance instances are spread across multiple availability zones. According to the official product page, Amazon Sagemaker has multiple use cases. One of them being Ad targeting, where Amazon Sagemaker can be used with other AWS services to help build, train, and deploy ML models for targeting online ads, optimize return on ad spend, customer segmentation, etc. Another interesting use case of Sagemaker is how it can train recommender systems within its serverless, distributed environment which can be hosted easily in low-latency, auto-scaling endpoint systems. Sagemaker can also be used for building highly efficient Industrial IoT and ML models to predict machine failure or for maintenance scheduling. As of now, Amazon Sagemaker is free for developers for the first two months. Each month developers are provided with 250 hours of t2.medium notebook usage, 50 hours of m4.xlarge usage for training, and 125 hours of m4.xlarge usage for hosting. After the free period, the pricing would vary by region and customers would be billed per-second for instance usage, per-GB of storage, and per-GB of Data transfer into and out of the service. AWS Sagemaker provides an end-to-end solution for the development of machine learning applications. The ease and flexibility offered by AWS Sagemaker could be harnessed by developers to solve several business-related problems.

Continuing from our previous post, Amazon’s re:invent 2017 welcomed a lot of new announcements pertaining to three specific domains in data science: Databases, IoT, and Machine Learning. Databases Databases were one of the hot topics for the cloud giant. AWS released the preview of two new database services - Amazon Neptune and Amazon Aurora. Amazon Neptune Preview So what’s Amazon Neptune? A brand new database service from Amazon! It is a fully-managed, quick, and a reliable graph database service, which allows easy development and deployment of applications. It is built exclusively to cater a high-performance service for storing billions of relationships and for running queries within a millisecond. Neptune is highly secure, with inbuilt support for encryption. Since it is fully managed, one should rest assured about the database management tasks. Neptune backs the famous graph models such as Property Graph and W3C's RDF. It also supports their corresponding query languages such as Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. This allows customers to build queries with ease. Also, these queries can efficiently steer through highly associated datasets. Some of its key benefits include: high availability point-in-time recovery continuous backup to Amazon S3 replication across availability zones Amazon Aurora Amazon Aurora announced a preview of two of its new features at the Reinvent: Aurora Multi-Master and Aurora Serverless. Let’s take a brief look at what these two features have in store. Aurora Serverless It allows customers to create database instances that run only when required. This means, databases can be automatically scaled up or down based on demand, which will save a lot of your time. It is designed to handle workloads that are highly variable and are liable to rapid changes. Customers can pay for the resources they use on a second-by-second basis. This will save a lot of your money. The preview of this serverless feature would be available for MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora. Aurora Multi-Master It allows customers to distribute writes for databases over several datacenters It guarantees customers a zero application downtime to avoid failure of database nodes or availability zones Customers can also leverage a faster write performance from the software At present, Aurora Multi-Master preview is for a single region distribution. However, Amazon expects to put it to work between regions across the global physical infrastructure of AWS, by next year.   Internet of Things The next technology Amazon rooted for this year was IoT. Here’s a list of announcements made for IoT applications. AWS IoT Device Management AWS IoT Device Management allows customers to load, set up, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices securely, throughout the device’s entire lifecycle. Customers can easily log into the AWS IoT console in order to register devices, either individually or in bulk. Further, they can also upload attributes and certificates, and access policies. It also helps customers maintain an inventory, which has all the information related to the IoT devices, such as serial numbers or firmware versions, and so on. Using this information, one can easily track where troubleshooting is required. The devices can be managed individually, in parts, or as an entire fleet.     AWS Greengrass ML inference AWS Greengrass ML inference preview lets customers deploy and run ML inferences locally on connected devices bringing in better and intelligent computing capabilities within the IoT devices. Carrying out such an inference on connected devices reduces latency and the cost associated with sending the device data to the cloud for prediction. AWS Greengrass ML inference allows app developers to incorporate machine learning within their devices; with no explicit ML skills required. It allows devices to run ML models locally, get the output, and make smart decisions rapidly; that too without being connected. It also performs explicit ML inference on connected devices without the need for sending the data to the cloud. Data is sent to the cloud only in cases that require more processing. AWS IoT Analytics Preview Re:invent gave us a preview of AWS IoT Analytics, a fully managed IoT analytics service that provides advanced data analysis of data collected from millions of IoT devices. This does not require added management of the hardware or the infrastructure. Let’s look at some of its benefits: Allows customers to have access to pre-built analytical functions, which help them with the predictive analysis of data. Allows customers to visualize analytical output from the service The tools required to clean up data have been provided Aids in identifying patterns within the gathered data In addition to this, the new AWS IoT Analytics feature offers visualization of your data through Amazon Quicksight. It also combines with Jupyter Notebooks to bring in the power of machine learning. To know more about AWS IoT in detail, you can visit the link here. Machine Learning Re:invent introduced a variety of new platforms, tools, and frameworks to leverage Machine Learning. AWS DeepLens Amazon brings an innovative way to get a hands-on deep learning experience for data scientists and developers. Their new AWS DeepLens is an AI-enabled video camera that runs deep learning models locally on the camera to analyze and take action on what it sees. The technology enables developers to build apps while getting practical, hands-on examples for AI, IoT, and serverless computing. The hardware boasts of a 4-megapixel camera that can capture 1080P video and a 2D microphone array. DeepLens has an Intel Atom® Processor with over 100 GLOPS of compute power,  for processing deep learning predictions in real time. It also has built-in 8 GB memory for storing pre-trained models and codes. On the software side, AWS DeepLens runs Ubuntu 16.04 and is preloaded with AWS Greengrass Core. Other frameworks such as TensorFlow and Caffe2, can also be used. DeepLens has The Intel® clDNN library and lets developers use AWS Greengrass, AWS Lambda, and other AWS AI and infrastructure services in their app. Amazon Comprehend Tagged as a continuously trained Natural Language Processing (NLP) service, Amazon Comprehend allows customers to analyze texts and find out everything within them. Be it the language used (from Afrikans to Yuroba and 98 more), the entities (people, places, products, etc), sentiments (positive, negative, and so on), key phrases, and much more from within the text provided.  