The next Angry Birds AI competition will be held at IJCAI 2017 in Melbourne, Australia, August 24-25, 2017. For more details please refer to the Call for Participation and the detailed Competition Rules. This year we will again have two competition tracks, the standard track and a competitive track where two AI agents try to solve the same level with alternating shots. Previous Angry Birds AI competitions were held in Sydney in December 2012 during the Australasian AI conference, in Beijing in August 2013 during the IJCAI conference, in Prague in August 2014 at the ECAI conference, in Buenos Aires in July 2015 at the IJCAI conference, and most recently at the IJCAI 2016 conference in New York. Further details about these past competitions can be found here.

Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition are based on the same proven, highly scalable Amazon technology built by the thousands of deep learning and machine learning experts across the company. Amazon AI services all provide high-quality, high-accuracy AI capabilities that are scalable and cost-effective. Amazon AI services are fully managed services so there are no deep learning algorithms to build, no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or infrastructure investments required. This frees developers to focus on defining and building an entirely new generation of apps that can see, hear, speak, understand, and interact with the world around them. To learn more about Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, or Amazon Rekognition, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-ai

Artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs, worsening inequality and risking significant political upheaval, Stephen Hawking has warned. In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Technology has already gutted many traditional manufacturing and working class jobs -- but now it may be poised to wreak similar havoc with the middle classes.

'We are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity': Stephen Hawking warns we are at risk of destroying Earth We are living through the most dangerous time in the history of the human race, according to Professor Stephen Hawking. The Cambridge University physics professor named overpopulation, climate change and diseases as just some of the threats facing our planet. He said we have developed technology that could destroy Earth, and we must'retrain' for a new world where robots have replaced many everyday jobs. We are living through the most dangerous time in the history of the human race, according to Professor Stephen Hawking. Writing in a comment article in The Guardian, Professor Hawking explained what worries him about the future of our planet.

In an independence model, the triplets that represent conditional independences between singletons are called elementary. It is known that the elementary triplets represent the independence model unambiguously under some conditions. In this paper, we show how this representation helps performing some operations with independence models, such as finding the dominant triplets or a minimal independence map of an independence model, or computing the union or intersection of a pair of independence models, or performing causal reasoning. For the latter, we rephrase in terms of conditional independences some of Pearl's results for computing causal effects.

Housemarque, the Finnish developer behind Resogun and Dead Nation, hasn't had the best year. I visited its Helsinki headquarters back in September to see how the studio was following up Resogun, the surprise hit of the PlayStation 4 launch. What I found was a unique company struggling to hold on to the identity it believes in. Housemarque made its name with Stardust. Originally released for the Amiga in the early '90s, the series rose to prominence with the digital release of Super Stardust HD on the PlayStation 3. The studio has since become a specialist in digital-only games, almost all of which can trace their lineage back to the arcade. The isometric shooter Dead Nation was the studio's next big hit, going on to become one of the bestselling digital-only titles for PlayStation 3, while the Ikaruga-meets-Metroid platformer Outland was critically acclaimed. But it was during the launch of the PlayStation 4 that Housemarque would make the biggest impact. Resogun took the basic premise behind the arcade classic Defender and turned it into a modern shooter. With cylindrical stages and a custom voxel-based engine, the game was by far the strongest PlayStation 4 exclusive of its time, and one of scant few highlights of the console's November 2013 launch. Sony clearly knew as much: It made Resogun free to all members of its PlayStation Plus subscription service, and as a result the game was downloaded by millions of PlayStation 4 owners.

Today we Google for information, but in the future, we might not need to. Instead we may rely on our butler, namely the intelligent, voice-activated digital assistant on our smart phones, smart watches, or devices like Amazon's Echo and Alphabet's Home. Rather than searching the web, we'll be able to ask our digital assistant how to remove the stain from our shirt. It'll perform other perfunctory tasks, like adding groceries to our shopping list, checking the weather, sending a text, or ordering an Uber. Maurice E. Stucke (@MauriceStucke) is a co-founder of the Konkurrenz Group and a law professor at the University of Tennessee.

Steve Cousins is founder and CEO of Savioke, which develops and deploys autonomous robots that work in human environments to improve people's lives. Steve was previously president and CEO of robotics incubator Willow Garage. When it comes to technology's impact on the economy, there continues to be concern that robots and other advances will lead to unemployment. But what does history really tell us about the impact of new technologies on jobs and the economy? And more importantly, what happens to America's ability to compete in a global economy if we reject automation and stifle technological innovation? As a computer scientist, researcher and now CEO of a fast-growing robotics company, I've spent my career building technologies to improve people's lives and help companies grow.

Here are Academic/Research positions in Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, Machine Learning posted on KDnuggets in November 2016. See an up-to-date and full list at www.kdnuggets.com/academic/ See also industry jobs in business analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science. Seeking applicants for this fellowship, sponsored by Amazon India and hosted by IISc. This is an 18-month postdoctoral fellowship targeted at outstanding researchers working on Foundations of data science, or Interface between theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning.

Starred articles are candidates for the picture of the week. A comprehensive list of all past resources is found here. We are in the process of automatically categorizing them using indexation and automated tagging algorithms. IBM makes quantum computing available in the cloud 2016 Big Data 100: 20 Coolest Platform And Tools Vendors The fight against antimicrobial resistance across Europe Cool video pie chart Inside Facebook's Biggest Artificial Intelligence Project Ever How to tell two radically different stories from the same dataset Data science, no coding required: DataRobot's automated platform Google launches new machine learning platform TechCrunch Cleaning Big Data: Most Time-Consuming, Least Enjoyable Data Scienc... Forbes Beyond the hype: the hard work behind analytics success MIT Sloan Deep learning will be huge -- and here's who will dominate it Years You Have Left to Live, Probably - Nice interactive chart by FlowingData Alooma gets $11.2 million Series A to solve data science pain points AI program wrote a short novel, and almost won a literary prize How facial recognition can expose your life to strangers Data science, no coding required: DataRobot's automated platform Deep learning will be huge -- and here's who will dominate it Alooma gets $11.2 million Series A to solve data science pain points