"We should study Science Fiction in order to understand what someday could become Science Fact." This is the time of year when everyone makes his or her predictions for 2018. I have my predictions as well, but wanted to do something a bit more fun. So I thought I'd look backwards to the state of technology 50 years ago to gain some insights that we can use to make projections about 2018. That is, what "predictions" made in the 1950's might tell us about 2018.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are using artificial intelligence to identify images of bacteria quickly and accurately through an AI-enhanced microscope, which they contend has the potential to alleviate the current national shortage of clinical microbiologists. BIDMC's Clinical Microbiology Laboratory is a "hidden part" of the Boston hospital, explains James Kirby, MD, director of the lab, but one that serves a critical function in diagnosing potentially deadly blood infections which is passed along to clinicians to determine appropriate therapies. "We have a microbiology technologist workforce, and one the things they spend a lot of time doing is looking at patient specimens in order to make a diagnosis of the type of infection people have," says Kirby, who is also associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. It takes time, and it takes a lot of skill." However, Kirby notes that there is a nationwide shortage of highly trained microbiologists, ...

A top Chinese drone manufacturer and a police-backed facial recognition firm are among dozens of companies set to receive state subsidies as China seeks to become a global powerhouse in internet technology, big data and artificial intelligence. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planning agency, said on Wednesday that 56 projects were in the first batch to receive the support in a key national scheme. They include "e-governance" systems developed by provincial authorities as well as drones and robots manufactured by private companies. The NDRC launched the national programme to promote what it described as "internet plus, artificial intelligence and the digital economy" with a call for submissions in October. The 56 projects are the first to qualify for the state support and will gain subsidies if there is no objection in the next week.

In the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data is power. And in a country like India, the scope for AI is colossal, especially in healthcare. From precision medicine and data management to remote diagnosis and predictive analysis, technology in healthcare is making giant strides. However, these innovations are also posing new-fangled security challenges, particularly in terms of personal health records. According to a recent global study, more than one-third (35.6 per cent) of surveyed professionals in the Internet of Things-connected medical device ecosystem said that they had experienced an incident related to cybersecurity in the past year.

Hyderabad: A smart police robot that can recognise people, take complaints, detect bombs, identify suspects, interact with people and answer their queries will be launched here on Friday. This world's first smart police robot, a beta version, was manufactured by H-Bot Robotics, a city-based startup. H-Bot had announced the manufacture of world's second humanoid robot cop in July and the designs were also finalised. The first robot cop was made in France and deployed in Dubai. During the process of making the humanoid, the makers conceived the idea of a smart police robot, with additional facilities based on artificial intelligence and machine learning and built indigenously.

The eruption of the Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia has been devastating, particularly for the 55,000 local people who have had to leave their homes and move into shelters. It has also played havoc with the flights in and out of the island, leaving people stranded while the experts try to work out what the volcano will do next. But this has been a fascinating time for scholars like me who investigate the use of drones in social justice, environmental activism and crisis preparedness. The use of drones in this context is just the latest example of the "computerisation of nature" and raises questions about how reality is increasingly being constructed by software. Amazon drone delivery is developing in the UK, drone blood delivery is happening in Rwanda, while in Indonesia people are using drones to monitor orangutan populations, map the growth and expansion of palm oil plantations and gather information that might help us predict when volcanoes such as Agung might again erupt with devastating impact.

AI can serve as more than just an assistant though. In Japan, for example, many businessmen have a hard time finding a wife and their suicide rates are very high. In the same respect, the elderly in the west are also very lonely. Perhaps AI can serve as more than just an assistant. I want you to suspend your beliefs about AI and think about the ethics and maybe positive changes that can come about if a human created a platonic relationship with an AI.

Forgetting is an operation on knowledge bases that has been addressed in different areas of Knowledge Representation and with respect to different formalisms, including classical propositional and first-order logic, modal logics, logic programming, and description logics. Definitions of forgetting have been expressed in terms of manipulation of formulas, sets of postulates, isomorphisms between models, bisimulations, second-order quantification, elementary equivalence, and others. In this paper, forgetting is regarded as an abstract belief change operator, independent of the underlying logic. The central thesis is that forgetting amounts to a reduction in the language, specifically the signature, of a logic. The main definition is simple: the result of forgetting a portion of a signature in a theory is given by the set of logical consequences of this theory over the reduced language. This definition offers several advantages. Foremost, it provides a uniform approach to forgetting, with a definition that is applicable to any logic with a well-defined consequence relation. Hence it generalises a disparate set of logic-specific definitions with a general, high-level definition. Results obtained in this approach are thus applicable to all subsumed formal systems, and many results are obtained much more straightforwardly. This view also leads to insights with respect to specific logics: for example, forgetting in first-order logic is somewhat different from the accepted approach. Moreover, the approach clarifies the relation between forgetting and related operations, including belief contraction.

The main goal of search engines is ad hoc retrieval: ranking documents in a corpus by their relevance to the information need expressed by a query. The Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) --- ranking the documents by their relevance probabilities --- is the theoretical foundation of most existing ad hoc document retrieval methods. A key observation that motivates our work is that the PRP does not account for potential post-ranking effects; specifically, changes to documents that result from a given ranking. Yet, in adversarial retrieval settings such as the Web, authors may consistently try to promote their documents in rankings by changing them. We prove that, indeed, the PRP can be sub-optimal in adversarial retrieval settings. We do so by presenting a novel game theoretic analysis of the adversarial setting. The analysis is performed for different types of documents (single-topic and multi-topic) and is based on different assumptions about the writing qualities of documents' authors. We show that in some cases, introducing randomization into the document ranking function yields an overall user utility that transcends that of applying the PRP.