Comprehend also has a topic modeling service that extracts topics from a large set of documents for analysis and topic-based grouping. Amazon Rekognition Video With the Rekognition Video, Amazon now has a higher say among similar others in the market. Rekognition Video uses its deep learning capabilities to derive detailed and complete insights from the videos. It allows developers to get detailed information about the objects within the videos. This also includes getting to know the scenes that the videos are set in, the activities happening within them, and so on. It also supports a feature which aids in detecting a person, for instance, it is pre-trained to recognize famous celebrities. It can also track people via a video and can filter out any inappropriate content. In short, it can easily generate metadata from within the video files. Amazon SageMaker An end-to-end Machine learning service that aids developers and data scientists in building, training, and deploying machine learning models easily and quickly, with improved scalability. It consists of three modules: Build - An environment to work with your data, experiment with the algorithms, and have a detailed output visualization. Train - Allows one-click model training and tuning, at high-scale and low cost. Deploy -  Provides a managed environment, which allows customers to easily host their models and test them securely for inference, that too with low latency. Amazon SageMaker eliminates machine learning complexities for developers. With Amazon SageMaker, customers can easily build and train their ML models in the cloud. Also, with some additional clicks, customers can also use the AWS Greengrass console in order to transfer the models to devices that they have selected. To have a detailed view of how SageMaker works, visit the link here. Amazon Translate Preview Amazon also unveiled a preview of its 'Translate', a high-quality neural machine translation service. Amazon translate uses advanced machine learning features to enable faster language translation of text-based content. Translate uses neural networks to represent models trained to translate between language pairs and allows development of applications which can allow multilingual user experiences.   Organizations and businesses can highly benefit with Translate, as they can now market their products in different regions. This means product consumers can access the websites, the information, and the resources using their language of choice using automated language translations. Additionally, customers can also engage themselves in multiplayer chats, gather information from consumer forums, dive into educational documents, and even obtain reviews about hotels even if those resources are provided in a language they can’t readily understand. Amazon Translate can be used with other Amazon services such as Amazon Polly, Amazon S3, AWS Elastic Search, Amazon Lex, AWS Lambda, and many others. Amazon Translate service is currently in preview and can be used to translate text to and from English and the supported languages. Amazon Transcribe Preview Amazon launched the preview of its Transcribe, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) service. ASR makes it easy for developers to enable the speech-to-text capability into their applications. An amazing feature of Transcribe is, it has an efficient and scalable API, saving developers from the expensive processes of manual transcription. One can also analyze audio files stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in different formats such as WAV, MP3, Flac, and so on. In fact, one can get detailed transcriptions along with the timestamps for each word, and the deduced punctuation.

Google's AIY Vision Kit, Amazon's Alexa for Business, and more in today's top stories in data science news. Amazon Web Services in news Amazon is putting "Alexa for business" Amazon Web Services has announced a new initiative to get companies use Alexa in the office. Under the plan, the virtual assistant will help employees launch conference calls, organize room bookings, and even discuss their expenses. With the new scheme, Alexa for Business, companies will be given the tools to manage a fleet of Alexa-enabled devices. Admins will be able to enroll users, enable and disable skills, and connect Alexa to their conferencing equipment. They’ll also be able to build their own apps for the assistant, with Amazon suggesting functions like helping with directions around the office, reporting problems with equipment, and ordering new supplies. Users will also be able to access their company’s apps from home devices, checking what’s on their office calendar and remotely joining meetings. Alexa for Business is being seen as a direct competition to other virtual assistants like Apple Siri, Google Assistant, or Microsoft Cortana. DigitalGlobe to leverage AWS suite of machine learning capabilities DigitalGlobe has migrated its entire 100-petabyte imagery library to Amazon Web Services, thus giving its customers instant access to Amazon's vast library of geospatial images. DigitalGlobe's sister division Radiant Solutions and its partner ecosystem are also leveraging AWS’s frameworks and tools to build machine learning applications that allow their customers to incorporate valuable geospatial information extracted from commercial satellite imagery into their workflows. “Few companies work with the sheer volume of data that DigitalGlobe does. When working at this volume, it’s nearly impossible to scale and rapidly innovate without the cloud,” said AWS VP Teresa Carlson said, adding that DigitalGlobe was the first customer to use AWS Snowmobile – AWS’s Exabyte-scale data transfer service that uses a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck – to move their massive image library to AWS. Google in news Introducing the AIY Vision Kit: Add computer vision to your maker projects Google's AIY Team has announced its next project: the AIY Vision Kit — an affordable, hackable, intelligent camera. The AIY Vision Kit is easy to assemble and connects to a Raspberry Pi computer. Based on user feedback, this new kit is designed to work with the smaller