Every two weeks, we find the most interesting data science links from around the web and collect them in Data Science Briefings, the DataMiningApps newsletter. Subscribe now for free if you want to be the first to get up to speed on interesting resources.
- AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch
Deepmind talks about their new AlphoGo Zero architecture. - Intel unveils new family of AI chips to take on Nvidia’s GPUs
Details are thin, but Intel says its new chips will boost deep learning training times. - The neural net tank urban legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened. - In China, a Store of the Future—No Checkout, No Staff
Wheelys tests a 24-hour store run entirely by technology. - The Supreme Court Is Allergic To Math
The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance — even an allergy — to taking math and statistics seriously. - China’s AI Awakening
The West shouldn’t fear China’s artificial-intelligence revolution. It should copy it. - A manifesto for Agile data science
Applying methods from Agile software development to data science projects. - AI Model Fundamentally Cracks CAPTCHAs
Scientists say they have developed a computer model that fundamentally breaks through a key test used to tell a human from a bot. - Google is gearing up its collaborative Jupyter offering
Interesting things are in the works at Google. Their hosted Jupyter environment seems to be coming along nicely. - OpenAI: Learning a Hierarchy
OpenAI has developed a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm that learns high-level actions useful for solving a range of tasks, allowing fast solving of tasks requiring thousands of timesteps. - Stop Using word2vec
“Word vectors are awesome but you don’t need a neural network – and definitely don’t need deep learning – to find them.” - Word embeddings in 2017: Trends and future directions
“This post will focus on the deficiencies of word embeddings and how recent approaches have tried to resolve them.” - Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help with Depression
Woebot combines cognitive behavior therapy with advances in natural language to create a virtual counselor. - How Adversarial Attacks Work
Recent studies by Google Brain have shown that any machine learning classifier can be tricked to give incorrect predictions, and with a little bit of skill, you can get them to give pretty much any result you want. - How AI Helps The Intelligence Community Find Needles In The Haystack
Technology from the startup Primer helps analysts find even the most obscure events they need to know about in a sea of data. - How to unit test machine learning code
“One of the main principles I learned during my time at Google Brain was that unit tests can make or break your algorithm and can save you weeks of debugging and training time.” - How our startup switched from Unsupervised LDA to Semi-Supervised GuidedLDA
“This is the story of how and why we had to write our own form of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I also talk about why we needed to build a Guided Topic Model (GuidedLDA), and the process of open sourcing everything on GitHub.” - Are We Ready for Intimacy With Androids?
Hiroshi Ishiguro builds androids. Beautiful, realistic, uncannily convincing human replicas. Academically, he is using them to understand the mechanics of person-to-person interaction. But his true quest is to untangle the ineffable nature of connection itself. - Streaming Dataframes
This post describes a prototype project to handle continuous data sources of tabular data using Pandas and Streamz. - How you can ditch PowerPoint and build better slides with Jupyter and Reveal.js
“In this article, I will introduce jupyter2slides — a little side project of mine that lets you easily create beautiful and interactive presentation slides using Jupyter Notebook and reveal.js.” - High-Performance GPU Computing in the Julia Programming Language
“In this blog post, I will focus on native GPU programming with a Julia package that enhances the Julia compiler with native PTX code generation capabilities: CUDAnative.jl.” - How We Built an AI to Play Street Fighter II
“For SDC, we knew we didn’t want a boring booth — after all, we had to be at the booth ourselves for two full days! So we did the obvious thing: Used Gyroscope’s AI to play and win at Street Fighter II Turbo on SNES, and then held a tournament between all the characters that Gyroscope learned how to play.”
