This paper presents a novel latent variable recurrent neural network architecture for jointly modeling sequences of words and (possibly latent) discourse relations between adjacent sentences. A recurrent neural network generates individual words, thus reaping the benefits of discriminatively-trained vector representations. The discourse relations are represented with a latent variable, which can be predicted or marginalized, depending on the task. The resulting model can therefore employ a training objective that includes not only discourse relation classification, but also word prediction. As a result, it outperforms state-of- the-art alternatives for two tasks: implicit discourse relation classification in the Penn Discourse Treebank, and dialog act classification in the Switchboard corpus. Furthermore, by marginalizing over latent discourse relations at test time, we obtain a discourse informed language model, which improves over a strong LSTM baseline.

MetaMind, a Palo Alto-based AI startup founded in July 2014, is being acquired by Salesforce. According to a new post published at the company's website by CEO Richard Socher -- a Stanford PhD who studied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision -- Salesforce plans to use its technology to "further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. Salesforce confirmed the deal but isn't disclosing financial details of the transaction or commenting on whether MetaMind's entire team will join its ranks. As a standalone company, MetaMind's general-purpose platform was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks. As of the middle of last year, its technology could reportedly answer everything from specific queries about snippets of text to the sentiment of that text.

Elissa Strauss interviews Amy Tuteur, an OB who has taken a skeptical view of the natural childbirth movement. Tuteur discusses the origins of the movements for natural childbirth and attachment parenting ("It's so ironic that [they] are now considered feminist, because they were started by people who absolutely weren't feminist") and analyzes their psychological appeal ("Being a mother is really, really, really hard ... along came this system that told that you are automatically an awesome mother if you have an unmedicated birth and breast-feed and co-sleep. That's so seductive and can easily become a big part of one's identity.")

Here are the basics of what the Panama Papers leak is all about. Photo shows the building where the office of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is located in Panama City, Panama, April 03, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO -- The 11.5 million leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca are providing a treasure trove of data on a hidden world of offshore accounts and murky dealings. "It's becoming much easier than it used to be to store and move very large amounts of data. I would expect this to continue," said John King, a professor of information at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.

Bengaluru: Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the IT services company, said it will give a Rs.24-crore grant over the next three years to Delhi-based Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) to set up a research centre for artificial intelligence (AI). For Infosys, which carries out its Corporate Social Responsibility through the foundation, supporting educational institutions has been a fundamental part of its CSR strategy. The grant comes at a time when Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, who has a doctorate degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford University, has been trying to increasingly build out capabilities around the strategic focal points of automation and artificial intelligence in the company. The proposed Infosys Center for Artificial Intelligence will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of AI and focus on areas such as robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics. The research will draw on real-time data to develop a deeper understanding of AI for social benefits, and the application of AI in education and related areas, said the release.

Bengaluru-based Bazmi Husain heads the research & development (R&D) vertical of Swiss engineering major ABB that spends 1.5 billion annually on R&D. Bazmi took charge as the chief technology officer of the group in January 2016 after being the managing director of ABB India. Bazmi, who also heads the venture capital arm of the group, talks to Jyoti Mukul about the global technology trends and how India is uniquely placed. Edited excerpts: How important is ABB's India centre in its R&D operations? India is the largest and fastest growing R&D location for ABB, with footprints across Bengaluru, Chennai, Vadodara and Nashik.

What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. There is no denying that AlphaGo, the Go-playing artificial intelligence designed by Google Deep Mind that recently beat world champion Lee Sedol, and similar deep learning approaches have managed to solve quite hard computational problems in recent years. But is it going to get us to full AI, in the sense of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machine? Not quite, and here is why. One of the key issues when building an AGI is that it will have to make sense of the world for itself, to develop its own, internal meaning for everything it will encounter, hear, say, and do.

Sudipta Mukherjee was born in Kolkata and migrated to Bangalore. He is an electronics engineer by education and a computer engineer/scientist by profession and passion. He graduated in 2004 with a degree in electronics and communication engineering. He has a keen interest in data structure, algorithms, text processing, natural language processing tools development, programming languages, and machine learning at large. His first book on Data Structure using C has been received quite well.

A 42-year-old man in Hong Kong spent 50,000 to realize a childhood dream: making a robot modeled on a Hollywood star, Reuters reports. Jezebel concurs, writing, "It does look just enough like Johansson for her to maybe want to consider taking out a restraining order." Still--after a year and a half of work, including teaching himself programming and electromechanics--Ma isn't letting anyone bring him down. "If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," he tells Reuters, which has photos and video of his creation. Ma built the Mark 1 on the balcony of his apartment. It was a largely lonely experience.