As AI continues its spread into business, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laid out three ethical principles for responsible AI development in a panel discussion on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. "We call them principles for AI, for a cognitive era, to guide what you do," Rometty said. "It's frankly our responsibility as leaders out there that are putting these technologies out to guide them in their entry into the world in a safe way." IBM has placed its big bet on the idea that data will become the basis of competitive advantage for companies worldwide, and will require AI tools that reason and learn to interpret it and gain insights, Rometty said. With AI, "the basis is that we would be so overwhelmed with information that it would be impossible for us to internalize it, and use it to what its full value could be," Rometty said.

Last September, Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmologist and professor at Oxford University, plunged a tiny robotic arm into Father William Beaver's eye. A membrane had recently contracted on the 70-year-old priest's retina, pinching it into an uneven shape and causing him to see the world as if reflected in a hall of mirrors. Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver's vision problems. It was the first operation performed inside the human eye using a robot. Since September, five more patients have undergone robot-assisted operations at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital in England, including one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2's unprecedented precision.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. The transportation industry is associated with high maintenance costs, disasters, accidents, injuries and loss of life. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are losing their lives to car accidents and road disasters every year. According to the National Safety Council, 38,300 people were killed and 4.4 million injured on U.S. roads alone in 2015. The related costs -- including medical expenses, wage and productivity losses and property damage -- were estimated at $152 billion.

EU rules for the fast-evolving field of robotics, for example, compliance with ethical standards and liability for accidents involving driverless cars, should be put forward by the EU Commission, urged the Legal Affairs Committee. Rapporteur Mady Delvaux (S&D, LU) said: "A growing number of areas of our daily lives are increasingly affected by robotics. In order to address this reality and to ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans, we urgently need to create a robust European legal framework". Her report, approved by 17 votes to 2, with 2 abstentions, looks at robotics-related issues such as liability, safety and changes in the labour market. MEPs stress that EU-wide rules are needed to fully exploit the economic potential of robotics and artificial intelligence and guarantee a standard level of safety and security. The EU needs to take the lead on regulatory standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third states, argues the report.

For centuries people have had a fascination for automatons. In the early industrial age automatons symbolized the humanization of machines, and today this extends into software and apps. Perhaps the most pronounced example of this are so-called "chat-bots." How do these machines work? A classic early automaton was the mechanical music box.

As humanity enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution, development of artificial intelligence (AI) must be guided by one overarching principle – technology must augment, not replace, human capability and opportunity. Experts speaking at an interactive session on artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting agreed that technology and access to technology must be democratized. They said it is essential to provide people with the relevant knowledge and skills to lay the groundwork for a more egalitarian and sustainable era of cognitive computing. The 47th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting is taking place on 17-20 January in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at IBM Corporation, USA, which has taken the lead in cognitive computing within the information technology industry and has developed the advanced AI platform Watson, said transparency is imperative to develop trust in cognitive computing.

We introduce a new dynamical system for sequentially observed multivariate count data. This model is based on the gamma--Poisson construction---a natural choice for count data---and relies on a novel Bayesian nonparametric prior that ties and shrinks the model parameters, thus avoiding overfitting. We present an efficient MCMC inference algorithm that advances recent work on augmentation schemes for inference in negative binomial models. Finally, we demonstrate the model's inductive bias using a variety of real-world data sets, showing that it exhibits superior predictive performance over other models and infers highly interpretable latent structure.

This paper extends the recently proposed and theoretically justified iterative thresholding and $K$ residual means algorithm ITKrM to learning dicionaries from incomplete/masked training data (ITKrMM). It further adapts the algorithm to the presence of a low rank component in the data and provides a strategy for recovering this low rank component again from incomplete data. Several synthetic experiments show the advantages of incorporating information about the corruption into the algorithm. Finally, image inpainting is considered as application example, which demonstrates the superior performance of ITKrMM in terms of speed at similar or better reconstruction quality compared to its closest dictionary learning counterpart.

January 18, 2017 --Barren circles dot the dry grasslands across about 1,500 miles of the Namib Desert stretching down the southwestern coast of Africa, emerging, growing, shrinking, and disappearing in lifetimes of 30 to 60 years. The empty patches are accentuated by a rim of particularly tall grasses that ring the circles, which range from 6 feet to 115 feet wide. The fairy circles, as the strange bare soil spots are called, have long puzzled scientists. Although they look a bit like imprints left by massive raindrops, impacting meteors, or as legend would have it, the feet of gods, researchers suspect the pattern may form as a result of a more systematic natural process. But just what that process might be has been the subject of much debate.

Artificial intelligence holds the key to a new era of innovation, one where computers begin to work intelligently on our behalf rather than under our command. It's an era where technology will become more intuitive, more conversational, more intelligent, will enable businesses to better know and serve their customers in ways previously unimaginable, and ultimately help solve some of the planet's biggest challenges. Microsoft is helping to lead a growing global conversation around AI's transformative potential. Last week, Harry Shum, executive vice president, Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, spoke at Future Forum in Beijing, China. This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared how Microsoft is democratizing AI for everyone at DLD in Munich, Germany, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.