Machines won't become intelligent unless they incorporate certain features of the human brain. Europe's massive €1 billion project has shifted focus from simulation to informatics By Megan Scudellari Large-scale brainlike systems are possible with existing technology--if we're willing to spend the money By Jennifer Hasler Researchers in this specialized field have hitched their wagon to deep learning's star By Lee Gomes Running algorithms that mimic a rat's navigation neurons, heavy machines will soon plumb Australia's underground mines By Jean Kumagai Artificial intelligence might endow some computers with self-awareness.

How would you describe Inbest.ai in a few words? Inbest.ai is an enterprise bot builder platform for financial institutions to build, manage and optimize chatbots for customer engagement. Chatbots are transforming investment services from static websites and apps to intelligent personal conversations in messaging applications. Our platform allows financial institutions to access this new channel. What inspired you to create the chatbot builder?

Automation through AI, robotics or 3D-printing will make healthcare more efficient and more sustainable. These new digital technologies will improve healthcare processes resulting in the earlier and more efficient treatment of patients. It will eventually shift the focus in medicine from treatment to prevention. Moreover, medical professionals will get the chance to move from repetitive, monotonous tasks to the challenging, creative assignments. AI has certainly more revolutionary potential than simply optimizing processes: it can mine medical records or medical images in order to come up with previously unknown implications or signals; design treatment plans for cancer patients or create drugs from existing pills or re-use old drugs for new purposes.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been a hot topic in 2017, especially when looking at the future of Artificial Intelligence in Social Media. Investment has been growing in AI, and this is expected to grow by around 300% throughout the rest of this year. A third of the world's population is using Social Media, and AI is playing a huge part in how businesses are communicating with potential prospects online. This is very exciting for me, as I have seen the evolution of Social Media all the way from the Myspace/Bebo days, all the way to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google and now SnapChat. AI is not going anywhere and in fact, it is going to become more widely used by businesses, which is why I wanted to write this article.

It was a striking story. "Machine Bias," the headline read, and the teaser proclaimed: "There's software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks." ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk assessment software known as COMPAS. It is being used to forecast which criminals are most likely to reoffend.

He is the star of the Daily Telegraph's splash, which sees his unexpected comeback as Theresa May's attempt to avoid a leadership challenge. The newspaper thinks the prime minister is addressing complaints that she is too autocratic and unwilling to work with her critics. It also expects Mr Gove to become a key adviser on Brexit and a powerful ally in getting any deal through the Commons. The Sun says he is the biggest winner in the "post-election disaster shake-up". The Times interprets the limited reshuffle as a signal that Mrs May will go for a so-called soft Brexit. The newspaper says she faces overwhelming pressure to go for looser controls on immigration, a re-think on leaving the customs union, and a more flexible approach to the European Court of Justice.

From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, emerging technologies are rewriting the retail playbook at a rapid pace, suggests J. Walter Thompson Intelligence in a new report called Frontier(less) Retail. Launched in collaboration with WWD, the report explores the idea that brands and retailers are increasingly putting innovation at the core of their strategies. This relates to everything from digital integration through to the more future-looking technologies helping to shift their businesses forward. Rebecca Minkoff has boosted sales with smart mirrors in dressing rooms, it notes, while Kate Spade has had a hit with Everpurse, a smartphone-charging handbag. It also attributes the success of Under Armour in part to its positioning as a tech-forward brand, and references Topshop's new incubator program, Top Pitch, as a clever bid to achieve the same at a time when its young consumer base is more likely to spend on smartphones than splurge on streetwear. Within all this, however, it is keeping abreast of change that is proving one of the industry's biggest challenges.

LOS ANGELES – Microsoft on Sunday unveiled Xbox One X -- billing it as the most powerful video console ever made, and escalating a battle with market king PlayStation. The $499 product was built with the muscle for seamless play on ultra-high definition 4K televisions and will be available worldwide on Nov. 7, according to Xbox team leader Phil Spencer. He introduced the much anticipated Xbox One X, called Scorpio during development, at a Microsoft event ahead of the official opening of the major Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Aiming at the hearts of gamers, Microsoft also showed off 42 coming games, with 22 titles being tailored for exclusive play on Xbox One consoles. Independent publishers tend to make blockbuster titles available for play on Xbox, PlayStation and personal computer hardware in an effort to sell creations to as broad an audience as possible.

Those fretfully debating artificial intelligence (AI) might best start by appraising the half dozen general pathways under exploration in laboratories around the world. While these general approaches overlap, they offer distinct implications for what characteristics emerging, synthetic minds might display, including (for example) whether it will be easy or hard to instill human-style ethical values. Most problematic may be those efforts taking place in secret. The "Moore's Law crossing" argument is appraised, in light of discoveries that brain computation may involve much more than just synapses. Will efforts to develop Sympathetic Robotics tweak compassion from humans long before automatons are truly self-aware? It is argued that most foreseeable problems might be dealt with the same way that human versions of oppression and error are best addressed -- via reciprocal accountability. For this to happen, there should be diversity of types, designs and minds, interacting under fair competition in a generally open environment. As varied concepts from science fiction are reified by rapidly advancing technology, some trends are viewed worriedly by our smartest peers. Portions of the intelligencia -- typified by Google's Ray Kurzweil [1] -- foresee AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as likely to bring good news, perhaps even transcendence for members of the Olde Race of bio-organic humanity 1.0. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Francis Fukuyama, warn that the arrival of sapient, or supersapient machinery may bring an end to our species -- or at least its relevance on the cosmic stage -- a potentiality evoked in many a lurid Hollywood film. Swedish philosopher Nicholas Bostrom, in Superintelligence [2], suggests that even advanced AIs who obey their initial, human defined goals will likely generate "instrumental subgoals" such as self-preservation, cognitive enhancement, and resource acquisition. In one nightmare scenario, Bostrom posits an AI that -- ordered to "make paperclips" -- proceeds to overcome all obstacles and transform the solar system into paper clips. A variant on this theme makes up the grand arc in the famed "three laws" robotic series by science fiction author Isaac Asimov [3]. Taking middle ground, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with YCombinator founder Sam Altman to establish OpenAI [4], an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research -- and its products -- accountable by maximizing transparency and accountability. As one who has promoted those two key words for a quarter of a century, I wholly approve [5].

Along with the recent advances in scalable Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, sampling techniques that are based on Langevin diffusions have started receiving increasing attention. These so called Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods are based on diffusions driven by a Brownian motion, which gives rise to Gaussian proposal distributions in the resulting algorithms. Even though these approaches have proven successful in many applications, their performance can be limited by the light-tailed nature of the Gaussian proposals. In this study, we extend classical LMC and develop a novel Fractional LMC (FLMC) framework that is based on a family of heavy-tailed distributions, called $\alpha$-stable L\'{e}vy distributions. As opposed to classical approaches, the proposed approach can possess large jumps while targeting the correct distribution, which would be beneficial for efficient exploration of the state space. We develop novel computational methods that can scale up to large-scale problems and we provide formal convergence analysis of the proposed scheme. Our experiments support our theory: FLMC can provide superior performance in multi-modal settings, improved convergence rates, and robustness to algorithm parameters.