Raspberry Pi Zero W computer and runs its vision algorithms on-device so there's no cloud connection required. The kit materials list includes a VisionBonnet, a cardboard outer shell, an RGB arcade-style button, a piezo speaker, a macro/wide lens kit, flex cables, standoffs, a tripod mounting nut and connecting components. "For those of you who have your own models in mind, we've included the original TensorFlow code and a compiler. Take a new model you have (or train) and run it on the the Intel® Movidius™ MA2450," Google said adding that users can extend the kit to solve their real world problems. A blockchain for health data Health Wizz unveils blockchain platform to give patients control of health data Health Wizz announced the upcoming launch of its blockchain-based solution designed to address the mounting problem of electronic health records, and provide patients more power over their own health information. Using the Health Wizz platform, every patient would become the arbiter of his or her own medical records. "Each time medical records are produced – by a doctor’s appointment, ER visit, hospital intake or self-reporting app – the platform would standardize them using a specification known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources," the company said. "Once done, the records are secured on the user’s own mobile devices in an encrypted space accessible only by that user’s own private cryptographic keys." To power its system, Health Wizz today announced a pre-sale of its digital token, which will run from Nov. 30 until February 2018. Proceeds will be used to develop the platform further and augment already existing venture capital investments. The formal launch of the platform will happen in March 2018. Other data science news H2O.ai secures $40 million to democratize artificial intelligence for the enterprise H2O.ai announced it has completed a $40 million Series C round of funding led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA with participation from New York Life, Crane Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of Transamerica and Aegon Group. The Series C round brings H2O.ai's total amount of funding raised to $75 million. The new investment will be used to further democratize advanced machine learning and for global expansion and innovation of Driverless AI, an automated machine learning and pipelining platform that uses “AI to do AI.” H2O’s signature community conference, H2O World will take place on December 4-5, 2017 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Impetus Technologies to host meetup on anomaly detection techniques using Apache Spark Big data company Impetus Technologies announced it will host a complimentary meetup "Anomaly Detection Techniques and Implementation Using Apache Spark" on Tuesday, December 5, 2017 from 6-8 pm Pacific time at the Larkspur Landing Hotel in Milpitas, Calif. The company said that space is limited for the event, and interested data scientists, developers and information technology (IT) professionals are asked to reserve a seat at the complimentary event by emailing at events@impetus.com. In the meetup, the StreamAnalytix team from Impetus will share insights on choosing the right anomaly detection techniques and demonstrate real-world use cases for finding variances in network traffic and financial transactions. Uptake raises $117M at $2.3B valuation for industrial predictive analytics Uptake, a SaaS startup that uses machine learning to read and understand how machines are working, and also anticipate when they may break down or need other attention, has closed a Series D round of $117 million at a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion, led by Baillie Gifford, with participation also from existing investors Revolution Growth and GreatPoint Ventures. It brings the total funding to over $250 million. “We’re on a growth trajectory now where there is virtually nothing standing in our way from being the predictive analytics market leader across every heavy industry, from oil & gas to mining and beyond,” said Uptake Co-founder and CEO Brad Keywell in a statement. CrowdRiff releases 'smart' visual content marketing platform Visual marketing software provider CrowdRiff said it has now processed over 500 million images for over 300 travel brands, and is releasing new visual marketing capabilities powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. CEO Dan Holowack announced this new release at the DTTT Global conference in Brussels, Belgium, where he is co-presenting a session, "Making the Shift to Visual Marketing," together with Amber King, Director, U.S. Marketing at Colorado Tourism Office. "The volume of available visual content is larger than ever before, and finding the perfect visuals that meet both brand and performance goals is a time-consuming and largely manual process," Holowack said, adding that CrowdRiff's latest release addresses "the most common problems marketing teams face when producing visual content, at every stage of the visual content lifecycle."

Amazon's latest announcements from AWS re:Invent 2017, Mozilla's Speech Recognition Model, and IOTA's Data Marketplace in today's trending stories around artificial intelligence (AI) and data science news. re:Invent 2017 in data science news AWS IoT Analytics: Amazon announces dedicated analytics service for IoT data To drive insights out of the huge data IoT generates, Amazon Web Services launched a dedicated IoT analytics service called AWS IoT Analytics. The IoT analytics tool lets users gather, store and then query the messages coming from the IoT sensors, while extracting specific sets of data on a regular basis. “With the AWS IoT Analytics service, you can process messages, gather and store large amounts of device data, as well as, query your data. Also, the new AWS IoT Analytics service feature integrates with Amazon Quicksight for visualization of your data and brings the power of machine learning through integration with Jupyter Notebooks,” the company said in its blog post. SageMaker: AWS makes it easier to build and deploy machine learning models AWS SageMaker is an end-to-end machine learning service making it easier for developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. With a goal to simplify machine learning and democratize deep learning models, SageMaker starts with an authoring component for data cleaning and processing, and offers scalable model hosting and training. Other than the built-in algorithms and one-click training, SageMaker has a new feature Hyper Parameter Optimization, using which developers can check a box at the beginning of tuning their model, and it will find the best parameters for their machine learning model. AWS DeepLens: Amazon unveils deep learning powered wireless video camera for developers Amazon has announced AWS DeepLens, a wireless AI camera that uses deep learning to run real-time computer vision models. DeepLens consists of an HD (1080p) video camera and an Intel Atom X5 processor that can process over 100 billion deep learning