Internet experts and highly engaged netizens participated in answering an eight-question survey fielded by Elon University and the Pew Internet Project from late November 2013 through early January 2014. Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from that. Among the key themes emerging from 1,896 respondents' answers were: - Advances in technology may displace certain types of work, but historically they have been a net creator of jobs. This page holds the content of the survey report, which is an organized look at respondents elaborations derived from 250 single-spaced pages of responses from ...

A UPS drone as it takes a three-mile test flight over open ocean outside of Boston. The test was one of a series of tests to show unmanned aerial vehicles can safely be used for deliveries in the United States. The drone was built by CyPhy, a Danvers, Mass.-based drone and technology company. A UPS drone took a three mile trip over open ocean outside of Salem, Mass. The test was meant to simulate delivery of urgently needed medicine from Beverly, Mass. to Children's Island, which is home to a YMCA day camp.

Intelligence is shaped by the survival requirements that an animal must face during its everyday life, according to cognitive ecology. Some birds can remember where they buried tens of thousands of nuts and seeds, which allows them to find them during the long winter months; a burrowing rodent can learn a complex underground maze with hundreds of tunnels in just two days; and a crocodile can have the presence of mind to carry sticks on her head and float them just below an area where herons are nesting, then pounce when an unwary bird swoops down to collect nesting material. Notwithstanding the liberties taken by filmmakers in popular movies like The Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, and its sequel, Finding Dory, can fishes really think? When the tide goes out, frillfins like to stay near shore, nestled in warm, isolated tide pools where they may find lots of tasty tidbits. But tide pools are not always safe havens from danger. Predators such as octopuses or herons may come foraging, and it pays to make a hasty exit. But where is a little fish to go? Frillfin gobies deploy an improbable maneuver: They leap to a neighboring pool. How do they do it without ending up on the rocks, doomed to die in the sun? With prominent eyes, slightly puffy cheeks looking down on a pouting mouth, a rounded tail, and tan-gray-brown blotchy markings along a 3-inch, torpedo-shaped body, the frillfin goby hardly looks like a candidate for the Animal Einstein Olympics.

The current crisis of refugees has divided European countries and societies into those who welcome refugees and those who oppose taking them. In this Viewpoint, we reflect on the role of universities and of computer science in such situations. As a case study, we describe an activity taken at the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology): when the crisis of refugees culminated in summer 2015, a group of professors and students of the Faculty of Informatics initiated computer courses for unaccompanied young refugees. This project allowed the refugees to gain computer-related knowledge, and, equally important, to make contacts with local students. Another major goal of the project was to give a clear message that refugees are welcome.

Computer vision is by no means a new idea, there were automatic number plate recognition systems as early as the 1960s but deep learning is one of the key technologies that have expanded its potential. Early computer vision systems were algorithm-based, removing the color and texture of a viewed object in favor of identifying basic shapes and edges, and narrowing down what they might represent. This stripped back the amount of data that had to be dealt with and enabled the processing power to be concentrated on the essentials. Deep learning flipped this process on its head, instead of algorithmically working out that a triangle of certain dimensions was statistically probable to be a road sign, why didn't we look at a whole heap of road signs and learn to recognize them? Using deep learning techniques, the computer can look at hundreds and thousands of pictures, e.g., an electric guitar and start to learn what an electric guitar looks like in different configurations, contexts, levels of daylight, backgrounds and environments.

We propose an extension to Hawkes processes by treating the levels of self-excitation as a stochastic differential equation. Our new point process allows better approximation in application domains where events and intensities accelerate each other with correlated levels of contagion. We generalize a recent algorithm for simulating draws from Hawkes processes whose levels of excitation are stochastic processes, and propose a hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo approach for model fitting. Our sampling procedure scales linearly with the number of required events and does not require stationarity of the point process. A modular inference procedure consisting of a combination between Gibbs and Metropolis Hastings steps is put forward. We recover expectation maximization as a special case. Our general approach is illustrated for contagion following geometric Brownian motion and exponential Langevin dynamics.

A DOCTOR in Mumbai, India, puts a spit sample into a handheld device. The doctor checks the results to see exactly what kind of drug-resistant tuberculosis the person has, and the precise combination of drugs needed to treat it. "If you can identify drug-resistant TB in less than a day, you will massively improve treatment" This is the goal of CRyPTIC, a global project run by a team at the University of Oxford. It aims to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of drug-resistant TB, cutting the wait from months to days, or even minutes. The idea is that the software will prescribe the right medication for TB just by looking at its genome.

Modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves and arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed, according to a new study. The research suggests that humans spread out across the globe in four migration events driven by climate change, connected to variations in the Earth's orbit. The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum London told MailOnline the research is'the most comprehensive climate, vegetation and human-dispersal modelling study published so far'. 'While the earliest [migration] wave had only limited further penetration across the rest of Eurasia, they [the researchers] argue that modern humans could have arrived in small numbers in China and southern Europe by about 80,000 years,' he explained.

Jason Jercinovic, global head of marketing innovation at Havas, discusses Artificial Intelligence and how brands can benefit from the technology.

A UAE-based bank is introducing an artificial intelligence robot that will engage with customers by telling them about the products and services. The UAE-based bank Emirates NBD plans to do so in a bid to make banking more convenient. The artificial intelligence (AI) robot called Pepper will make his appearance at the bank's marketing and promotional events in the UAE as well as at select Emirates NBD branches in the near future. Pepper will interact with customers to understand visitation needs and present products and services alternatives in an engaging manner, assisted by the bank's staff. While Pepper will not engage on core banking functions, as the world of artificial intelligence and robots evolves, the bank has announced that it will continue to engage with these technologies to make banking simpler and more convenient.