Baidu, China's online search leader, said today it has hired Qi Lu as Baidu's Group President and chief operating officer, in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations effective immediately. Before joining Baidu, Lu served as Microsoft's global executive vice president and led one of Microsoft's three business units. Lu possesses a wealth of leadership and management experience, and is a leading authority in the area of artificial intelligence," Baidu CEO Robin Li said in a statement. "To achieve our goals, especially in artificial intelligence, which is a key strategic focus for the next decade, we will need to continue attracting the best global talent. With Dr. Lu on board, we are confident that our strategy will be executed smoothly and Baidu will become a world-class technology company and global leader in AI." Lu holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Fudan University in Shanghai and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

The other day I sat in a coffee shop across from a student who was studying a complex math problem. The equation took up the entire page, and he sat there staring at it for quite awhile. After I thought about how glad I am to not be in school anymore, I started thinking about how jumping into a new investing market can be intimidating. Like the math equation, it can be hard to make sense of all the information on the page. But it doesn't have to be this way, especially if you closely follow what smart companies are doing in new segments and pair that with some good ol' fashioned research.

The US Navy has revealed plans for a radical new smart'mini missile' that can be fired from warships to take out swarms of enemy drones and boats. Known as the Multi Azimuth Defense Fast Intercept Round Engagement System (MAD-FIRES) program, it will develop a'medium-caliber guided projectile'. DARPA says this will'combine the guidance, precision, and accuracy of missiles with the speed, rapid-fire capability, and large ammunition capacity of medium-caliber bullets like 20-to-40-caliber ammunition designed to destroy lightly armored vehicles, aircraft, and personnel.' Navy bosses say they need the new mini missile to deal with the increasing risk of'swarm' attacks, and hope with fit it to warships such at the USS Enterprise (pictured) The MAD FIRES will be enhanced ammunition rounds able to alter their flight path in real time to stay on target. They will be able to continuously target, track and engage multiple fast-approaching targets simultaneously and re-engage any targets that survive initial engagement.

If the vision of Industry 4.0 is to be realized, most enterprise processes must become more digitized. A critical element will be the evolution of traditional supply chains toward a connected, smart, and highly efficient supply chain ecosystem. The supply chain today is a series of largely discrete, siloed steps taken through marketing, product development, manufacturing, and distribution, and finally into the hands of the customer. Digitization brings down those walls, and the chain becomes a completely integrated ecosystem that is fully transparent to all the players involved -- from the suppliers of raw materials, components, and parts, to the transporters of those supplies and finished goods, and finally to the customers demanding fulfillment. This network will depend on a number of key technologies: integrated planning and execution systems, logistics visibility, autonomous logistics, smart procurement and warehousing, spare parts management, and advanced analytics. The result will enable companies to react to disruptions in the supply chain, and even anticipate them, by fully modeling the network, creating "what-if" scenarios, and adjusting the supply chain in real time as conditions change. Once built -- and the components are starting to be developed today -- the digital supply "network" will offer a new degree of resiliency and responsiveness enabling companies that get there first to beat the competition in the effort to provide customers with the most efficient and transparent service delivery. At most companies, products are delivered to customers through a very standardized process. Marketing analyzes customer demand and tries to predict sales for the coming period. With that information, manufacturing orders raw materials, components, and parts for the anticipated capacity.

Baidu's Deep Learning Lab, which is leading the artificial intelligence programme at China's dominant internet search engine, was upstaged by Google DeepMind's AlphaGo on its home turf when it announced a duel against human competitors scheduled to be broadcast across China on Friday. Deep Learning Lab will enter its artificial intelligence robot to solve problems in the popular television game show Super Brain in China. The challenge will involve using facial and voice recognition skills in three rounds against human challengers. The first round of the Baidu AI versus humans contest will be aired on Jiangsu Satellite TV Station on Friday night. Representing humanity in the challenge are a number of gifted individuals who won the previous Super Brain contest.

This issue of AI Magazine brings together a collection of articles on challenges, mechanisms, and research progress in turn-taking and coordination between humans and machines. The contributing authors work in interrelated fields of spoken dialog systems, intelligent virtual agents, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and semiautonomous collaborative systems and explore core concepts in coordinating speech and actions with virtual agents, robots, and other autonomous systems. Several of the contributors participated in the AAAI Spring Symposium on Turn-Taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction, held in March 2015, and several articles in this issue are extensions of work presented at that symposium. The articles in the collection address key modeling, methodological, and computational challenges in achieving effective coordination with machines, propose solutions that overcome these challenges under sensory, cognitive, and resource restrictions, and illustrate how such solutions can facilitate coordination across diverse and challenging domains. The contributions highlight turn-taking and coordination in human-machine interaction as an emerging and evolving research area with important implications for future applications of AI.

Gaussian processes (GPs) have been proven to be powerful tools in various areas of machine learning. However, there are very few applications of GPs in the scenario of multi-view learning. In this paper, we present a new GP model for multi-view learning. Unlike existing methods, it combines multiple views by regularizing marginal likelihood with the consistency among the posterior distributions of latent functions from different views. Moreover, we give a general point selection scheme for multi-view learning and improve the proposed model by this criterion. Experimental results on multiple real world data sets have verified the effectiveness of the proposed model and witnessed the performance improvement through employing this novel point selection scheme.

As Iraqi Security Forces attempt to drive ISIS out of Mosul, a large city in Northern Iraq that the terrorist organization has occupied since 2014, it's facing an arsenal of improvised, experimental weapons. One of ISIS' newest hand-made weapons is the armed drone: a commercial quadcopter equipped with the ability to drop grenade-size explosives. It's well-known that ISIS uses weaponized drones, but new images out of Mosul confirm that the group is now using the quadcopters as bombers as well as single-mission vehicles. Kurdish media network Rudaw reported last week that the explosive-dropping drones have killed civilians and damaged equipment. So far, ISIS has not used these drones to deliver chemical weapons, Rudaw said.

The term "artificial intelligence" was beaten to semantic death in 2016. The term has been used and abused before, but perhaps never like it was during a year of self-driving cars and home assistants, anyone and everyone is trying to associate the "AI" acronym with their startup like it were the 1991 marketing blitz for Terminator 2. From that perspective, one might be quick to forgive anyone who dismissed the latest acquisition by Microsoft of Maluuba. Based in Montreal, University of Waterloo graduates Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman founded the company in 2010. Maluuba is currently focused on applying deep learning and "reinforcement learning" to language comprehension by machines. To that end, they have published several research papers though, haven't publicly released a product.

Fraugster, the young company that uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to eliminate payment fraud, has raised €4.7 million in funding. The technology learns from each transaction in real-time and can anticipate fraudulent attacks even before they happen. Online merchants lose more than €15 billion to fraudulent transactions every year. Most attempt to tackle this with anti-fraud solutions that are based on outdated technologies. However, older solutions tend to block many sound transactions, leading to false positives that cost the industry over €259 billion in 2015 alone.