It has been a very productive year for NLP and ML research. Both areas continued to grow, with conferences reaching record numbers of publications. In this post I will break these numbers down a bit more, by individual authors and organisations. Compared to last year, I've now included ICLR which has grown very rapidly in the last two years and become a highly competitive conference. The analysis is done automatically, by crawling publication information from the conference websites and ACL Anthology.

Technology is blamed for many things. Amongst them is the rise in mental illnesses such as depression. Social media has been linked to a rise in low self-esteem and social anxiety for teenagers and adults, and according to psychologists, technology has resulted in millennials being on the "brink of a mental-health crisis". Back in 2010 psychologists at the University of Leeds found evidence of a link between excessive internet use and depression, while in 2015 scientists at the University of Gothenburg connected heavy use of technology with heightened stress, sleeping problems and depressive symptoms in women. But harnessed in the right way, technology offers tremendous opportunity and hope.

Last month, our company had a bring your kids to work day. Teachers had announced a general strike, asking for more resources from the government. It meant that many parents needed an improvised daycare, which, I have to admit, was quite fun. The sentiment of teachers is not new, nor is it exclusive for the Netherlands; teachers are often put under difficult circumstances even though most people would agree that they have a noble task in educating our children. But something is slowly but steadily changing in the role of teachers which sheds a new light on their role and duress.

Edward D. Hess, Professor of Business Administration & Batten Executive-in-Residence – Darden School of Business, and co-author of Humility Is the New Smart Technology will continue to advance much faster than the business world will adopt and much faster than the social and governmental sectors will adapt. The two big areas that will practically lead the way in 2018 are The Industrial Internet of Things and Global Politics. Global industrial Incumbents who are ahead now in technology adoption and who are building AI-Cloud based platforms to serve an ecosystem will continue to advance and ultimately that will lead to massive global industry consolidations leading to large reductions in the number of human employees. The power of large AI-based platform organizations will be the story of the future. The impact is still 3-5 years out but, when it hits, it will be big. The dominant Future of Work issues in 2018 will be political. How will China advance toward its goal of becoming the AI global leader and who will contest that? What happens in the mid-term elections in the United States? And will Germany's to be formed new government continue to exhibit the leadership needed in Europe and globally?

Over the next 25 years, a revolutionary technology will transform our world. It will save us money, boost production of goods fivefold, and make our lives more comfortable. But it will crater wages by 90%, drive whole swaths of skilled workers to starvation, destroy families, and cause wide-scale political and social upheaval, sparking mobs, riots, and armed rebellion. The invention: The Jacquard loom. The Jacquard loom is a wooden contraption that fits to the head of a regular loom. You feed it punch cards, and it controls the weaving patterns for you.

Singles have been warned to avoid the'puffery' of dating websites which claim to have scientific proof they can find love. The warning comes after the popular site eHarmony was found to be misleading those looking for a partner. The company made the advertising claim that it used a'scientifically proven matching system'. A billboard ad for the website on a London Underground platform seen in July said: 'Step aside, fate. It's time science had a go at love.' Singles have been warned to avoid the'puffery' of dating websites which claim to have scientific proof they can find love (pictured, eHarmony's controversial advert) It went on: 'Imagine being able to stack the odds of finding lasting love entirely in your favour.

In the coming decades, intelligent systems will take over more and more decision-making tasks from humans. While accountants have been using technology for many years to improve what they do and deliver more value to businesses, this is an opportunity to reimagine and radically improve the quality of business and investment decisions – which is the ultimate purpose of the profession. In order to realise this potential, the profession needs to focus on the fundamental business problems it aims to solve, and imagine how new technologies can transform its approach to them. This is according to a report (Artificial intelligence and the future of accountancy) by the IT Faculty at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). It says although artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning are not new, and the pace of change is fast, widespread adoption in business and accounting is still in early stages.

Leading experts are warning that the prevalence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives will lead to a "tech takeover" of every aspect of our lives. The ultra-liberal British Institute for Public Policy Research has concluded that while technology will soon permeate every aspect of our lives, and in certain ways, control it, the benefits will outweigh the negatives. Artificial intelligence will not lead to a "post-human society," but rather increased economic output and the creation of new sources of wealth. The critical challenge of automation is likely to be in distribution rather than production. If the benefits are fairly shared, automation can help build an economy where prosperity is underpinned by justice, with a more equitable distribution of wealth, income and working time.

Called Ultromics, it was trained to identify potential problems in the scans of 1,000 patients treated over the past seven years, along with information about whether they went on to have heart problems. "As cardiologists, we accept that we don't always get it right at the moment," Prof Leeson said. "But now there is a possibility that way may be able to do better." Prof Sir Malcolm Grant, the chairman of NHS England, said in 2015 that artificial intelligence would bring NHS patients a greater quality of care by better diagnosing medical conditions and personalising treatment. He said the health service would benefit hugely from the use of machine learning and robots, suggesting that if such technology could outperform humans, it would be "daft" not to use it.

Structure based ligand discovery is one of the most successful approaches for augmenting the drug discovery process. Currently, there is a notable shift towards machine learning (ML) methodologies to aid such procedures. Deep learning has recently gained considerable attention as it allows the model to "learn" to extract features that are relevant for the task at hand. We have developed a novel deep neural network estimating the binding affinity of ligand-receptor complexes. The complex is represented with a 3D grid, and the model utilizes a 3D convolution to produce a feature map of this representation, treating the atoms of both proteins and ligands in the same manner. Our network was tested on the CASF "scoring power" benchmark and Astex Diverse Set and outperformed classical scoring functions.