operations per second. The camera runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and is preloaded with the Greengrass Core. Amazon said it will pair DeepLens with SageMaker, another new platform being announced at re:Invent for developing and distributing machine learning algorithms. "Developers can extend these tutorials to create their own custom, deep learning-powered projects with AWS Lambda functions," writes Amazon. "AWS DeepLens could be programmed to recognize the numbers on a license plate and trigger a home automation system to open a garage door, or AWS DeepLens could recognize when the dog is on the couch and send a text to its owner." DeepLens is priced at $250 and includes wireless connectivity; it has a 2D microphone array and 8GB of onboard storage. It also features USB and microHDMI ports for connecting to a PC to export data. Amazon Translate: A neural machine translation service more accurate and scalable Amazon has announced a neural machine translation service named Amazon Translate, to deliver fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Amazon Translate will use machine learning and deep learning models to deliver more accurate and more natural sounding translation than traditional statistical and rule-based translation algorithms. Apart from accuracy, it is highly scalable, meaning it easily translates large volumes of text efficiently, localizing websites and applications for international users. To preview Amazon Translate, click here. Aurora Serverless: AWS announces a serverless database service where users only pay for the processing when the database is actually doing work Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division has announced a new database service making it easier and cheaper to quickly launch relational databases that don’t need to process data continuously. Aurora Serverless users only pay for the processing when the database is actually doing work. Customers no longer have to provision or manage database capacity, and the database automatically starts, scales, and shuts down based on application workload. Customers simply create an endpoint through the AWS Management Console, specify the minimum and maximum capacity needs of their application, and Amazon Aurora handles the rest. Mozilla in data science news Mozilla releases open source Speech Recognition Model and voice dataset Mozilla has announced the initial release of its open source speech recognition model. The system is based on research from Baidu’s Deep Speech project, and was trained using a data set of almost 400,000 voice recordings from over 20,000 people. Mozilla said its system offers a word error rate of about 6.5 percent, not quite as good as human beings at recognizing speech, but still pretty close. The company is also releasing the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset, which was contributed to by nearly 20,000 people globally. No blockchain, but Tangle.. Cryptocurrency IOTA announces Data Marketplace for Internet of Things, uses new technique Tangle to distribute and decentralize its ledger Upcoming cryptocurrency startup IOTA has launched a new micropayment-based Data Marketplace that's powered by distributed ledger technology. The publicly data marketplace is specially designed for the Internet of Things. The initiative has gathered participation from more than 20 global organizations, including Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture and Fujitsu. Research groups from leading universities in the world are also working on it. The marketplace aims to give connected devices the ability to securely transfer, buy and sell datasets using a “tangle” based distributed ledger technology for storing transactions. In contrast, most other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ether use blockchain technology. The IOTA Foundation claims that it is this decentralized permissionless ledger, where the data will be hosted, that will eventually ensure that the data being sold on IOTA's marketplace is tamper-proof. Co-founders Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø believe Tangle offers free transactions and much better scaling opportunities.

Up-and-coming cryptocurrency startup IOTA has partnered with more than 20 corporate behemoths such as Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture and Fujitsu to build a reliable Data Marketplace for data sharing and monetizing. Several research groups from universities around the world are also involved in the project. According to IOTA, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are generated on a daily basis, but almost 99% is lost because there is no safe place to exchange and share this data securely. “Any kind of data can be monetized,” said David Sønstebø, who co-founded the Internet-of-Things based cryptocurrency, “If you have a weather station collecting wind, temperature, humidity, and barometric data, for instance, you can sell that to an entity that is doing climatic research.” The marketplace aims to give connected devices the ability to securely transfer, buy and sell datasets using a “tangle” based distributed ledger technology. Other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether use blockchain technology in contrast. “IOTA is kind of the first distributed ledger that goes beyond the blockchain,” Sønstebø said, “We got rid of the blocks and we got rid of the chains, which has resulted in getting rid of the major pain points or limitations of the blockchain such as fees, scalability, and centralization.” As soon as data is put onto IOTA’s decentralized ledger, it is distributed to countless nodes or the computers that connect to the blockchain network, ensuring that it is impossible to tamper with the data, Sønstebø claimed. Basically, Tangle is a form of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), a complex data structure where the devices on the network build consensus through the web of connections between transactions, as they randomly verify each other’s transactions. This method of verification means there’s no central ledger, and there’s no need for miners to power the network. It is this decentralized permissionless ledger, where the data will be hosted, that may possibly ensure that the data being sold on IOTA’s marketplace is tamper-proof. Since computing power in the Tangle grows as the network grows, IOTA is promising free, fast transactions. The marketplace demo will run until January, IOTA stated, adding that they will release a series of blog posts and case studies to highlight how companies can use the technology and benefit from it. While the technology is still new, it may act as a catalyst for a whole new paradigm of research, artificial intelligence, and democratization of data. In tangle, IOTA has used an interesting technique to distribute and decentralize its ledger while addressing the core drawbacks of blockchain system. In their white paper released in October, IOTA had even said the tangle “naturally succeeds the blockchain as its next evolutionary step.”

