Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are gaining more attention as days pass. Aside from the advantages that cryptocurrencies have like anonymity and easy international transactions, people are enticed by the fact that it can become a good investment. Apart from trading bitcoins for cash, you can also use bitcoins to buy gift cards, book flights, and hotels, buy furniture, or even buy real estate properties. Bitcoin purchases are not taxed at the moment since there is no way for third parties to identify, track, or intercept transactions that use bitcoins. Transaction fees are considerably lower as well compared to credit card transactions or services like Paypal.

The data science life cycle is generally comprised of the following components:

In a paper at NIPS ’15, Judea Pearl and co. put together a toy example when all of the standard multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms fail. The paper shows that a MAB algorithm can do worse than random guessing, how to overcome the problem in one such case, and raises questions that need to be addressed when standard MAB algorithms are used in practice. And as long as we’re describing human learning as Bayesian updating, the paper is also interesting as a comment on optimizing human decision making.

Trello has become central to how millions of teams work because it makes these teams more efficient. It allows teams to assign, track and complete tasks efficiently in a simple user-friendly solution.

The purpose of the Summer of Data Science is to learn a specific topic or complete a project or read a book or finish a course so you can check something off of your long data science “to learn” list (get used to it being long, data scientists always have more to learn, so it never gets shorter!), and have fun achieving goals along with other data science learners during a fixed period of time. The deadline should be motivating, to get you to start and finish something before the summer is over.

Data are becoming the new raw material of business The Economist

This post is authored by Erika Menezes, Software Engineer at Microsoft.

Import AI #97: Faking Obama and Putin with Deep Video Portraits, Berkeley releases a 100,000+ video self-driving car dataset, and what happens when you add the sensation of touch to robots.

DataRobot, the Boston-based Data Science company, enables business analysts to build predictive analytics with no knowledge of Machine Learning or programming. It uses automated ML to build and deploy accurate predictive models in a short span of time.

O’Reilly and Microsoft are excited bring you a new e-book on AI, titled A Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications.