Kevin Lewis sends along this press release reporting what may be the least surprising laboratory finding since the classic “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001].”

The fourteenth annual worldwide R user conference, useR!2018, was held last week in Brisbane, Australia and it was an outstanding success. The conference attracted around 600 users from around the world and — as the first held in the Southern hemisphere — brought many first-time conference-goers to useR!. (There were also a number of beginning R users as well, judging from the attendance at the beginner’s tutorial hosted by R-Ladies.) The program included 19 3-hour workshops, 6 keynote presentations, and more than 200 contributed talks, lightning talks and posters on using, extending, and deploying R.

Bart Turczynski writes:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful and growing field, but some are still hesitant to employ it, seeing it as a black box. However, if you take a second to step outside the box (see what we did there?) when it comes to AI for business operations, the picture– and the path toward unbiased machine learning and transparency in data processes– becomes much more clear.

Here at AYLIEN, we host a fully-functional research lab of five NLP scientists who carry out leading-edge research into NLP, machine learning, and deep learning. One of the missions of this lab is to constantly feed research output into the models that power our services, so our engineers can build and maintain a world-leading NLP service.

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Earlier this year at the QCon.ai conference, I gave a short presentation, “The Case for R, for AI developers”. I also presented an interactive workshop, using R and the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, to automatically generate captions for images, and to create a tool to recognize images of hotdogs. Video from both the presentation, and the workshop (which starts at the 10:00 mark), is now available to view the QCon.ai website.

You wouldn’t know it if you’re coming from a data science background, but Microsoft products permeate the businesses world. A lot of documents are stored and shared within Windows environments, not all of them easily discoverable and interpretable with respect to personal information and data privacy.