October is the International Longevity Month, a campaign we've been organizing worldwide since 2013. This traditional campaign has combined the activities of many organizations and individual activists working to promote research, development and application for healthy longevity around the world.

What is happening in Europe regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)? "A lot" is the short answer. There is a Cambrian explosion of projects, studies and initiatives in this field. In this post we provide an overview of what is happening in Europe regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). We look some of the latest examples from across Europe where public sector buyers are looking for suppliers of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data systems, products and services.

Manually checking models for compliance against building regulation is a time-consuming task for architects and construction engineers. There is thus a need for algorithms that process information from construction projects and report non-compliant elements. Still automated code-compliance checking raises several obstacles. Building regulations are usually published as human readable texts and their content is often ambiguous or incomplete. Also, the vocabulary used for expressing such regulations is very different from the vocabularies used to express Building Information Models (BIM). Furthermore, the high level of details associated to BIM-contained geometries induces complex calculations. Finally, the level of complexity of the IFC standard also hinders the automation of IFC processing tasks. Model chart, formal rules and pre-processors approach allows translating construction regulations into semantic queries. We further demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through several use cases. We argue our approach is a step forward in bridging the gap between regulation texts and automated checking algorithms. Finally with the recent building ontology BOT recommended by the W3C Linked Building Data Community Group, we identify perspectives for standardizing and extending our approach.

We learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are "white", the inconsequential niceties – "I love your dress!" – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two "big" lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others. The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. "No mortal can keep a secret," wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905.

Amazon staff review thousands of audio recordings made by Alexa each day -- including snippets of couples arguing and having sex -- an investigation claims. The clips were accidentally captured by the popular digital assistant -- confusing the noises for the commands it should be listening to -- and sent off for analysis. Staff at the tech firm review one in every five-hundred recordings made by Alexa, whether of deliberate commands to the assistant or accidental recordings. According to a privacy expert, the revelation is a reminder of the extent of the personal information that the tech firm has on its users. Amazon has an English-speaking team monitoring thousands of Alexa recordings daily based in Bucharest, Romania, the Sun claims, along with similar setups in Boston, Costa Rica and India.

If you're a fan of Ubisoft's popular Watch Dogs video game series – a 5-year-old action-adventure franchise played out in real-world cities like Chicago and San Francisco – you'll no doubt want to get your hands on the next installment, slated for March 5, 2020, for PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Google Stadia. "Watch Dogs: Legion," which earned several "Best of Show" awards at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game confab known as E3, looks to be the most ambitious title in the series to date. Is Facebook listening to me?: Why those ads appear after you talk about things One of the most ambitious games of 2020, Ubisoft's'Watch Dogs: Legion' takes place in a post-Brexit London, which has become an all-seeing surveillance state. The following is what you need to know about the game – based on what I saw (and played) at E3, along with some details provided by Joel Burgess, world director at Ubisoft Toronto, which is taking the reins on this title with portions of the game being developed simultaneously at Ubisoft studios in Montreal, Paris, Newcastle, England; Bucharest, Romania; and Kiev, Ukraine. One of the most ambitious games of 2020, Ubisoft's'Watch Dogs: Legion' takes place in a post-Brexit London, which has become an all-seeing surveillance state. The game takes place in a near-future London, at a time when people are being oppressed by Big Brother-esque surveillance and a corrupt private military corporation, Albion, patrolling the streets.

"In three to five years, RPA and AI will become a commodity productivity tool, the same way as you use Excel and PowerPoint," proclaimed Boris Krumrey, chief robotics officer at UiPath, at the AI Summit in London last week. Robotic process automation, or RPA as it's often called, isn't the sexiest concept to emerge from the technology sphere, but it is a fast-growing industry -- and it's one that could reshape the workplace of the future. RPA brings automation to laborious enterprise tasks through smart "software robots" that replicate repetitive (and tedious) tasks through rules-based processes. The technology is installed on top of popular business applications, which may include enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and it monitors what humans do so that it can emulate them. If you ever have to carry out manual data entry tasks for hours or days at a time, RPA could be the answer to your prayers. Some estimates peg the RPA industry at $2.3 billion today, and it could grow to more than $4 billion by 2022.

Generative adversarial nets (GAN) has been successfully introduced for generating text to alleviate the exposure bias. However, discriminators in these models only evaluate the entire sequence, which causes feedback sparsity and mode collapse. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel mechanism. It first segments the entire sequence into several sub-sequences. Then these sub-sequences, together with the entire sequence, are evaluated individually by the discriminator. At last these feedback signals are all used to guide the learning of GAN. This mechanism learns the generation of both the entire sequence and the sub-sequences simultaneously. Learning to generate sub-sequences is easy and is helpful in generating an entire sequence. It is easy to improve the existing GAN-based models with this mechanism. We rebuild three previous well-designed models with our mechanism, and the experimental results on benchmark data show these models are improved significantly, the best one outperforms the state-of-the-art model.\footnote[1]{All code and data are available at https://github.com/liyzcj/seggan.git

European Robotics Forum, the most influential meeting of the robotics and AI community, held its 10th anniversary edition in Romania. The event was organized Under the High Patronage of the President of Romania and Under the Patronage of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The most advanced prototypes, high end technology projects, financed under Horizon 2020, were exhibited to be admired and analysed at JW Marriott between 20 and 22 March. Among the robots that were displayed one could find: the famous REEM-C – the humanoid robot that speaks 9 languages and that costs 1 million euro, QT – the robot especially created to help children who suffer from autism, Trimbot – the gardening robot that will help cut the roses and the bushes, as well as other prototypes that take innovation to the next level. Among the exhibitors we could also find Romanian companies developing advanced software solutions for international robotics companies.

Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening. Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.