In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically determine the batch size in stochastic gradient descent methods. The choice of the batch size induces a trade-off between the accuracy of the gradient estimate and the cost in terms of samples of each update. We propose to determine the batch size by optimizing the ratio between a lower bound to a linear or quadratic Taylor approximation of the expected improvement and the number of samples used to estimate the gradient. The performance of the proposed approach is empirically compared with related methods on popular classification tasks. The work was presented at the NIPS workshop on Optimizing the Optimizers. Barcelona, Spain, 2016.

For the second consecutive year, Spain's agricultural ministry has launched a pilot experiment using artificial intelligence to predict the evolution of the olive fly.

It was, in part, Tesla's self-driving car, first demonstrated in 2015, that finally got the pharmaceutical industry to take artificial intelligence (AI) seriously. That is according to Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive officer of artificial intelligence start-up Insilico Medicine, based in Baltimore, Maryland. He says Tesla showed that AI really is feasible, and in the past couple of years the pharmaceutical industry investment tap has started to flow. This investment has been coupled with continued technological progress. "It previously took half a year to show something new," says Zhavoronkov, but currently every week his team messages him about an advance that makes him think "wow". The questions now are when the first AI-designed drugs will reach the market and whether AI will transform the process of drug discovery.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. In case you weren't keeping track, Monday, December 4, was National Cookie Day in the United Sttes, so here's a throwback to MIT's PR2 baking a cookie (they say it's called a "Chocolate Afghan," whatever that is). We've been waiting TEN YEARS for this: It's the official ROS 10 year montage!

Do you know your Eliza from your Tay, and the other A.I. heroes and villains from sixty years of Artificial Intelligence? It's taken from our upcoming SYZYGY international survey Public Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence: What Marketers Need to Know to be released on October 6 (let me know if you're interested in a copy). We're surveying 6000 people across Europe and the USA to understand how people feel about A.I. today. The goal of the study is to help marketers, whether marketing A.I. or marketing with A.I., become more empathetic to people's hopes, fears and meanings around this emerging technology.

It took Amazon a while to get its streaming music strategy truly off the ground -- its Music Unlimited service, with competes with Spotify, Apple Music and the like, only launched last fall. But today, both Music Unlimited and the Echo smart speaker lineup are expanding in a big way: Amazon has announced that both are available in 28 new countries, most of which are found across Europe and South America. Pricing for Music Unlimited will vary by area, but Amazon says it'll offer the same three plans it currently does -- including an Echo-only plan, the standard individual plan for smartphones, computers and other devices and a family plan for multiple users. Amazon's also not discussing pricing for Echo hardware, as that also will vary from country to country. But launching both the hardware and service at the same time is a smart move, as the company says its music service is designed with voice control in mind. Of course, Spotify and the like work just as well, but having both the Echo and Music Unlimited available at the same time will ensure new customers can use their new speakers to their fullest extent.

"Cancer is an umbrella term for thousands of different types of conditions, yet treatment offered today is often generic and does not consider the need for differing therapies for different people," says Professor Toby Walsh, a leading expert in artificial intelligence (AI). "However, with AI, all of us can have access to the best experts on the planet to get the best diagnosis and treatment." Major technology companies such as Alphabet's Verily and Google's DeepMind, alongside a slew of startups, are using cognitive computing to fight cancer by building tools that essentially sort and accumulate medical knowledge and data on a scale that is impossible for humans alone to achieve. Using machines to encapsulate the knowledge of physicians and experts, and to interpret data better than the specialists, can create a new understanding of cancer to provide better diagnosis and treatment outcomes. For example, opportunities provided by genome sequencing can be unlocked with AI.

My report is timed to the 60th anniversary of the launch of the First artificial Earth satellite. Artificial intelligence is created by scientists and programmers of the world. The main scientific and research centers in the field of artificial intelligence are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (USA), the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Germany), the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Japan, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia). Different technological communities are also interested in the development of artificial intelligence. They create new technologies and platforms, including crypto-currencies.

At what point does a factory worker lose capacity because of a co-bot? What if a logistics artificial intelligence (AI) system is fooled by new data and makes a fatal error? What if board executives are duped by hostile chatbots and act on misinformation? None of these instances of bot-gone-bad scenarios are science fiction fantasy. Don't forget the Tesla driverless car that mistook a trailer for the sky, the racist Microsoft bot that learnt from bad examples and the chatbots that influenced the 2016 US presidential election.

Australian gambling regulators are considering whether pay-to-win "loot boxes" in video games constitute gambling and may be in breach of state laws. The recent release of Star Wars Battlefront 2, one of the year's gaming blockbusters, has renewed a global debate about the convergence of gambling mechanisms and video games. Authorities in Belgium and a legislator in the United States have both expressed concern about Battlefront 2's reliance on loot boxes, a randomised system of reward that can help a player progress through the game. The game's progression system relies significantly on the boxes, which can be purchased using real money to give the player equipment and "star cards" with varying levels of effectiveness for their character. A character may, for example, get lucky and unlock an ability to cause significantly more damage.