Artificial intelligence could be the most revolutionary force affecting productivity in the United States economy, says the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. "Everyone in Silicon Valley thinks statisticians are mis-measuring the productivity provided by the internet, but it's not that," says John C. Williams, on a trip to Sydney this week. "Instead, the technologies that we now use and love mostly affect our consumption of leisure rather than affect our output in factories or offices." Positive data showing the US economy is nearing full employment and that inflation is edging higher prompted the US central bank to recently raise interest rates for the second time in three months. The US Fed also announced it will push ahead with plans to gradually shrink its $US4.5 trillion ($6 trillion) bond portfolio.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

In the twilight of his boxing career, Manny Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) may still have something left to prove. The Filipino icon currently serves in the Senate, but on Saturday he returns to the ring to face Jeff Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs), an inexperienced Australian who will be fighting in his hometown and in front of 50,000 spectators at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. But there is more to this fight than just a legend facing a relatively obscure boxer. The fight will be shown on ESPN, not pay-per-view or HBO, which has mostly been the home to Pacquiao fights over the past 10 years. The fight may also be viewed as a title-fight tune-up for Pacquiao, who at 38 years old may still have something left in him.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

Two driverless shuttles will begin operating at the University of Michigan this fall. The tall, airy, 15-passenger shuttles will carry students and staff in a two-mile loop on campus roads alongside regular traffic. The shuttle will be free and insured by the university. A driverless shuttle carries passengers at the University of Michigan, Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Two driverless shuttles will begin operating at the university this fall. The tall, airy, 15-passenger shuttles will carry students and staff in a two-mile loop on campus roads alongside regular traffic.

Entity resolution (ER) presents unique challenges for evaluation methodology. While crowdsourcing platforms acquire ground truth, sound approaches to sampling must drive labelling efforts. In ER, extreme class imbalance between matching and non-matching records can lead to enormous labelling requirements when seeking statistically consistent estimates for rigorous evaluation. This paper addresses this important challenge with the OASIS algorithm: a sampler and F-measure estimator for ER evaluation. OASIS draws samples from a (biased) instrumental distribution, chosen to ensure estimators with optimal asymptotic variance. As new labels are collected OASIS updates this instrumental distribution via a Bayesian latent variable model of the annotator oracle, to quickly focus on unlabelled items providing more information. We prove that resulting estimates of F-measure, precision, recall converge to the true population values. Thorough comparisons of sampling methods on a variety of ER datasets demonstrate significant labelling reductions of up to 83% without loss to estimate accuracy.

John Kelleher is a partner at McKinsey & Co. and the co-chair of Next Canada. Laura McGee is an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. and co-founder of #GoSponsorHer. There's no doubt that Canada could lead the planet in artificial intelligence (AI). Canadian academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio essentially created the field of deep learning and put Canada on the map; today, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal are globally important centres of AI research. The best AI talent in the world is also increasingly coming to Canada to launch AI businesses such as integrate.ai

We've written a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) here at Nanalyze, and just when we feel like there's not much more we can add to the topic, we find loads more interesting companies to write about. There has been a lot of talk lately about how machines just won't be able to capture that "human element" of emotions or "emotional intelligence" as it is often called. The act of building an emotional quotient or EQ as a layer on top of AI is being referred to as affective computing, a topic we covered before. The first step towards AI being able to demonstrate emotional intelligence, is that it needs to see emotions in our behaviour, hear our voices, and feel our anxieties. To do this, AI must be able to extract emotional cues or data from us through conventional means like eye tracking, galvanic skin response, voice and written word analysis, brain activity via EEG, facial mapping, and even gait analysis.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, roboticists have spent the last 14 years honing a robot navigation system modeled on the brains of rats. This biologically inspired approach, they hope, could help robots navigate dynamic environments without requiring advanced, costly sensors and computationally intensive algorithms.

Artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the $445 billion beauty industry by creating AI-powered shopping experiences despite the widespread brick-and-mortar retail crisis. "Cracking e-commerce for beauty has been notoriously difficult compared to other verticals," Headliner Labs co-founder Caroline Klatt told International Business Times. "Getting a recommendation from a stylist is the number one driver of sales in stores." New York-based Headliner is just one of many companies creating custom AI chatbots for beauty brands. To understand just how dramatic this high-tech shift really is, let's recall how people got beauty products just 15 years ago.