MACHINE LEARNING EXPLAINED

We are surrounded by large volumes of text — emails, messages, documents, reports — and it’s a challenge for individuals and businesses alike to monitor, collate, interpret and otherwise make sense of it all. Over recent years, an area of natural language processing called topic modeling has made great strides in meeting this challenge. This article introduces topic modeling — how it works and what it’s used for — through an intuitive explanation of a popular topic modeling approach called Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

The volume of text that surrounds us is vast. And it’s growing.

Emails, web pages, tweets, books…

REAL WORLD AI

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In the summer of 2018, a wildfire in California, the Thomas Fire, destroyed 1,000 buildings and led to 22 deaths [1a]. The fire was triggered by electricity transmission (power) lines.

In another incident, also in California, power lines were blamed for a dozen wildfires that led to 18 deaths in 2017 [1b].

Many years earlier in Australia, in 2009, one of the nation’s worst fire seasons saw a whole town near Melbourne being razed to the ground.

The fire started due to power lines.

…

REAL WORLD AI

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In 2018, California experienced the worst wildfires in its history — 1.9 million acres were destroyed by more than 8,500 fires across the state[1]. The loss of life, injury, and destruction to property were devastating.

And California’s air quality suffered as well, due to the harmful ash and smoke emanating from the fires.

Not surprisingly, Sacramento city officials issued a health warning during that period, to alert residents about the deteriorating conditions — there were layers of ash on cars and the air was…

REAL WORLD AI

What did you eat yesterday? Did it include almonds, apples, blueberries, cauliflower, or cabbage?

For those of us who are fortunate to have plentiful access to these foods, we can no longer take them for granted.

And not because of climate change, land shortages, or destructive agricultural practices (although these are problems in themselves), but because of the humble honey bee.

Honey bees assist in over one-third of global food production, according to the University of Pennsylvania, and especially in crops like blueberries, almonds, and apples.

And they’re under threat.

Over recent years, honey bees have been attacked by a…

DIY INVESTING

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Forex trading is often promoted as being easy, automated, and very profitable — but is this too good to be true?

This article contains affiliate links, and if you buy through these links I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only suggest products or services that I have personally used or have otherwise vetted.

A young man in a cut-sleeve t-shirt is talking to me.

“Have you ever wanted to make money without any complicated software, all happening…

REAL WORLD AI

If you’re a coffee lover, you may have wondered how your favorite cup of morning brew gets to taste so good.

There’s the skill of the barista, of course, and the caliber of espresso machinery involved.

But there’s also the roasting of the coffee beans — getting this right makes a big difference to the taste of your morning cup.

Coffee roasting is a complex process that takes a fair degree of skill.

And it’s not easy to get a consistently good outcome amidst the hustle and bustle of a busy coffee roasting facility.

That’s why Norwegian coffee roasting specialist…

DIY Investing

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Forex trading is becoming a popular way to earn an extra income — and as more and more people get started with forex trading, a natural question is, “how much money do I need to start trading forex?”.

This article contains affiliate links, and if you buy through these links I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only suggest products or services that I have personally used or have otherwise vetted.

Is as little as 100 dollars enough…

IOT MACHINE LEARNING

TinyML is an emerging AI technology that promises a big future — its versatility, cost-effectiveness and tiny form-factor make it a compelling choice for a range of applications.

In parts of Asia, property damage, crop-raiding, injury, deaths and retaliatory killings are on the rise.

Why? Due to increasing levels of conflict between humans and elephants — human-elephant conflict (HEC) — in densely populated areas.

According to WILDLABS, 400 people and 100 elephants are killed each year in India alone due to HEC.

One way of reducing HEC is to establish early warning systems for communities living near elephant habitats. But…