Intelligent Machines and the Future of Recruitment is the conference, organised by Textkernel in honour of its 15th anniversary, that explores the impact of rapidly evolving machine intelligence on the future of people and jobs. Among the speakers are Glen Cathey (Kforce), Behshad Behzadi(Google), Federico Pistono (author), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam),Martin le Vrang (ESCO), Perry Timms (Media Zoo), Ton Sluiter (USG People),Balazs Paroczay (Randstad Sourceright) and Prof. Dr. Armin Trost (Furtwangen University). "The rise of machine learning, search engines, semantic technologies and the large amounts of available information are changing the labour market," says Jakub Zavrel, CEO of Textkernel. "When I started the company 15 years ago, the use of AI in recruiting was still in its infancy. Companies like us have been making AI and semantic search technology part of the mainstream. What better way to celebrate Textkernel's anniversary than to organise a conference to spark the discussion on how artificial intelligence will evolve and change the way we hire and work."

Three weeks ago we reported an amusing anecdote out of China in which robot waiters in a Guangzhou restaurant had been "fired" because whencustomers flocked to the Heweilai Restaurant chain in the southern Chinese city, they found they were not all they are cracked up to be. "A staff member said the robots couldn't effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also said the robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table." "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee. We joked in the summary saying that "for now, it appears, China's minimum wage workers, and it has a few hundred million of those, will not be phased out just yet." According to a report released by the MIT Technology Review, where some saw failure in China's "novelty" worker robots, the Chinese government saw nothing less than the opportunity to perfect what will soon put million of Chinese workers out of a job: an army of worker robots. Because while there is certanly humor to be found in the anecdote about a robot "termination", the Chinese government is keen to change this.

Recent films depicting human-machine romance could soon be a reality, as more people are becoming comfortable with the idea of dating robots. Researchers have found that one in four young people in the UK would happily date a robot - as long as it looked like a real-life human being.

Volvo has announced plans to conduct the'most ambitious' trial of driverless car technology on UK roads. The Swedish manufacturer said it will be the first time members of the British public will be recruited to get behind the wheel of autonomous driving (AD) cars on a public highway. A limited number of semi-AD cars will take to the streets of London early next year, before the scheme is extended in 2018 to up to 100 vehicles. Volvo has announced plans to conduct the'most ambitious' trial of driverless car technology on UK roads. The Swedish manufacturer said it will be the first time members of the British public will be recruited to get behind the wheel of autonomous driving (AD) cars on the public highway. Adapted versions of Volvo's XC90 sport utility vehicle will be used in the trials.

More than half of the world's population is bilingual and that prevalence is rising. Psychologists have been interested in how bilingualism shapes the mind for almost a century - and many say it can improve memory and attention. But new research suggests this may not be the case, and being bilingual could in fact be bad for your brain. In their studies, babies listened to words spoken in both Spanish and English, which is common in America. They are those who suggest that in order to speak in one language, bilinguals have to suppress the influence of the other.

You'll soon be getting much better video recommendations from YouTube. Google is launching new iOS and Android apps for YouTube aimed not only at a design refresh, but also at offering you smarter video recommendations. You'll also notice larger photos, which should help in identifying videos from particular channels. "The new recommendation system is based on deep neural network technology, which means it can find patterns automatically and keep learning and improving as it goes," said a blog post detailing the update. "Every day, we recommend hundreds of millions of different videos on Home, billions of times, in 76 languages."

The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates' names appear in random order). In addition to the election of ACM's officers--President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer--five Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://www.esc-vote.com/acm2016. To access the secure voting site, you will need to enter your email address (the email address associated with your ACM member record) and your unique PIN provided by Election Services Co. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method. All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 24 May 2016. Validation by the Tellers Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 26 May 2016. Vicki Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. (since 2013), Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies, Computing, University of Dundee, U.K. (since 2009), and an IBM Research Staff Member Emeritus (since 2009). Previously, she was Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1986–2008), Research Associate, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT (1980–86), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1978–80). Vicki is the ACM Vice President. She also currently serves as a member of the ACM Executive Committee and Council, on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, and on the ACM Fellows Awards Committee (Chair, 2015). She is Vice President at Large of ACM SIGCHI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has served on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2005–14; SGB Chair 2010–12), and as Chair of SIGACCESS, where she revitalized the SIG and established a successful annual conference (ASSETS). She co-founded the field's premier archival journal (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing) and served as Associate Editor of ACM TWEB. She was on the organizing committee for several SIGPLAN OOPSLA conferences, chaired the recent ACM CEO Search Committee, and currently serves on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows committee (since 2013; Convener 2015). She is an ACM Fellow, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Volvo is set to run self-driving versions of its family 4x4s on roads around London next year as the motor industry's trial of autonomous vehicles accelerates. While self-driving pods and shuttles were already due to operate on pavements in Greenwich and Milton Keynes this summer, the Swedish carmaker is planning to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the capital from 2017. Volvo's UK test, called Drive Me London, will go a step further than other programmes by using real families driving autonomous cars on public roads. The manufacturer has conducted tests with the same vehicles in Gothenburg since 2014, and plans a parallel public trial in the Swedish city next year. The cars will record data from everyday users to help develop driverless cars for real-world conditions.

Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

Most existing abstractions and implementations for parallel computing were developed for computational science applications in which the main parallelism pattern is data parallelism; an example of a data-parallel operation is "map," which applies a function to each element of a set, producing a new set. Systems like Hadoop enable programmers to express and exploit data parallelism without having to write low-level parallel code. Some graph analytics algorithms have data parallelism, but others exhibit a more complex parallelism pattern called "amorphous" data-parallelism,29 described later in this article. Unlike in data-parallel programs, tasks in amorphous data-parallel programs may or may not be able to run in parallel, depending on the graph structure and values known only at runtime. To exploit this parallelism pattern, systems need to find opportunities for parallel execution while executing the program in parallel.