Artificial intelligence has faced a renewed wave of scrutiny from some of the world's most prominent business leaders in recent days as concerns over its potential to create job losses grows. Inbenta argues that rather than being a job killer, AI will in fact be a job creator. It was billed as the end for bank tellers. On 27 June 1967, British comedian Reg Varney inserted a paper cheque into a machine in Enfield, North London and the ATM was born. Critics claimed its birth would facilitate the death of millions of banking jobs around the world.

Deep Learning waves have lapped at the shores of computational linguistics for several years now, but 2015 seems like the year when the full force of the tsunami hit the major Natural Language Processing (NLP) conferences. However, some pundits are predicting that the final damage will be even worse. Accompanying ICML 2015 in Lille, France, there was another, almost as big, event: the 2015 Deep Learning Workshop. The workshop ended with a panel discussion, and at it, Neil Lawrence said, "NLP is kind of like a rabbit in the headlights of the Deep Learning machine, waiting to be flattened." Now that is a remark that the computational linguistics community has to take seriously!

Germany's lower parliamentary house, the Bundestag, has approved the regular use of self-driving vehicles and features in the country, according to reports. As the country relies on a bicameral parliament, though, the upper house known as the Bundesrat will apparently also have to approve the legislation, and the executive branch will have to as well, before the law can be changed. The coalition forces that are backing the legalization of self-driving vehicles -- composed of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CSU) -- are reportedly confident that approval will be forthcoming. The law (as quoted in translation by Teslarati) reads: "During vehicle driving, the driver may turn away from traffic and vehicle control by means of highly automated or fully automated driving function … (but must) immediately (assume control) if he recognizes that the conditions for the intended use of the highly or fully automated driving functions no longer exist … even if he does not control the vehicle in the context of the intended use of this function." So, people will seemingly be responsible for whatever the self-driving vehicle/tech providers are unwilling to explicitly take responsibility for.

Amazon is offering other manufacturers free use of its smart speakers' microphone technologies as part of its efforts to spread the use of its Alexa virtual assistant. The firm will, however, pick and choose who can take advantage of the proposal. The initiative follows the launch of the Google Home speaker and its associated Assistant. One expert said the two tech firms were now involved in a "land grab" to become the sector's number one player. Doing so will help attract developers, and in turn ensure that one product has a wider range of capabilities than the other.

There's currently a shortage of over seven million physicians, nurses and other health workers worldwide, and the gap is widening. Doctors are stretched thin -- especially in underserved areas -- to respond to the growing needs of the population. Meanwhile, training physicians and health workers is historically an arduous process that requires years of education and experience. TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017.

A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat's level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at the University of Bristol in England, was looking for an objective way to tell whether animals in captivity were suffering. Specifically, he wanted to be able to measure whether, and how much, disruptions in lab rats' routines--being placed in an unfamiliar cage, say, or experiencing a change in the light/dark cycle of the room in which they were housed--were bumming them out. He and his colleagues explicitly drew on an extensive literature in psychology that describes how people with mood disorders such as depression process information and make decisions: They tend to focus on and recall more negative events and to judge ambiguous things in a more negative way. You might say that they tend to see the proverbial glass as half-empty rather than half-full. "We thought that it's easier to measure cognitive things than emotional ones, so we devised a test that would give us some indication of how animals responded under ambiguity," Mendl says.

Integrating intermittent renewable-energy supplies into existing electricity grids in a stable way will depend on artificial intelligence. Such a system could process massive volumes of consumption data and adjust power usage almost instantly, giving real-time control over supply and demand. Domestic consumers would be rewarded (with cheaper bills) for shifting their energy demand at short notice when the grid has a power imbalance, as is already the case for large industrial consumers and grid-scale storage systems. Smart meters that collect household consumption data would enable this process. By 2020, the United Kingdom aims to have such meters in 26 million homes and the European Union has a target of 200 million.

A major open problem on the road to artificial intelligence is the development of incrementally learning systems that learn about more and more concepts over time from a stream of data. In this work, we introduce a new training strategy, iCaRL, that allows learning in such a class-incremental way: only the training data for a small number of classes has to be present at the same time and new classes can be added progressively. iCaRL learns strong classifiers and a data representation simultaneously. This distinguishes it from earlier works that were fundamentally limited to fixed data representations and therefore incompatible with deep learning architectures. We show by experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet ILSVRC 2012 data that iCaRL can learn many classes incrementally over a long period of time where other strategies quickly fail.

Over 60% of Britons believe artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will soon have the potential to malfunction and even kill humans. This concern rises to 72% when those who understand and are interested in AI are asked about their fears over future robots. Participants were asked: "Films and TV series...portray intelligent robots who malfunction and kill humans. How far away do you feel we are from the technology depicted in the films?" Just 9% believed such a scenario is "very unlikely", while 45% said it was likely and 17% considered a future of robots killing humans as "very likely".

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