Cloudera has announced the beta release of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, a data warehouse cloud service that brings the warehouse to the data through a unique cloud-scale architecture that eliminates costly data movement. Built on the Cloudera Altus Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) foundation, Altus Analytic DB delivers instant self-service BI and SQL analytics to users in a reliable and secure environment. In addition, by leveraging the Shared Data Experience (SDX), the same data and catalog is accessible for analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and others using the tools they prefer – SQL, Python, R – without any data movement. For enterprises, challenges with existing analytic environments have resulted in a number of limitations for both business analysts and IT. Because of resource constraints, critical reporting and SLAs are given priority while limiting self-service access for other queries and workloads. To support additional workloads and access beyond SQL, data silos have proliferated in organizations, resulting in inefficiencies in managing the multiple data copies, difficulties in applying consistent security policies, and governance issues. In turn, business users are struggling to analyze data across these silos and there is limited ability to collaborate with groups including data scientists and data engineers. Cloudera Altus Analytic DB removes those limitations through the speed and scale of the cloud. Central to Altus Analytic DB is its unique architecture that brings the warehouse to the data, enabling direct and iterative access to all data in cloud object storage. This simple, yet powerful design could deliver dramatic benefits for IT, business analysts, as well as non-SQL users. IT benefits from simple PaaS operations to easily and elastically provision limitless isolated resources on-demand, with simple multi-tenant management and consistent security policies and governance. Business analysts get immediate self-service access to all data without risking critical SLAs, and with predictable performance no matter how many other reports or queries are running. Additionally, they can continue to leverage existing tools and skills, including integrations with leading BI and integration tools such as Arcadia Data, Informatica, Qlik, Tableau, Zoomdata, and others. With no need to move data into the database, shared data and associated data schemas and catalog are always available for iterative access beyond just SQL, so data scientists, data engineers, and others can seamlessly collaborate. Senior vice president Charles Zedlewski said Cloudera is helping its customers "modernize their data warehouse both on-premises and in cloud environments" with the unique architecture. "With no need to move data into the Cloudera Altus platform, users can quickly spin up clusters for business reporting, exploration, and even use Altus Data Engineering to deploy data pipelines, all over the same data and Shared Data Experience without impacting performance or SLAs," he said, stressing on how the Cloudera Altus Analytic DB is making it easier for analysts to get dedicated, self-service access for BI and SQL analytics, all with an "enterprise focus." Key Capabilities of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, built with the leading high-performance SQL query engine, Apache Impala (now graduated to a Top-Level Project), puts the full power and flexibility of a modern, cloud-powered analytic database in the hands of businesses quickly, easily, reliably, and securely: Brings the data warehouse to the data: No need to move data into the database – saving time and simplifying IT management and security. Delivers instant analytics: With no pre-processing or moving data, users can operate on data immediately and iterate – again and again – for faster time-to-insights. Ensures data consistency: Everyone works with the same data, schemas, and structures – business analysts, financial analysts, data scientists, data engineers, anyone. Goes beyond SQL: Flexible self-service access lets users collaborate over shared data, using the languages and tools they prefer to work with - SQL, Python, R, and more. Built with cloud scale: Easy elasticity and performance for fast, adaptable, cost-effective analytics. The initial beta of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB will be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Sign up here to join the beta.

Amazon kicked off it's highly anticipated re:invent on 27th November 2017. For data scientists and developers, the event boasts of multiple hackathons, over 1000+ breakout sessions, a full day of learning opportunities, and hands-on experiences with AWS experts. The scheduled 5-day event also announced a number of releases and tools, specially catered for the data science and developer community. Here are some of the top announcements made till date. AWS AppSync – A service for building real-time, collaborative apps with offline capabilities AWS announced the release of AppSync, a service to build responsive web and mobile applications driven by data-intensive services in the cloud. The distinguishing feature of Appsync is the fact that shared app data is updated in real time. It also offers an offline programming model, using which the service can automatically manage the data operations for offline users as well. The service can add the app data locally for offline users and then update it to the cloud, once the device reconnects. AWS AppSync makes use of GraphQL, an open standard data query language for retrieving data from the cloud. GraphQL works at the application layer to define operations to be performed on the retrieved data and also works on the structuring of the data retrieved.  With GraphQL-backed AppSync, developers can retrieve and manipulate data from multiple sources with ease. Thus creating robust, collaborative and data-driven apps. H1 Instances – New Storage family AWS also introduced a new Storage Optimized Instance family during re:invent, called the H1 instances specifically for Big Data Applications, These include data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce, distributed file systems, network file systems, log or data processing, and big data clusters. The H1 instances provide more memory per terabyte of local magnetic storage and more vCPUs as compared to the dense storage (D2) instances. The instances in H1 are based on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors running at a base clock frequency of 2.3 GHz and come in four instance sizes (all VPC-only and HVM-only): Source: aws.amazon.com The two largest sizes support Intel Turbo and CPU power management, with all-core Turbo at 2.7 GHz and single-core Turbo at 3.0 GHz. Amazon GuardDuty – Threat Analysis and Protection Amazon’s GuardDuty is a Security Monitoring and Threat Detection service powered by Machine Learning. Announced on the 2nd day of re:invent, it helps cloud users protect their AWS accounts and workloads from potential threats. GuardDuty monitors information from multiple sources such as VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail Event Logs, and DNS logs to detect malicious or unauthorized behavior in the AWS accounts. GuardDuty then uses machine learning to find trends, patterns, and anomalies in the customer’s activities and data. Customers can enable Amazon GuardDuty with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Amazon GuardDuty requires no installation or management of any agents, sensors, or network appliances. Most importantly it does not affect performance and reliability. The findings from the security activities are presented at three levels, low, medium, or high. GuardDuty can also be integrated into systems such as Splunk, Sumo Logic, and PagerDuty and in workflow systems like JIRA, ServiceNow, and Slack. Amazon Sumerian: AI platform to build VR, AR, and 3D experiences Re:invent also saw Amazon unveil a new platform, Amazon Sumerian, for developers to build