How will AI shape the average North American city by 2030? A panel of experts assembled as part of a century-long study into the impact of AI thinks its effects will be profound. The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence is the brainchild of Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist, former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and managing director of Microsoft Research's main Redmond lab. Every five years a panel of experts will assess the current state of AI and its future directions. The first panel, comprised of experts in AI, law, political science, policy, and economics, was launched last fall and decided to frame their report around the impact AI will have on the average American city.

In less than 12 hours, three different people offered to pay me if I'd spend an hour talking to a stranger on the phone. All three said they'd enjoyed reading an article I'd written about Google building a new computer chip for artificial intelligence, and all three urged me to discuss the story with one of their clients. Each described this client as the manager of a major hedge fund, but wouldn't say who it was. The requests came from what are called expert networks--research firms that connect investors with people who can help them understand particular markets and provide a competitive edge (sometimes, it seems, through insider information). These expert networks wanted me to explain how Google's AI processor would affect the chip market.

Several companies are already working on flying car prototypes. NEW YORK -- While most of the auto industry is focused on getting self-driving cars rolling, Uber already has its eyes set to the skies. In a white paper published this week, the company detailed plans for Uber Elevate, its new division for offering rides through flying cars. The company hopes to have the program up and running within a decade. In addition to being incredibly cool, Uber stresses the many benefits of this method of transportation in this new mode of transportation, time saving being the biggest.

Video games aren't just for fun – they can make a political point, too. Responding to current affairs is a growing trend in gaming, and it is more evident than ever in the run-up to the US presidential election. There are dozens of Donald Trump-themed indie titles on PC game store Steam. And bigger developers are also incorporating political themes in their games. Chris Baker, a former creative director at news and entertainment website Buzzfeed, launched GOP Arcade with a friend this year.

The TV show The IT Crowd played off of stereotypes on what it's like to work in IT. Basically, it meant working in the basement, no one except the CEO remembering you exist, and impatiently asking people if they've tried turning the device off and on again. But the Internet of Things is changing all of that, as people in all roles and professions realize how IBM's Watson machine learning platform could impact them and their work. "It's resonating with so many people, not just CTOs," said Harriet Green, VP and GM of Internet of Things, Commerce and Education at IBM. Green was interviewed by Dave Vellante (@dvellante), and John Furrier (@furrier), hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM World of Watson event in Las Vegas, NV. Exciting client use cases abound. From Olli, a 3-D printed driverless vehicle that uses Watson to talk, to a deputy superintendent demonstrating how Watson can be used in classrooms to interact with students.

JERUSALEM – In the innermost chamber of the site said to be the tomb of Jesus, a restoration team has peeled away a marble layer for the first time in centuries in an effort to reach what it believes is the original rock surface where Jesus' body was laid. Many historians have long believed that the original cave, identified a few centuries after Jesus' death as his tomb, was obliterated ages ago. But an archaeologist accompanying the restoration team said ground penetrating radar tests determined that cave walls are in fact standing -- at a height of 6 feet and connected to bedrock -- behind the marbled panels of the chamber at the center of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. "What was found," said National Geographic archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, "is astonishing." The work is part of a historic renovation project to reinforce and preserve the Edicule, the chamber housing the cave where Jesus is said to have been entombed and resurrected.

In the next five years, every important decision, whether it's business or personal, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson. Watson, the company's artificial intelligence-fueled system, is working in fields like health care, finance, entertainment and retail, connecting businesses more easily with their customers, making sense of big data and helping doctors find treatments for cancer patients. The Watson system is set to transform how businesses function and how people live their lives. "Our goal is augmenting intelligence," Rometty said. "It is man and machine. This is all about extending your expertise. It doesn't matter what you do. IBM's conference this week, which the company said drew 17,000 attendees, explored how companies, including retailers, educators, human resources departments and financial institutions, amon others, can use Watson. "The challenge IBM has right now is to define the marketplace," said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst, who attended the conference. "Ten years from now, will IBM be the leader?

Kernel-based quadrature rules are becoming important in machine learning and statistics, as they achieve super-$\sqrt{n}$ convergence rates in numerical integration, and thus provide alternatives to Monte Carlo integration in challenging settings where integrands are expensive to evaluate or where integrands are high dimensional. These rules are based on the assumption that the integrand has a certain degree of smoothness, which is expressed as that the integrand belongs to a certain reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, this assumption can be violated in practice (e.g., when the integrand is a black box function), and no general theory has been established for the convergence of kernel quadratures in such misspecified settings. Our contribution is in proving that kernel quadratures can be consistent even when the integrand does not belong to the assumed RKHS, i.e., when the integrand is less smooth than assumed. Specifically, we derive convergence rates that depend on the (unknown) lesser smoothness of the integrand, where the degree of smoothness is expressed via powers of RKHSs or via Sobolev spaces.

In PU learning, a binary classifier is trained from positive (P) and unlabeled (U) data without negative (N) data. Although N data is missing, it sometimes outperforms PN learning (i.e., ordinary supervised learning). Hitherto, neither theoretical nor experimental analysis has been given to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we theoretically compare PU (and NU) learning against PN learning based on the upper bounds on estimation errors. We find simple conditions when PU and NU learning are likely to outperform PN learning, and we prove that, in terms of the upper bounds, either PU or NU learning (depending on the class-prior probability and the sizes of P and N data) given infinite U data will improve on PN learning. Our theoretical findings well agree with the experimental results on artificial and benchmark data even when the experimental setup does not match the theoretical assumptions exactly.

Companies have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for them for years, with little success. Pepper, a humanoid machine carrying the hopes of SoftBank Group Corp.'s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, was supposed to change that. Promoted as the first robot to be endowed with emotions, the company marketed Pepper aggressively after it was unveiled in 2014, promising the gadget was sophisticated enough for tasks usually handled by shop clerks, receptionists and translators. "It's not there to have a conversation," said Junichi Nishi, a municipal government official in Fujieda, a city of about 140,000 in central Japan. "We use it primarily as a tablet," he said, referring to the touch screen attached to the robot's chest.