Many web systems rank and present a list of items to users, from recommender systems to search and advertising. An important problem in practice is to evaluate new ranking policies offline and optimize them before they are deployed. We address this problem by proposing new evaluation algorithms for estimating the expected number of clicks on ranked lists from stored logs of past results. The existing algorithms are not guaranteed to be statistically efficient in our problem because the number of recommended lists can grow exponentially with their length. To overcome this challenge, we use models of user interaction with the list of items, the so-called click models, to construct estimators that learn statistically efficiently. We analyze our estimators and prove that they are more efficient than the estimators that do not use the structure of the click model, under the assumption that the click model holds. We evaluate our estimators in a series of experiments on a real-world dataset and show that they consistently outperform prior estimators.

In a surprise but smart move, Teradyne (NYSE:TER), the American test solutions provider that acquired Universal Robots in 2015 and Energid Technologies earlier in 2018, acquired Danish MiR (Mobile Industrial Robots) for $148 million with an additional $124 million predicated on very achievable milestones between now and 2020. MiR was just returning from celebrating its 300% growth in 2017 at a company get-together in Barcelona with 70 MiR employees from all over the world when the announcement was made. It tripled its revenue from autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in 2017. MiR co-founder and CEO Thomas Visti said that growth in 2017 was primarily due to multinational companies that returned with orders for larger fleets of mobile robots after it tested and analyzed the results of its initial MiR robot orders. Another factor in MiR's 2017 growth was the launch of the MiR200 which can lift 440 pounds, pull 1,100 pounds, is ESD approved and cleanroom certified.

Who will win the race to adopt artificial intelligence for cyber warfare--the defenders of vulnerable corporate networks or the cyber criminals constantly inventing new ways to attack them? The promise--or unrealistic hope--that AI will "transform the world," has given rise to a number of significant races. Most prominent is the race among nations for AI superiority, primarily the U.S. and China, with several European countries (e.g., France) and the European Union attempting to position themselves not too far behind. This reminds one of the nuclear arms-race and the use of the same technology for both beneficial and destructive purposes. In a recent paper warning of the potential of AI to "upend the foundations of nuclear deterrence," RAND researchers wrote: "The dual-use nature of many AI algorithms will mean AI research focused on one sector of society can be rapidly modified for use in the security sector as well."

US and China are pulling away in the race to build AI. A group of renowned artificial intelligence (AI) scientists have called for a new multinational AI hub to be built in Europe in a bid to help the continent compete with other parts of the world. AI is set to have a profound impact on Europe and the rest of the world in the coming decades and many believe the impact will be larger than that of the industrial revolution. In an open letter, the scientists wrote that "Europe is not keeping up" with North America and China and called for a new European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems, abbreviated as ELLIS. The group argues there are clusters of AI excellence within labs scattered across Europe "that play in the international top league" but "virtually all of the top people in those places are continuously being pursued for recruitment by US companies."

The applications of artificial intelligence to enhance humans' life open a vast array of opportunities available to those who have the foresight to begin to venture down that path. Looking at the aging population trends in European countries, North America, Japan or China, we can easily conclude that one of the biggest challenges governments are facing is dealing with an increasing population over the age of 65 together with a declining birth rate. As The Independent published about grave concerns in Japan on this issue a few months ago, "Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a "national movement" to address Japan's demographic challenges. The government has taken steps to keep older workers in their jobs longer, and to encourage companies to invest in automation". Aging-in-place may be the key to reducing the side-effects of the phenomenon where the number of rooms in nursing homes cannot keep up with the string increase in senior population.

Having invented the first machine gun, Richard John Gatling explained (or at least justified) his invention in a letter to a friend in 1877: With such a machine, it would be possible to replace 100 men with rifles on the battlefield, greatly reducing the number of men injured or killed. This sentiment, replacing soldiers--or at least protecting them from harm to the greatest extent possible through the inventions of science and technology--has been a thoroughly American ambition since the Civil War. And now, with developments in computing, artificial intelligence and robotics, it may soon be possible to replace soldiers entirely. Only this time America is not alone and may not even be in the lead. Many countries in the world today, including Russia and China, are believed to be developing weapons that will have the ability to operate autonomously--discover a target, make the decision to engage and then attack, without human intervention.

Kofukuji temple chief priest Bungen Oi holds a Sony's pet robot aibo after a robots' funeral at the Kofukuji temple in Isumi, Chiba on April 26, 2018. More than a hundred robot dogs from different years were sitting next to each other in Japan, not for a tech fair but for their "funeral".

KDnuggets poll finds that Machine Learning Engineer, Researcher, and Data Scientist have the highest job satisfaction. Job satisfaction usually starts high, but drops significantly after 4 years on the job. Data professionals in Asia and Latin America are most unsatisfied.

The true promise of technology is to amplify the best traits in humanity. It doesn't always seem like that, and I'll admit there are legitimate concerns about the possible negative impact of the fourth industrial revolution. However, being the hallucinogenic optimist that I am, I like to focus attention on the bright spots that show us a beautiful future. I've recently invested in one of those bright spots. Visit is a startup in India that amplifies humanity -- while solving a very big and serious problem.

Was that poem written by an angsty middle schooler or an artificially intelligent algorithm? A team of researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University developed a poet AI good enough to fool online judges, according to a paper published Thursday on the preprint site arXiv. It's the latest step towards artificial intelligence that can create believable, human-passing language, and, man, it seems like a big one. In order to generate something as esoteric as a poem, the AI was fed thousands of images paired with human-written descriptions and poems. This taught the algorithm associations between images and text.