and host VR, AR, and 3D apps. These apps can run on head-based displays like the Oculus, HTC Vive, smartphones and tablets, digital signage, and web browsers. The tools and resources included in Sumerian include: A web-based editor, for constructing 3D scenes, importing assets, scripting interactions and special effects, with cross-platform publishing. An Object library of pre-built objects and templates. Sumerian supports importing FBX, OBJ, and other 3D assets to use in a scene. A JavaScript scripting library for advanced scripting capabilities. Animated hosts which are lifelike 3D characters customizable for gender, voice, and language. Integration with Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex to add speech and natural language to Sumerian hosts. Sumerian is free to use. Customers only pay for the storage they create. AWS Machine Learning Partner Solutions Next in line for AWS re:invent, was the launch of new AWS Machine Learning Partner Solutions program dedicated specifically to Machine Learning. AWS Machine Learning Partners provide solutions to help organizations address their data challenges, or enable ML workloads. They also offer SaaS-based capabilities for enhancing end applications with machine intelligence. The current data partners include Alteryx, CrowdFlower, Paxata, etc. for Data Services, Bonsai, C3 IoT, Databricks, Dataiku, and more for Platform Solutions and Anodot, Luminoso, and many others for SaaS/API Solutions. More data partners are listed on their official site. AWS Machine Learning Research Awards In order to acknowledge people contributing towards the machine learning domain, Amazon announced novel, AWS Machine Learning Research Awards. This program funds university departments, faculty, Ph.D. students, and postdoctoral who are conducting research in Machine Learning. The program would award recipients with unrestricted cash gifts and AWS credits redeemable towards Amazon’s cloud services. Selected participants would also be awarded training resources and the opportunity to attend an annual research seminar at Amazon’s Seattle HeadQuarters. Andrew Moore, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University says “The capabilities students have available to them at their fingertips today via the AWS Cloud are amazing, and it’s great that a sophisticated framework tool such as Apache MXNet is available. The opportunity to have the next generation of machine learning practitioners and researchers make the most of these tools is exciting and is uniquely enabled through this funding program. We can’t wait to get started.” There are still 2 more days to go before the conclusion of the mega re:invent. Keep an eye on our website for upcoming releases. In case you want to view the live coverage you can find it here.

Bitcoin prices crossing 5-figure, Bokeh incremental release 0.12.11, Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, and more in today's trending stories around data science news. Bitcoin Mania rolls on with 10k landmark Bitcoin cryptocurrency smashes through $10,000 record, as experts warn of bubbles On a wild ride this year, Bitcoin has finally crossed the $10,000 record price for the first time. At the last close, the cryptocurrency was trading at 10948 US Dollar. The 10k mark was imminent, with an already huge anticipation built around the industry, but just after hitting the coveted figure the digital currency saw an incredible hike in the subsequent four hours of the trade. Bitcoin, which experts say is in a massive bubble, is already up more than 875% this year. A new version from Bokeh Bokeh 0.12.11 released Python interactive visualization library Bokeh has announced the release of Bokeh 0.12.11, an incremental release over 0.12.10. Among the highlights, the updated version adds new step glyph method for drawing step lines. Also, the LOD downsampling now works automatically on linked plots and the Bokeh server has been made simpler to embed with less boilerplate. In addition to the improvements to layout, Bokeh 0.12.11 comes with several other bug fixes and better documentation. For full details, see the CHANGELOG and Release Notes. Additionally, examples for each release are uploaded to CDN. Click here to download. Cloudera claims to change the game in cloud-based data warehouses Cloudera announces beta version of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB Cloudera has announced the upcoming beta release of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, a data warehouse cloud service that aims to bring the warehouse to the data through a cloud-scale architecture to eliminate costly data movement. Built on the Cloudera Altus Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) foundation, Altus Analytic DB delivers self-service BI and SQL, removing the data silos in organizations. The initial beta of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB will be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To join the beta, sign up here. In other data science news China’s Baidu, Xiaomi enter pact to create smart connected devices under AI and IoT ecosystem Baidu is teaming up with smartphone supplier Xiaomi to develop advanced consumer electronics products powered by artificial intelligence and connected to the internet of things (IoT). The two companies announced their collaboration at Xiaomi’s first IoT Developer Conference on Tuesday in Beijing, where senior management laid out their vision of smart devices that will deliver what they expect as more enhanced experience to users. Apache Impala upgraded to Top-Level Project The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Impala has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles. Inspired by Google's F1 database, Impala was originally released in 2012 and entered the Apache Incubator in December 2015. The project has had four releases during its incubation process. "In 2011, we started development of Impala in order to make state-of-the-art SQL analytics available to the user community as open-source technology," said Marcel Kornacker, original founder of the Impala project. "The graduation to an Apache Top-Level Project is a recognition of the exceptional developer community that stands behind this project." Apache Impala software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. Catch Apache Impala in action at Not Another Big Data Conference, taking place on Dec. 12 in Palo Alto. Adobe demonstrates future Photoshop tool that uses machine learning to select image subjects Adobe has previewed an upcoming feature that uses AI to identify and automatically mask subjects in the image. The feature is called Select Subject and it uses Adobe’s AI platform, Sensei. From the “Select and Mask” menu, users can simply click anywhere on the image and it will automatically identify and select the various subjects in the image. From there, the same tools to change the background or edit the subject are available. Adobe teased the feature in a video, saying that it will be available in the next iteration of Photoshop. “Select Subject, powered by Adobe Sensei, is a tool that enables users to make their selections in one click. With Select Subject, you’ll be able to get started with your selections faster than ever before,” Adobe said, giving a sneak peek in the demo video. DataScience.com now available on AWS Marketplace as a single-click offering DataScience.com is now an Advanced Tier Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) and its enterprise data science platform is also available as a one-click offering on AWS Marketplace. “As the provider of a solution that integrates with AWS APIs to make launching Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources more efficient and facilitates access to data stored in Amazon Redshift and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), we believe we bring a lot of value to customers who are looking to scale AI and data science work across their organizations,” DataScience.com Chief Strategy Officer William Merchan said.

