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).

Ever wondered how the news channel predicts the weather conditions accurately? The answer is because of data science. It always works in the background in the whole process of weather prediction. For all individuals and organizations, it is a great deal to know the accurate situation of the weather. Many businesses are directly or indirectly linked with climatic conditions.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence ("AI") are unlocking enhanced capabilities for machine learning, data interpretation and innovation, whilst also increasingly becoming useful in our everyday lives. AI now plays a key role in drug discovery, the advertisements we see recommended to us online, route suggestions for online mapping platforms, and auto-generated digital content. Recently, this has raised questions for traditional thinking around intellectual property law, with particular implications for patent ownership and invention. The question is – could AI be capable of being considered an inventor? An additional step, that an inventor must be human, was recently put to the test.

Learning dynamical models from data plays a vital role in engineering design, optimization, and predictions. Building models describing dynamics of complex processes (e.g., weather dynamics, or reactive flows) using empirical knowledge or first principles are onerous or infeasible. Moreover, these models are high-dimensional but spatially correlated. It is, however, observed that the dynamics of high-fidelity models often evolve in low-dimensional manifolds. Furthermore, it is also known that for sufficiently smooth vector fields defining the nonlinear dynamics, a quadratic model can describe it accurately in an appropriate coordinate system, conferring to the McCormick relaxation idea in nonconvex optimization. Here, we aim at finding a low-dimensional embedding of high-fidelity dynamical data, ensuring a simple quadratic model to explain its dynamics. To that aim, this work leverages deep learning to identify low-dimensional quadratic embeddings for high-fidelity dynamical systems. Precisely, we identify the embedding of data using an autoencoder to have the desired property of the embedding. We also embed a Runge-Kutta method to avoid the time-derivative computations, which is often a challenge. We illustrate the ability of the approach by a couple of examples, arising in describing flow dynamics and the oscillatory tubular reactor model.

A daily power walk or bike ride in old age may cut the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, a study has claimed. Research has long shown exercise in middle age and beyond can cut the chance of dementia -- which is most commonly caused by Alzheimer's -- by up to 40 per cent. Now researchers from the University of California say the disease can be prevented if people exercise in later life as well. Exercise is thought to help stave off the disease because it improves cognitive function, keeps bodyweight low and prevents plaque forming in the arteries -- a key cause of vascular dementia. But the latest study also suggests exercise in later life can reduce inflammation in the brain, which can cause Alzheimer's to develop.