It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.

CAIRO – Al-Qaida's chief bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was behind the 2009 Christmas Day plot to down an airliner over Detroit and other foiled aviation-related terror attacks, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Yemeni officials and a tribal leader said Friday. The killing of al-Asiri deals a heavy blow to the group's capabilities in striking western targets and piles pressure on the group that already lost some of its top cadres over the past years in similar drone strikes. A Yemeni security official said that al-Asiri is dead; a tribal leader and an al-Qaida-linked source also said that he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the eastern Yemeni governorate of Marib. The tribal leader said that al-Asiri was struck, along with two or four of his associates, as he stood beside his car. He added that al-Asiri's wife, who hails from the well-known al-Awaleq tribe in the southern governorate of Shabwa, was briefly held months ago by the UAE-backed forces and later released. Al-Qaida itself has remained silent about its top bomb maker.

LaToya Smith was 29 years old when she died from skin cancer. The young doctor had gotten her degree in podiatry from Rosalind Franklin University, in Chicago, just four years prior, and had recently finished a medical mission in Eritrea. But a diagnosis of melanoma in 2010 meant she would work in private practice for only a year before her death. As a black woman, LaToya reflected a stark imbalance in skin-cancer statistics in America. While fair-skinned people are at the highest risk for contracting skin cancer, the mortality rate for African Americans is considerably higher: Their five-year survival rate is 73 percent, compared with 90 percent for white Americans, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

Owning a car means having the freedom to venture at your own pace… it also means a great deal of expenses, and surprisingly a study found that it might be cheaper to Uber in these major cities than to own a car. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has brought Uber back to basics, refocusing on delivering profitable ride-hailing. Uber wants to be more than your first choice for a ride-sharing service: It wants to infiltrate your life, just as Amazon does. The ride-hailing company, now nine years old, is generating revenue growth, and reinvesting that into a variety of expansive ventures – from scooters and bikes to flying taxis. Uber generated $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, up 63 percent from the same period a year ago when revenue was about $1.7 billion.

Deep in the rainforest in a northern corner of the Republic of Congo, some of the most sophisticated monitoring of animal sounds on earth is taking place. Acoustic sensors are collecting large amounts of data around the clock for the Elephant Listening Project. These sensors capture the soundscape in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and adjacent logging areas: chimpanzees, gorillas, forest buffalo, endangered African grey parrots, fruit hitting the ground, blood-sucking insects, chainsaws, engines, human voices, gunshots. But researchers and local land managers who placed them there are listening for one sound in particular -- the calls of elusive forest elephants. Forest elephants are in steep decline; scientists estimate two-thirds of Africa's population has likely been lost to ivory poaching in recent decades. Africa's savannah elephants have also declined by 30 percent over a recent seven-year period, primarily because of poaching, according to results released in 2016 from Paul G. Allen's Great Elephant Census.

Bangassou, Central African Republic - As an IT specialist, Djamaladine Mahamat Salet is used to providing solutions to complex problems. When he discovered there were no high-school classes for the displaced children in his community, he decided to start teaching them basic computer skills. The big challenge was that he would have to do so without electricity, an internet connection, and no laptops. "These children are stuck here due to this conflict," said 38-year-old Salet. "I am trying to prepare these students so that when they can finally go on to university, they will thrive."

The San Francisco-based company's second-quarter revenue rose 63% from the prior year to $2.8 billion, while gross bookings, a measure of the overall demand for its ride and delivery services, jumped 41% to about $12 billion, according to a financial statement released by Uber. The company narrowed its loss to $891 million in the second quarter from $1.1 billion a year ago. The loss was, however, wider than the $550 million loss in the first quarter of this year, not including a $3 billion gain from the sales of its southeast Asian and Russian operations. The company is spending more money on new businesses such as food delivery and scooters, according to an Uber spokesman. Mr. Khosrowshahi, who replaced ousted Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick last August, has worked to cut expenses at the ride-hailing company in preparation for an initial public offering. This year, he has sold divisions such as the money-losing U.S. car leasing business to Fair.com and its southeast Asian operations to rival Grab Inc.

Following a particular news story online is an important but difficult task, as the relevant information is often scattered across different domains/sources (e.g., news articles, blogs, comments, tweets), presented in various formats and language styles, and may overlap with thousands of other stories. In this work we join the areas of topic tracking and entity disambiguation, and propose a framework named Story Disambiguation - a cross-domain story tracking approach that builds on real-time entity disambiguation and a learning-to-rank framework to represent and update the rich semantic structure of news stories. Given a target news story, specified by a seed set of documents, the goal is to effectively select new story-relevant documents from an incoming document stream. We represent stories as entity graphs and we model the story tracking problem as a learning-to-rank task. This enables us to track content with high accuracy, from multiple domains, in real-time. We study a range of text, entity and graph based features to understand which type of features are most effective for representing stories. We further propose new semi-supervised learning techniques to automatically update the story representation over time. Our empirical study shows that we outperform the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods for tracking mixed-domain document streams, while requiring fewer labeled data to seed the tracked stories. This is particularly the case for local news stories that are easily over shadowed by other trending stories, and for complex news stories with ambiguous content in noisy stream environments.

Reinventing the future of work can lead to shared prosperity. An artificial intelligence-driven career adviser, an industrial smart glove, freelance insurance, a tactile laptop for the visually impaired. The 12 European finalists of the global MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge are "improving economic opportunity for workers," according to the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. The challenge is the flagship program of the initiative, and this year the initiative launched a worldwide competition divided into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. "If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity," Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the initiative, said in a statement.