Stuart Russell, Anthony Aguirre, Ariel Conn, and Max Tegmark recently wrote a response to my critique of their "Slaughterbots" video on autonomous weapons. I am grateful for their thoughtful article. I think this kind of dialogue can be incredibly helpful in illuminating points of disagreement on various issues, and I welcome the exchange. I think it is particularly important to have a cross-disciplinary dialogue on autonomous weapons that includes roboticists, AI scientists, engineers, ethicists, lawyers, human rights advocates, military professionals, political scientists, and other perspectives because this issue touches so many disciplines. I appreciate their thorough, point-by-point reply.

The artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare startup Medopad has announced over £100m in trade deals with Chinese companies, including Tencent. Medopad's chief executive Dan Vahdat accompanied the UK prime minister Theresa May on a visit to China this week. Other business bosses visiting China with May included Jessica Butcher, co-founder of augmented reality (AR) startup Blippar and Nikhil Rathi, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. Medopad creates remote patient monitoring apps, and uses mobile technology and advanced analytics to deliver efficient care to patients. The company has signed 15 trade deals with Chinese organisations that will see it advance the use of AI in healthcare platforms across China.

A patient gets help from a robot receptionist at the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing. A robot keeps an eye on some senior citizens as they watch a program on TV. AI carebots could replace human caregivers as soon as they become cheaper, experts say.

But the patent disclosure goes to the heart about a global debate about privacy and security. Amazon already has a reputation for a workplace culture that thrives on a hard-hitting management style, and has experimented with how far it can push white-collar workers in order to reach its delivery targets. Privacy advocates, however, note that a lot can go wrong even with everyday tracking technology. On Monday, the tech industry was jolted by the discovery that Strava, a fitness app that allows users to track their activities and compare their performance with other people running or cycling in the same places, had unwittingly highlighted the locations of United States military bases and the movements of their personnel in Iraq and Syria. In theory, Amazon's proposed technology would emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee's hands were in relation to inventory bins, and provide "haptic feedback" to steer the worker toward the correct bin.

Some big trends have emerged this week in red hot areas like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and edtech. The bottom line seems to be that China is investing in a big way to ensure it remains on the cutting edge when it comes to the technology of tomorrow, whether it's investing billions into AI or leveraging the country's most important social media platform to embrace blockchain. Here are the some of the most interesting tech stories out of China you might not have heard about. Everyone is adopting blockchain technologies, but it's hard for big companies to move at the speed of technological innovation. This is not the case for Tencent in China, makers of WeChat, a social media messaging app with 1 billion active users.

Apple calls time on servers. MIT's Intelligence Quest aims to totally re-think how we advance AI How Twilio aims to'Hatch' successful careers in tech Europe's largest port is embracing the Internet of Things Alibaba AI platform will make Malaysia's capital think smarter

Amazon's Alexa is now your personal butler at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. Self-learning software developed by Google defeated the world's best player of the highly complex Chinese strategy game Go. IBM's Watson saved the life of a woman in Japan by correctly diagnosing her with a rare form of cancer that doctors missed. We are rapidly approaching an inflection point in human history where artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, and debates about humans vs. machines have become part of our common vernacular. How can we prepare our next generation of students to compete?

Knowledge bases (KBs) of real-world facts about entities and their relationships are useful resources for a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, because knowledge bases are typically incomplete, it is useful to be able to perform knowledge base completion or link prediction, i.e., predict whether a relationship not in the knowledge base is likely to be true. This article serves as a brief overview of embedding models of entities and relationships for knowledge base completion, summarizing up-to-date experimental results on standard benchmark datasets FB15k, WN18, FB15k-237, WN18RR, FB13 and WN11.

Hurry--early price ends March 9. This post was originally published on Insight Data Science; it is republished here with permission. Whether you are an established company or working to launch a new service, you can always leverage text data to validate, improve, and expand the functionalities of your product. The science of extracting meaning and learning from text data is an active topic of research called natural language processing (NLP). NLP produces new and exciting results on a daily basis, and is a very large field.

As 2017 wound down, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant rose up to the top of Apple's App Store while Amazon's Echo Dot was its own bestseller. But some of the millions of those devices sold have already found their way into hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Northwell Health in New York, the Commonwealth Care Alliance in Boston, and Libertana Home Health in Los Angeles. "When we went from laptops to smartphones as our primary means of doing computing, that was a major paradigm shift," said John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel. "Ambient listening tools probably will replace mobile devices." Amazon is hardly alone in the market. Apple Siri, Google Home and Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are also available. At least one hospital is already girding to implement Google Home as well.