http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535041/automating-the-data-scientists/

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Automating the Data ScientistsSoftware that can discover patterns in data and write a report on its findings could make it easier for companies to analyze it.

By Tom Simonite on February 13, 2015

Why It Matters

Many organizations have more data than they’re able to interpret.

Whether your business is fighting cancer, serving online ads, or governing a country, employees who can dissect and explain complex data have become indispensable. +

Now researchers backed by Google are developing software that could automate some of the work performed by such data scientists, in hopes of making sophisticated data skills more widely available. When fed raw data, the “automatic statistician” software spits out a report that uses words and charts to describe the mathematical trends it finds.+

“It’s not meant to replace exactly what a statistician would do, but it can help a lot,” says Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge, who developed the software. “Sometimes it finds patterns that a regular data analyst would not,” he adds.+

Computers have made it trivial to run complex mathematical operations on large collections of data, and selling data analysis software is a growing business. But human creativity and expertise is still needed to choose and deploy the methods that can explain the patterns in a data set.+

The automatic statistician is one of a handful of tools being built to automate some of that expertise. When the system was given a decade of data on air travel, for example, it produced a nine-page report with four mathematical explanations for trends seen in the data that could be used to produce forecasts.+

Ghahramani recently received a $750,000 grant from Google to support the project. Later this year, a version of the automatic statistician will be made available online. After that, Ghahramani says, he’ll explore the possibility of launching a commercial version, while also continuing his research.+

The automatic statistician draws on a large collection of statistical techniques that can be combined like building blocks to create different mathematical models, says Ghahramani. The software first tries out the simplest of those methods on the data; it then selects the ones that best explain the data for another round of experimentation, adding more mathematical techniques to see what happens. The best model is then used to generate the final written report.+

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http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/meet-steve-pete-the-man-who-cant-feel-pain/story-fneuzlbd-1227222659540

Meet Steve Pete, the man who can’t feel pain Health Problems

by: DEBRA KILLALEA From: news.com.au 1 day ago February 17, 2015 3:27PM

Ryan lost his hand in an accident but still feels pain from his non-existent hand0:20

Steve Pete has broken his bones more than 70 times. But he’s never felt physical pain. Source: SBS

STEVE Pete has broken bones more times than he can count and once chewed part of his own tongue off.

The 33-year-old also shattered his arm so badly he initially didn’t even realise he was hurt until he saw the bones poking out.

While his injuries sound horrific, and no doubt are, Mr Pete has no idea he has even injured himself because he can’t feel pain.

The American suffers from congenital analgesia or congenital insensitivity to pain. While this has obvious plus sides, there are a lot more disadvantages than people realise.

“I’ve had so many injuries over the years that it’s hard to recall,” he told news.com.au from his home in Kelso, Washington State.

“I’ve broken so many bones. One time in the playground at school I was on the swing set going back and forth.

“I jumped off the swing, landed incorrectly and my bones shattered in my right arm.

“I didn’t feel it but there was bone sticking out, which was a pretty good indication I’d injured myself.”

Mr Pete, whose brother Chris also suffers with the same condition, said he was a baby when his parents realised something was seriously wrong after he chewed off part of his tongue, and he underwent a series of tests.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/technology/personaltech/googles-time-at-the-top-may-be-nearing-its-end.html?ref=technology&_r=0Google, Mighty Now, but Not ForeverFEB. 11, 2015Photo

A Google employee preparing his gear before setting out to capture images of Liberty Island in New York for Google Street View. CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo

Technology giants often meet their end not with a bang but a whimper, a slow, imperceptible descent into irrelevancy that may not immediately be reflected in the anodyne language of corporate earnings reports.

Old kingpins like Digital Equipment and Wang didn’t disappear overnight. They sank slowly, burdened by maintenance of the products that made them rich and unable to match the pace of technological change

around them. The same is happening now at Hewlett-Packard, which is splitting in two. Even Microsoft — the once unbeatable, declared monopolist of personal computing software — has struggled to stay relevant in the shift from desktop to mobile devices, even as it has continued to pump out billions in profits.

Now Google is facing a similar question about its place among tech’s standard bearers. And like those companies before it, its strength today — a seemingly endless reservoir of ads next to search results — may turn out to be its weakness tomorrow.

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http://blogs.technet.com/b/inside_microsoft_research/archive/2015/02/10/microsoft-researchers-algorithm-sets-imagenet-challenge-milestone.aspx

Microsoft Researchers' Algorithm Sets ImageNet Challenge MilestonePosted by Richard Eckel

The race among computer scientists to build the world’s most accurate computer vision system is more of a marathon than a sprint.

The race’s new leader is a team of Microsoft researchers in Beijing, which this week published a paper in which they noted their computer vision system based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) had for the first time eclipsed the abilities of people to classify objects defined in the ImageNet 1000 challenge.

In their paper, Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification, the researchers say their system achieved a 4.94 percent error rate on the 1000-class ImageNet 2012 classification dataset, which contains about 1.2 million training images, 50,000 validation images, and 100,000 test images. In previous experiments, humans have achieved an estimated 5.1 percent error rate.

“To our knowledge, our result is the first to surpass human-level performance…on this visual recognition challenge,” the researchers wrote.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/02/12/pinterest-apple-pins/23289605/Pinterest launches app pins

Brett Molina , USA TODAY1:09 p.m. EST February 12, 2015

Pinterest is adding new pins that will allow users to download apps from Apple's App Store without leaving the social network.

App pins will appear on the Pinterest app available for iPhones and iPads, and feature an "Install" button users tap to download an app to their smartphone or tablet.

"Let's say you're pinning workout inspiration to your Marathon Training board," says Pinterest product manager Julie Black in a blog post. "If you see a fitness app that helps you reach your goals, you can download it right from Pinterest."

Along with the app pins, Apple created its own pin board featuring apps from its App Store. Apple has experimented with social networks before. The company launched aTumblr blog devoted to iTunes.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535116/how-people-will-use-the-apple-watch/

How People Will Use the Apple WatchDevelopers and designers debate whether the Apple Watch will find its purpose.

By John Pavlus on February 17, 2015

Why It Matters

Wearable technology could make information more accessible and communication easier.

When Apple unveiled the first iPad in 2010, many pundits scoffed. Among the gripes: tablet computers had been tried before without success; most people already had laptops; and wasn’t it just a giant iPod Touch?+

The market, as we know, reacted differently. Tablet computers are now a hit—thanks in no small part to Apple’s savvy design, which offered people something that was instantly comprehensible and easy to use, but also flexible enough to suggest thousands of new applications.+

With the upcoming release of the Apple Watch, the company seems poised to repeat the trick. Despite a raft of existing smart watches from companies including Samsung, Motorola, and Pebble, wearable technology has resisted mainstream appeal, partly because the devices don’t feel particularly useful (see “So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb”).+ …