At Search Party we are in the business of creating intelligent recruitment software. One of the problems we deal with is matching candidates and vacancies in order to create a recommendation engine. This usually requires parsing, interpreting and normalising messy, semi-/unstructured, textual data from résumés and vacancies, which is where the following come in: conditional random fields, bag-of-words, TF-IDFs, WordNet, statistical analysis, but also a lot of manual work done by linguists and domain experts for the creation of synonym lists, skill taxonomies, job title hierarchies, knowledge bases or ontologies. While these concepts are valuable for the problem we try to solve, they also require a certain amount of manual feature engineering and human expertise. This expertise is certainly a factor that makes these techniques valuable, but the question remains whether more automated approaches can be used to extract knowledge about the job space to complement these more traditional approaches.

U.S. officials have told airlines to "be prepared" for an expanded ban on carry-on electronic devices allowed on airplanes. Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan confirmed to reporters Tuesday that the administration is considering expanding the ban on laptops, which currently applies to U.S.-bound flights from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa. An expanded ban on devices larger than cellphones could potentially include "more than a couple" other regions, including flights from Western Europe. Lapan reminded reporters that DHS Secretary John Kelly has alluded to the ban "likely" being expanded. DHS officials, however, are still deciding where and how the new restrictions will be implemented.

ServiceNow is bringing enhanced machine-learning capabilities to its Now Platform for business process automation to help customers prevent outages, automatically route service requests, and predict and benchmark IT performance. The AI capabilities will be offered through the upcoming Intelligent Automation Engine, announced at the company's Knowledge conference in Orlando Tuesday. The move strengthens ServiceNow's base in IT management while making further inroads into other areas of the enterprise. The machine-learning capabilities will be brought into ServiceNow's cloud services for security, customer service, and HR. The Intelligent Automation Engine's algorithms are based on technology the company acquired through its purchase of DxContinuum in January.

What does the public sector of the future look like? Ken McGrath, head of Government at eir Business, looks at the rise of AI and robotics in the public sector and the benefits and challenges that presents. There's no doubt that recent reporting on robots and the future has ushered in a little bit of hysteria about said robots stealing our jobs and replacing humans in certain roles. What most people don't realise is that robots are already all around us; just because a supermarket's self-service checkout doesn't have eyes, doesn't make it any less of a robot. They're already embedded in organisations across Ireland and the world, helping them to work smarter and more efficiently. In the University of Limerick, for example, robotic assisted surgery is in full swing.

You really might be able to pre-order Amazon's touchscreen Echo sometime today, May 9th, if the leaked listing AFTVnews got its hands on is the real deal. Based on the screenshot (posted below the fold), the device is officially called the Amazon Echo Show, and it will set you back $230 in the US. The leaked listing didn't show prices in other regions, but it could cost you £220 or €240 if you're in the UK or Germany, respectively. That aligns with the price the Wall Street Journal was expecting and is almost $100 more than the newly launched Echo Look. The listing also says that pre-orders will begin shipping on June 28th, and each customer is limited to four units, likely to prevent resellers from hoarding.

Each of these areas already features a significant level of complexity, so the following description of data mining and artificial intelligence applications has necessarily been restricted to an overview. Vehicle development has become a largely virtual process that is now the accepted state of the art for all manufacturers. CAD models and simulations (typically of physical processes, such as mechanics, flow, acoustics, vibration, etc., on the basis of finite element models) are used extensively in all stages of the development process. The subject of optimization (often with the use of evolution strategies[31] or genetic algorithms and related methods) is usually less well covered, even though it is precisely here in the development process that it can frequently yield impressive results. Multi-disciplinary optimization, in which multiple development disciplines (such as occupant safety and noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH)) are combined and optimized simultaneously, is still rarely used in many cases due to supposedly excessive computation time requirements.

Doctors have gotten very good at determining which of their patients are at high risk for a heart attack. But new research suggests that artificial intelligence may be even better -- and that widespread use of AI could save many of the lives now lost to heart disease, the leading killer in the U.S. In preliminary tests, AI computer programs developed at the University of Nottingham in England were significantly more accurate at predicting which patients were at high risk. The programs, which employed an algorithm based on data from the medical records of more than 300,000 patients, accurately predicted 7.6 percent more heart attacks than doctors using the standard method, which involves careful consideration of patients' age, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other potential risk factors. The algorithm also prevented the accidental tagging of patients as "high-risk." That means these patients could safely forgo the medications often prescribed by doctors -- and thus avoid the severe muscle problems and other serious side effects these cholesterol-lowering drugs sometimes cause.

On 12th January, MEPs voted for a set of regulations to be drafted to govern the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence, hot off the back of the UK government setting up a commission to look at the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Across continents, the law is unclear and differing and is likely to evolve in this area. In late 2016, in the UK, the Commons' Science and Technology Committee published a report on robotics and artificial intelligence. The report recommended that a standing Commission on Artificial Intelligence be established to examine the social, ethical and legal implications of recent and potential developments in AI. As of 12th January, MEPs from the parliament's legal affairs committee passed Mady Delvaux's report into robotics and AI.

Technology is a key topic at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2017. Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the single most disruptive technology the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution. Granted, there is a lot of hype out there on AI, along with doomsday headlines and scary movies. But the reality is that it will positively and materially change how we engage with the world around us. It's going to improve not only how business is done, but the kind of work we do – and unleash new levels of creativity and ingenuity.

In 1931 at the age of just 25 years, the young Austrian mathematician Kurt Goedel proved an astonishing mathematical theorem that made him instantly famous and a celebrity in mathematical circles around the world (see picture; in the Anglo-Saxon literature Goedel is usually referred to as "Godel" skipping the Umlaut in his German name). Despite its very abstract nature and the lack of any every day practical use, Goedel's theorem - the so called Incompleteness Theorem - has had a dramatic and deep impact on mathematics itself and its foundations. It also had a substantial impact on the philosophy of the 20th century and our understanding of the general limitations of computers and algorithms. I will explain here how Goedel's theorem actually caused the emergence of the new science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and theoretical computer science in the 1940s and 1950s and how it motivated such key AI pioneers like Alan Turing to get involved. The birth of AI and the course AI has taken ...