By Shray Ambe This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. My name is Shray Ambe and I am a rising senior at Emory University. I am a Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology major who is pursuing a career in the medical field. Outside of the classroom, I am involved in organizing the booth for Emory's Center for The Study of Human Health at the Atlanta Science Festival Expo every year and also enjoy volunteering at the Emory Autism Center and the Radiology Department at Emory University Hospital. At the 2016 Neuroethics Network in Paris, France, bioethicist and philosopher John Harris gave a lecture titled "How Smart Do We Want Machines to Be?" During his lecture, Harris discussed the potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and stated "it doesn't matter how smart they are; obviously the smarter the better."

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics -- the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States. Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes.

Could a robot designed as a sexual companion ever feel something like love for me? And could I, as a human with emotional intelligence, ever feel love for it? These questions challenge our definition of love, but they also challenge our understanding of both human emotion and artificial intelligence. Will intimate relationships between humans and robots ever get beyond just sex? This is a topic up for debate at the 12th Human Choice and Computers Conference in Manchester, UK, where academics and researchers are gathering this week to discuss humanity's relationship--sexual, romantic, or otherwise--with our AI counterparts.

I've been writing about the work of Cathy "Mathbabe" O'Neil for years: she's a radical data-scientist with a Harvard PhD in mathematics, who coined the term "Weapons of Math Destruction" to describe the ways that sloppy statistical modeling is punishing millions of people every day, and in more and more cases, destroying lives. Today, O'Neil brings her argument to print, with a fantastic, plainspoken, call to arms called (what else?) Weapons of Math Destruction. Discussions about big data's role in our society tends to focus on algorithms, but the algorithms for handling giant data sets are all well understood and work well. Models are what you get when you feed data to an algorithm and ask it to make predictions. As O'Neil puts it, "Models are opinions embedded in mathematics." Other critical data scientists, like Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group have located their critique in the same place.

The second beauty contest, where humans are judged by the robots completes with over six thousand images evaluated by the five robot judges. In addition to the panel of judges from the first contest, Beauty.AI 2.0 featured three new robot judges including: "Average Face" built on the hypothesis that the closer the face is to the average face within the ethnic group, the more attractive it is "AntiAgeist" evaluating the difference between the predicted and actual chronological age "PIMPL" evaluating the number and distribution of pimples and other dark spots (but not freckles) The results were sent to the individual participants via secure link and winners were announced at http://winners2.beauty.ai/#win . The results were surprising, since the consensus scores provided by the robot jury disagreed with human opinion. Tens of participants responded with angry emails criticizing the winners selected by the robot jury. Statements including "what is your "robot" worth??? One walk through a shopping-mall and I will discover more attractive people vs. that ones "won" your Beauty Contest", "If this is how I will be judged in the future, I don't want to see it", "You need human opinion" were among the most pleasant ones with rare positive comments including "this contest is a confidence booster!".

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Elon Musk may not be in hiding, but he is definitely missing in action on Twitter -- the social network he usually frequents to tease consumers and his critics of his next move or hint at upcoming updates and whatnot. The last that we heard of him was he was going to publish a post that would introduce the Autopilot 8.0 update and clearly explain how the controversial Autopilot system really works. And that was a week ago. On Sept. 1, the CEO of Tesla Motors took to Twitter to announce to his millions of followers that he was postponing his new blog post until the end of the weekend. He did this a day after sharing on the social network that he was writing the post and publishing it on Aug. 31.

We deal with the efficient parallelization of Bayesian global optimization algorithms, and more specifically of those based on the expected improvement criterion and its variants. A closed form formula relying on multivariate Gaussian cumulative distribution functions is established for a generalized version of the multipoint expected improvement criterion. In turn, the latter relies on intermediate results that could be of independent interest concerning moments of truncated Gaussian vectors. The obtained expansion of the criterion enables studying its differentiability with respect to point batches and calculating the corresponding gradient in closed form. Furthermore , we derive fast numerical approximations of this gradient and propose efficient batch optimization strategies. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed approaches enable computational savings of between one and two order of magnitudes, hence enabling derivative-based batch-sequential acquisition function maximization to become a practically implementable and efficient standard.

Project Wing, a subdivision of Google's parent company Alphabet, will use self-guiding drones to deliver Chipotle food at Virginia Tech this fall. The drones are capable of both flying and hovering on pre-planned routes, avoiding hazards as they go. Dave Vos, head of Project Wing, told Bloomberg that human pilots will be there to take over in case of emergency, as is required by the FAA. This specific experiment is novel, because "it's the first time that we're actually out there delivering stuff to people who want that stuff," Vos told Bloomberg. The drones will launch from a food truck, make the delivery, and return to the truck as a "home base."

An insistent pattern has quietly taken hold in my household. I will order some consumer product online. I will open the package, extract the thing from its protective wrappings, and retrieve the instruction manual. I will examine the product briefly, then begin to read the instruction manual. And then I will go to YouTube.