She is Helena. She is virtual – a robot, yes – a matchmaker that uses AI and machine learning to connect the right candidate for the right job opportunity. The bot goes further. After scouting the best candidates, and matching them to available roles, she (that’s the gender inventors decided upon) approaches them on behalf of the organizations. In other words, a full-fledged corporate headhunter driven by artificial intelligence. Or you may call it a simplified job-hunting tool from the other end. In essence, the AI-powered virtual assistant plays the dual role, serving not only as a company headhunter but also as job seeker’s agent, meaning both sides do not have to search for each other. As an AI agent, Helena allows professionals to discreetly and ‘passively’ receive job opportunities from companies. Once the candidate shows interest, she refers them to the company and ensures they respond as quickly as possible. It has taken the AI startup Woo over two years to build Helena, putting together what they call a 'dream team' of the best recruiters and data scientists from industry-leading companies such as Google and Facebook, other than the top algorithm engineers from the market. And while it takes real stuff to train the ‘unreal’ headhunter robot how to think and make decisions like human recruiters, Helena has got smarter over time through employer feedback and machine learning. According to the company, she is out-performing human recruiters in the quality of her match-making and the speed of her performance. She is “constantly calibrating and fine-tuning her decision-making based on the client’s dynamic needs and feedback.” “If you think about an interview, it’s an outcome of a lack of information on both sides,” Woo CEO and founder Liran Kotzer says. “But if there’s a machine that knows everything—like a god—knows about your past experiences, about your projects, your culture—the machine is going to tell you that there’s a perfect fit and both parties won’t question it.” So are the Helenas going to totally disrupt the future of recruitment? There are both sides of the argument. But you can’t take away the fact that the AI assistant is infinitely scalable. Unlike her human counterparts, Helena has the capacity to handle an unlimited amount of candidates. Free from individual views and biases! That qualifies as fair – up from fair enough – in terms of selection criteria. Here, your candidature is considered based on scientific algorithms considering your past success, trends, CTQs, and metric-based relevant data sets. It has a potential of bringing a new era of transparency. “Helena turns the tables on today’s labor intensive and largely unscientific recruitment process. Unlike using an expensive headhunter to manually source and screen a limited number of candidates for specific jobs, Helena uses data science to hire,” Kotzer adds. Connecting possible employees with their would-be employers – without the intervention of either – is too much of an automated concept. But the start has shown remarkable accuracy in the matchmaking. Woo claims its headhunting software has a 52 percent success rate of interested candidates accepting job interviews. That is nearly twice that of human recruiters, isn’t it? For people on both sides of the interview table, the hiring process is tedious. There are stacks of resumes, cover letters, supplementary documents, LinkedIn profiles, and countless job interviews. It makes a definite sense to automate the repetitive tasks if we have the requisite analytical insights for the data leading to optimized job matches. That prepares the perfect ground for artificial intelligence to take over. You would not call Helena ‘just another bot’ for at least attempting to solve the age-old problem of recruitment bias.

A new breakthrough in quantum encryption, robotic headhunter Helena, new AI products to leverage machine learning for Radiology, and Amazon-Intuit AI partnership among today's trending news in data science news. A new technique to transmit quantum encryption codes quickly and safely Researchers aim for unbreakable encryption in quantum computers as new breakthrough drastically increases the speed of current QKD transmission Amid possible security threats to the forthcoming quantum computers, researchers have been trying to make the quantum data encryption hack-proof. In this regard, photon-based quantum encryption could help companies better defend against cyber threats, which is now one step closer to reality thanks to a breakthrough research from Duke University. In the new system, researchers have increased the speed of QKD (quantum key distribution) transmission by between five and 10 times the current rates. Up until now, speeds were restricted to between tens to hundreds of kilobits a second. QKD transmission is theoretically unhackable because it utilizes quantum uncertainty in data transmission: If an attacker even tries to read the encryption key it will change its state, notifying the sender and recipient that they're under attack. Interestingly, the researchers developed the system with nothing but commercially available telecommunication hardware. One of them said that the hardware used by the research team could be even engineered to fit into a single computer-sized box, and it could become a feasible piece of security hardware in the near future. Their paper is available here. Now an AI to connect the right candidate for the right job opportunity Announcing Helena, the first ever robotic headhunter for employers Woo has launched a new AI-powered headhunter ‘Helena’ that automatically scouts, approaches and sources the best candidates on behalf of employers. Unlike using an expensive headhunter to manually source and screen a limited number of candidates for specific jobs, Helena uses data science to hire. Helena serves not only as company headhunter; she also serves as job seeker’s agent, sparing both sides the need to actively search for each other. Woo said it has invested more than two years building Helena, by putting together a 'dream team' of the best recruiters and data scientists from industry-leading companies such as Google and Facebook, as well as top algorithm engineers. Announcing new AI solutions at Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging: Nuance leverages Nvidia’s deep learning for radiology At the ongoing Radiological Society of North America conference (RSNA) in Chicago, Nuance Communications and Nvidia will show a live demo of a new solution they have jointly developed to use machine learning into radiology: Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging. Nuance will be in South Hall A, Booth 2700, and Nvidia will be in North Hall 3, Booth 8543 at the RSNA. Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging combines Nvidia’s deep learning platform with Nuance’s PowerScribe radiology reporting and PowerShare image exchange network, used by 70 percent of all radiologists in the United States. The Marketplace makes it easy for radiology departments to seamlessly integrate AI into existing workflows. For instance, Nvidia’s deep learning platform can ingest normal and abnormal chest X-ray data, and create an algorithm to identify which images display pneumonia. Nuance can then integrate the images into different categories, alerting radiologists how each individual case should be prioritized. Change Healthcare, Dicom Systems ink strategic partnerships with Google Cloud to apply AI into medical imaging analytics At the ongoing RSNA conference, Change Healthcare and DICOM Systems have collaborated with Google Cloud to help hospitals tackle the storage challenges, improve radiology workflows, and bring machine learning to imaging analytics among others. Change Healthcare has teamed up with Google Cloud to develop new tools for radiologists, building a scalable data infrastructure to enable more effective insights via machine-learning technology. Whereas Dicom Systems said it is working as a technology partner with Google Cloud to launch a hybrid cloud VNA, de-identification and imaging data supply chain platform. Amazon Web Services (AWS) in data science news Announcing AWS Machine Learning Research Awards to fund machine learning research Amazon Web Services have announced the AWS Machine Learning Research Awards, a new program that funds university departments, faculty, PhD students, and post-docs conducting innovative research in machine learning. Amazon is working with Carnegie Mellon University, California Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School, University of Washington, and the University of California, Berkeley on this program. The goal of this program is to help researchers accelerate the development of innovative algorithms, publications, and source code across a wide variety of machine learning applications and focus areas. In addition to funding, award recipients receive computing resources, training, mentorship from Amazon scientists and engineers, and have the opportunity to attend a research seminar at the AWS headquarters in Seattle. Intuit to use AWS as its standard artificial intelligence platform Intuit Inc. has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, and plans to integrate AWS Lex technology for its QuickBooks Assistant and other products. Intuit will also run its companywide data lake on AWS. The personal finance company has been using artificial intelligence in products such as Mint, QuickBooks and TurboTax. From Amazon’s point of view, the Intuit partnership shows AWS is now being utilized beyond infrastructure as a service. A new AI-powered SDK to grab information from documents in real time ABBYY announces AI-driven SDK to instantly capture data from complex documents in 63 languages Document and content capture company ABBYY has released its new Real-Time Recognition SDK (RTR SDK). Using live streaming video from a smartphone camera, the solution can instantly extract text and data from even the most complex documents and objects including passports, ID Cards, bank statements, driver’s licenses, and more. The SDK grabs information in 63 languages. The SDK helps developers incorporate real-world document data into their apps instantaneously. “At the moment, we are working with neural networks to improve the accuracy of recognition further,” said Jupp Stoepetie, CMO at ABBYY. “We are also looking into the opportunities provided by the new AI chips in mobile devices. Apple iPhone’s neural engine, Huawei Mate 10’s neural processing unit, and other new-generation mobile processors power on-device AI and machine learning, which goes hand-in-hand with our on-device intelligent capture enabling continuous improvement based on the user’s feedback.” The ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK is available now, along with a developer toolkit and quick-start guides.

Voice typing is considered as Alpha, till date; where one doesn’t have to type. So, here’s for those who do not even want to waste their energy in speaking out. Abbyy, an organization for document recognition, data capture, and language processing, has released an AI-powered Real-Time Recognition (RTR) SDK. You don’t have to speak; it speaks for you, that too in 63 different languages! With the RTR SDK, Abbyy’s mission is to take data capture to an altogether different level. It allows developers to capture content, extract information from it and make it actionable using Artificial intelligence technologies. Developers can now make use of such an SDK to incorporate real-world document data into their apps instantly. The SDK is available to all developers and is ready for integration with existing or new applications for Android or iOS apps. In addition to this, a developer toolkit is also available, which supports an easy integration with the code samples and the quick-start guides. By using a smartphone camera, the solution is able to capture texts in real-time, be it within a document or over an object. Jupp Stoepetie, Managing Director at ABBYY says, “With real-time recognition, app users can effortlessly enter data from printed sources, documents, and bank cards”. With the RTR SDK, any application is capable of taking data entries virtually from a printed source. This allows fast, easy, and an accurate way of text recognition and classification. Presently, the Real-Time Recognition SDK is integrated within applications designed for different sectors such as e-commerce, finance, logistics, and government. Having such a solution within applications for instant data capture significantly speeds up various time-consuming tasks such as a registration, opening an account, entering credit/ debit card details or a promo code, applying for a loan, and so on. The most important feature to note is, the SDK allows you to do all the above without any security implications. As the text captured doesn’t require to be photographed, or saved in memory or onto any cloud or external servers, it best suits organizations which have improved data security standards. Jupp Stoepetie states,“The technology is very well-suited for processes that require compliance with security and privacy rules, as no images are sent to the server or stored on the device”. Below is an overview of the key features that ABBYY’s real-time recognition SDK offers: It includes an incredible OCR (Object Character Recognition) technology, backed with intelligent algorithms in order to recognize texts even from within a live video with a high accuracy rate. Real-time extraction of texts from natural scene objects, documents, invoices, and even from the screens (desktop, tablets, and so on) is now possible. One can now extract texts directly using the smartphone’s preview screen rather than taking a picture of the text and re-typing it manually. When asked about the future of the RTR SDK, and what the developers can expect, Stoepetie said that ABBYY is working with neural networks to improvise the accuracy of the text recognition within the applications via the SDK. He further added that ABBYY’s would be looking into the opportunities provided by the new AI chips within mobile devices. Such AI-powered devices can go hand-in-hand with the intelligent text capture by the RTR SDK enabling a continuous improvement based on user’s feedback. Two of the popular mobile processors that allow on-device AI and machine learning are Apple’s iPhone neural engine and Huawei Mate 10 neural processing unit. For a more detailed overview of the real-time recognition SDK, you can visit the official link here.