The iBrain is Here by @StevenLevy via @backchnnl

Apple isn't known for its work in AI but that doesn't mean it's sitting out this race. In this Backchannel article, Steven Levy offers an exclusive look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple.

This is a great article and very interesting reading. There is always such focus on Google that it was nice to see it from a different company.

VMware New Cloud Plan: Sell Stuff for Rival Clouds by Dina Bass via @infomgmt

The company will announce Cloud Foundation, which combines software for storage, networking and virtualisation into one package, as well as the ability to use that product as a service hosted in IBM's cloud.

I like the sound of this strategy - they need to find their own place in what is a crowded market.

SLIDESHOW: 100 Best Practices in Big Data – Non-Relational Data Stores via @infomgmt

The Cloud Security Alliance has released its report on the 100 Best Practices in Big Data Security and Privacy. As the Alliance notes, “Non-relational data stores such as NoSQL databases typically have very few robust security aspects embedded in them. Solutions to NoSQL injection attacks are not yet completely mature...

I particularly like slide 8 (there are only 11 so don't worry about the 100 title)

Machine Learning Becomes Mainstream: How to Increase Your Competitive Advantage by @_NidhiC and @Ronald_vanLoon via @CIOWaterCooler

First there was big data – extremely large data sets that made it possible to use data analytics to reveal patterns and trends, allowing businesses to improve customer relations and production efficiency. Then came fast data analytics – the application of big data analytics in real-time to help solve issues with customer relations, security, and other challenges before they became problems.

I love this article - it says so may things that are true.  It would be good to get your senior management reading this so they can understand the way things are changing.

Will Artificial Intelligence Defeat Cancer? by @AnnaDomanska_ via @IndLeaders

Cancer, the single most feared diagnosis imaginable, is being tackled by some of the biggest companies in the world using the most formidable weapon: à la artificial intelligence. In fact, the milestones we have hit in past two years in diagnosing rare forms of cancer using clinical data, has stumped the scientific community.

What a great use of AI.

Airline Flight Data Analysis – Part 1 – Data Preparation by Michael Kamprath via @DIYBigData

This is the start of a PySpark data analysis project concerning airline on-time performance. In this post, the usefulness of the Apache Parquet data format is explained as data is loaded and cleaned.

This is a great post and has code and a link to his github containing the code.

Introduction to Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) by Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh and Carlos Guestrin via @OReillyMedia

Local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) is a technique to explain the predictions of any machine learning classifier. Here's an introduction to LIME and how it works.

I found this really interesting. I guess this is a similar to SMART for objectives.