Today on In Case You Missed It: Lockheed Martin just demonstrated its AI aircraft system that can spot fires and put them out independent of human intervention, while also checking to see if any humans were left behind near danger. The system is supposed to be in service within five years. Researchers discovered that Goffin cockatoos are smart enough to make tools from various materials, judging how long and narrow they need to be each time to pass through a hole and also reach a treat. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the rapid repair of a sinkhole in Japan, the timelapse video is here. There have been a lot of interesting stories this week but people will be talking about the judge's decision to allow a dying girl to be cryogenically frozen for quite a while.

Information extraction involves classifying data items that are stored in plain text, and is a major area of research for machine learning scientists. Last week, a research team from MIT introduced a new approach to information extraction for machine learning systems at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, and won a best-paper award. Instead of feeding their system as much data as possible, the team's winning approach takes a different route and focuses on a much smaller data set, a similar process used by human beings – if you're reading a paper that you don't understand, you're likely to do a search on the web and find articles that you are able to understand. This new system approach does something similar; if the system's confidence score is low in assessing a particular text, it will query for more information, pulling up a handful of new articles from the web that correlate with a specific set of terms. In future, this model could be applied to sparse data and save much time in reviewing databases.

This position is open as of 11/19/2016.Senior (Machine Learning) Engineer Data science is fast becoming a critical skill for developers and managers across industries, and it looks like a lot of fun as well. But it's pretty complicated - there are a lot of engineering and analytical options to navigate, and it's hard to know if you're doing it right or where the bear traps lie. In this series we explore ways in to making sense of data science - understanding where it's needed and where it's not, and how to make it an asset for you, from people who've been there and… Deep learning is driving the explosion of artificial intelligence today. Deep learning--software that attempts to mimic activity in neurons in the neocortex--has greatly enhanced state-of-the-art techniques in speech recognition, natural language understanding, object detection, visual object recognition, and language translation.

Like a more crooked version of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, a new machine learning paper from a pair of Chinese researchers has delved into the controversial task of letting a computer decide on your innocence. Can a computer know if you're a criminal just from your face? In their paper'Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images', published on the arXiv pre-print server, Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University investigate whether a computer can detect if a human could be a convicted criminal just by analysing his or her facial features. The two say their tests were successful, and that they even found a new law governing "the normality for faces of non-criminals." They described the idea of algorithms that can match and exceed a human's performance in face recognition to infer criminality "irresistible".

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Infosys has invested about $2 million in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence startup focused on advanced text analysis. India's second largest software services firm said it has made the investment from its Innovation Fund. UNSILO is Infosys Innovation Fund's first investment in Europe, according to a stock exchange filing. "UNSILO have built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. We will partner with UNSILO to bring their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients. They join and expanding portfolio of innovative young companies from around the world that Infosys works with to help enterprises drive their digital transformation," said Ritika Suri, executive vice president & global head of corporate development & ventures, Infosys.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features. The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone's character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you'll become a rapist or thief. Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed "facial images of 1,856 real persons" into computers and found "some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle."

As described in our earlier blog on "Here's all that you need to know about Chatbots", ChatBots are software programs that are present in our messaging apps to perform different tasks. How about having a Bot that tracks our daily expenses and prevents unnecessary spending? Fintech companies have already started their path towards this trend. As Bots can be programmed for virtually anything, it would be possible for financial service organizations to build a financial advisor, broker, investment manager and virtually any other bot. Chatbots/ Virtual Assistants are going to change the way we live radically.

Her name is Alice and she's designed to help you decide what clothes and accessories suit you best. At the recent IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona, she was busy making recommendations about men's suits and women's party dresses via Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Skype, SMS, and webchat. Bismart, the Catalan company behind the digital assistant, is a Microsoft Worldwide Partner with a background in big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applied to marketing. With 50 employees, it expects to close the year with a turnover of €3m ($3.32m), 50 percent up on 2015. "We've just opened a new office in Singapore, where we anticipate a turnover of up to €500,000 in the first year," says Albert Isern, CEO of the company.

On the wall of Aaron Dollar's office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word "robot." The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. He sees them as helpers in our daily lives--performing tasks like setting the table or assisting with the assembly of your new bookcase. But getting to the point where robots can work in the unstructured environment of our homes (as opposed to industrial settings) would take a major technological leap and a massive coordination of efforts from roboticists around the globe.