Artificial intelligence (AI) was once the stuff of science fiction. It is used in mobile phone technology and motor vehicles. But concerns have emerged about the accountability of AI and related technologies like machine learning. In December 2020 a computer scientist, Timnit Gebru, was fired from Google's Ethical AI team. She had previously raised the alarm about the social effects of bias in AI technologies.

House of Gucci, in theaters this week, is ostensibly a drama about the family behind the Italian fashion house, but it is soon clear what the movie is really about: accents. It's a showcase for stars like Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, and Al Pacino to test-drive their Italian and Italian-accented English, and critical reactions have been mixed, to say the least: Lady Gaga was slammed by one expert for sounding more Russian than Italian, and Jared Leto earned comparisons to a certain cartoon plumber. How fair is all this grousing? To get an expert's perspective on the matter, Slate spoke to Garrett Strommen, who runs a Los Angeles company that offers language lessons and dialect coaching, among other services. Strommen has worked as a dialect coach and consultant for TV, movies, commercials, video games, and more, and agreed to explain exactly what is going on with Gaga and Leto in House of Gucci. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. Heather Schwedel: Can you tell me about your background with Italian?

Dante's Divine Comedy has inspired countless artists, from William Blake to Franz Liszt, and from Auguste Rodin to CS Lewis. But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet's death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms. The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante's epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols' English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante's. Ai-Da will perform the poems on Friday night at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

Successful adoption of Edge AI requires understanding and integrating different elements in a way that this stack can be seamlessly deployed in the target environment. Implementing an Edge AI application requires an understanding of aspects like the tasks to be performed, hardware, frameworks, and models. For deep neural networks to run at the edge; hardware, frameworks, and tools need to work collectively. As edge AI applications vary according to the use case, these requirements need to be thought through for each of the scenarios. It is necessary to select proper hardware, frameworks, and tools that will be compatible with each other and the best suited for the use case. Below we discuss briefly a few of the frameworks, hardware processors, and development boards.

The idea of lending your face to a robot may sound like the plot from an episode of Black Mirror, but it could soon become a reality. Robot manufacturer Promobot is seeking a face for its next humanoid robot, which will be used in hotels, shopping malls and airports from 2023. The firm is offering a whopping £150,000 ($200,000) to the brave volunteer, who must be willing to transfer the rights to use of their face forever. In its latest campaign, the tech firm is seeking someone with a'kind and friendly' face, to be used on a humanoid robot-assistant. While Promobot has specified that the volunteer must have a'kind and friendly' face, it is open to applications from people of any gender and age.

This paper presents a new task of predicting the coverage of a text document for relation extraction (RE): does the document contain many relational tuples for a given entity? Coverage predictions are useful in selecting the best documents for knowledge base construction with large input corpora. To study this problem, we present a dataset of 31,366 diverse documents for 520 entities. We analyze the correlation of document coverage with features like length, entity mention frequency, Alexa rank, language complexity and information retrieval scores. Each of these features has only moderate predictive power. We employ methods combining features with statistical models like TF-IDF and language models like BERT. The model combining features and BERT, HERB, achieves an F1 score of up to 46%. We demonstrate the utility of coverage predictions on two use cases: KB construction and claim refutation.

The metaverse, enormous virtual-physical cyberspace, has brought unprecedented opportunities for artists to blend every corner of our physical surroundings with digital creativity. This article conducts a comprehensive survey on computational arts, in which seven critical topics are relevant to the metaverse, describing novel artworks in blended virtual-physical realities. The topics first cover the building elements for the metaverse, e.g., virtual scenes and characters, auditory, textual elements. Next, several remarkable types of novel creations in the expanded horizons of metaverse cyberspace have been reflected, such as immersive arts, robotic arts, and other user-centric approaches fuelling contemporary creative outputs. Finally, we propose several research agendas: democratising computational arts, digital privacy, and safety for metaverse artists, ownership recognition for digital artworks, technological challenges, and so on. The survey also serves as introductory material for artists and metaverse technologists to begin creations in the realm of surrealistic cyberspace.

Talk about international curbs on face biometrics typically ignore two massive areas -- China and Africa. As China continues to use and sell facial recognition systems on scale that is unprecedented on Earth, regulation is not something that gets meaningful debate. And Africa continues to suffer the narrowmindedness of governments and industries in developed economies. An article in The Conversation touching on AI development on the continent lists three AI and machine learning programs underway in African nations when most people living north of the equator would be surprised that any work at all is being done there. But China surprised AI ethicists worldwide this week by endorsing draft United Nations recommendations intended to, among other things, convince signatory countries to ban AI for social scoring and mass surveillance.

Third Annual Awards Celebrate Irish AI Innovation across diverse sectors The 2021 AI Awards winners are: ACI Worldwide for the best application of AI in a Large Enterprise Terrain AI wins for the Best Application of AI to achieve Social Good INFANT Research Centre wins for a third year for Best Application of AI in an Academic Research Body Webio wins the award for Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application EdgeTier snaps the Best Application of AI in a Start-up award FIRE1 wins the Intelligent Automation – Best Use of RPA & Cognitive award STATSports recognised for Best Use of AI in Sector Eoin Kenny, University College Dublin wins the Best Application of AI in a Student Project award Dublin 25th November 2021: STATSports, FIRE1, ACI Worldwide, and INFANT Research Centre are amongst the top Irish AI innovators recognised by AI Ireland at the third annual AI Awards ceremony, sponsored by Microsoft...

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI).