It's called'Aibo,' and is promoted as using artificial intelligence to respond to people looking at it, talking to it and touching it. Japanese customers have already bought over 20,000 units, and it is expected to come to the U.S. before the holiday gift-buying season – at a price nearing US$3,000. Why would anyone pay so much for a robotic dog? My ongoing research suggests part of the attraction might be explained through humanity's longstanding connection with various forms of puppets, religious icons, and other figurines, that I collectively call'dolls.' These dolls, I argue, are embedded deep in our social and religious lives.

FOR the time being, Cape Town has dodged a bullet. After months of unrelenting drought, the recent winter rains have begun to refill its parched dams. That doesn't mean things are easy. City residents are still limited to using 50 litres of water a day, scarcely enough to half-fill a bath. But at least so-called day zero, when the taps run dry and residents have to wait in line to collect survival rations of water, has been averted.

Forest loss is being driven by various factors, including commodity production, forestry, agriculture, wildfire, and urbanization. Curtis et al. used high-resolution Google Earth imagery to map and classify global forest loss since 2001. Just over a quarter of global forest loss is due to deforestation through permanent land use change for the production of commodities, including beef, soy, palm oil, and wood fiber. Despite regional differences and efforts by governments, conservationists, and corporations to stem the losses, the overall rate of commodity-driven deforestation has not declined since 2001. Global maps of forest loss depict the scale and magnitude of forest disturbance, yet companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations need to distinguish permanent conversion (i.e., deforestation) from temporary loss from forestry or wildfire.

Abstract--Social media conversations unfold based on complex interactions between users, topics and time. While recent models have been proposed to capture network strengths between users, users' topical preferences and temporal patterns between posting and response times, interaction patterns between topics has not been studied. We argue that social media conversations naturally involve interacting rather than independent topics. Modeling such topical interaction patterns can additionally help in inference of latent variables in the data such as diffusion parents and topics of events. We propose the Hidden Markov Hawkes Process (HMHP) that incorporates topical Markov Chains within Hawkes processes to jointly model topical interactions along with useruser and user-topic patterns. We propose a Gibbs sampling algorithm for HMHP that jointly infers the network strengths, diffusion paths, the topics of the posts as well as the topictopic interactions. We show using experiments on real and semisynthetic data that HMHP is able to generalize better and recover the network strengths, topics and diffusion paths more accurately that state-of-the-art baselines. More interestingly, HMHP finds insightful interactions between topics in real tweets which no existing model is able to do. This can potentially lead to actionable insights enabling, e.g., user targeting for influence maximization. A popular area of recent research has been the study of information diffusion cascades, where information spreads over a social network when a'parent' event from one infected node influences a'child' event at neighboring node [5], [11], [19], [6], [10]. The action of propagating information between two neighboring nodes depends on various factors, such as the strength of influence between the nodes, the topical content of the parent event and the extent of interest of the child node towards that topic. Explosion of social media data has made it possible to analyze and evaluate different models that seek to explain such information cascades. However, many relevant variables such as the network influence strengths, the identity of influencing or parent event for any event, and the actual topics are typically unobserved for most social network data.

The El Niño/La Niña pattern in the Pacific Ocean is notorious for its long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as "teleconnections," and believe that there are many more to be discovered. The new TRIPODS Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate. Researchers will apply data science methods such as machine learning, network analysis and predictive modeling to the growing flood of climate data. "There are fundamental challenges pervasive in data science that are epitomized in the climate science setting, making this collaboration a nice opportunity for advances on a number of fronts," said Rebecca Willett, professor of computer science and statistics at UChicago.

The Artificial Intelligence Week Middle East conference has wrapped up in Dubai, with PwC and Accenture among the sponsors and exhibitors featuring at the two-day event. Covering the banking & finance, government, and healthcare sectors, the Artificial Intelligence Week Middle East conference was held over the 4th and the 5th at the Park Hyatt in Dubai, featuring exhibitions, networking, pitches, and talks from some of the regional leaders in the field, including Xavier Anglada, Accenture Digital Lead for MENAT, and Stephen Anderson, Clients & Markets Leader for PwC Middle East. PwC in the Middle East, the event's official AI Consulting Sponsor & Partner, presented its recent annual AI report for the delegates in attendance, outlining the projected $96 billion boost to the United Arab Emirates' GDP by 2030 through the implementation of AI technologies – part of the $15.7 trillion possible worldwide windfall, and representing a 13.6 percent contribution to the UAE's overall GDP. Accenture – the AI event's Lead Digital Transformation Partner – has itself predicted huge gains for the UAE economy through AI adoption, amounting to some $182 billion in gross value add by 2030, while Accenture and PwC between them point to sizeable potential opportunities in the financial services, utilities, healthcare, education, transport, manufacturing and retail sectors. Unsurprisingly perhaps, consumer goods CEOs in the UAE are among the world's most enthusiastic for AI according to a further recent report by KPMG.And not just consumer goods CEOs in the UAE, but both wider industry and the government and public spheres are ready to embrace artificial intelligence – at least, if the line-up of AI tech conferences being held in the Emirates is anything to go by, with among others the Artelligence Forum having taken place in Dubai in April and the World AI show scheduled again in the city for April of next year.

Toddlers use the same gestures as chimpanzees and gorillas showing they really are just'tiny apes', claim researchers. One to two year olds use 52 limb and body movements to communicate - nine in ten of which are observed in great apes. This is a crucial stage of development when infants are on the cusp of learning language, say Scottish scientists behind the findings. Toddlers use the same gestures as chimpanzees and gorillas showing they really are just'tiny apes', claim researchers. Senior author Dr Catherine Hobaiter, of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews University, said: 'Wild chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans all use gestures to communicate their day-to-day requests.

Hurricane Harvey, shown in 2017. A new data project hopes to sniff out weather patterns. The El Nino and La Nina patterns in the Pacific Ocean are notorious for their long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as teleconnections, and believe that there are many more to be discovered. The new TRIPODS Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate.

Imagine there was a simple test to see whether you were developing Alzheimer's disease. You would look at a picture and describe it, software would assess the way you spoke, and based on your answer, tell you whether or not you had early-stage Alzheimer's. It would be quick, easy, and over 90% accurate--except for you, it doesn't work. That might be because you're from Africa. Imagine most of the world is getting healthier because of some new technology, but you're getting left behind.

Rise of frontier technologies like Artificial Intelligence has caused fears of robots taking over blue-collar jobs, but a UN expert says mass unemployment is not expected as humans still have the upper hand given their creative abilities. Ekkehard Ernst, Chief of Macro-economic policies and job unit at the UN International Labour Organization (ILO), says the manufacturing sector does not stand to profit most from AI, at least not in developed countries, and will not suffer the forecast demise. The jobs more likely to be impacted are in service sectors such as construction, health care and business. "It is not so much about losing jobs but about how jobs are being transformed and employees in these sectors will add new tasks to their profile while being supported by computers and robots in others," Ernst said. The type of tasks that are being replaced by AI algorithms are routine, repetitive tasks that take a lot of time and can be more easily and more effectively performed by machines and by robots – leaving people to focus on interpersonal, social, emotional skills.