It's been a big month for artificial intelligence. On May 9, a hot startup unveiled a shape-shifting personal assistant. On May 12, a legacy computer company that thinks it's a startup shifted a platform to cyber security. VIV is the product of two artificial intelligence wunderkinds, Das Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer. They've been tinkering with the smart frontier of software for the better part of 15 years. In fact, the two were working on natural language programs at DARPA long before working at that defense project was cool.

We show that the climate phenomena of El Nino and La Nina arise naturally as states of macro-variables when our recent causal feature learning framework (Chalupka 2015, Chalupka 2016) is applied to micro-level measures of zonal wind (ZW) and sea surface temperatures (SST) taken over the equatorial band of the Pacific Ocean. The method identifies these unusual climate states on the basis of the relation between ZW and SST patterns without any input about past occurrences of El Nino or La Nina. The simpler alternatives of (i) clustering the SST fields while disregarding their relationship with ZW patterns, or (ii) clustering the joint ZW-SST patterns, do not discover El Nino. We discuss the degree to which our method supports a causal interpretation and use a low-dimensional toy example to explain its success over other clustering approaches. Finally, we propose a new robust and scalable alternative to our original algorithm (Chalupka 2016), which circumvents the need for high-dimensional density learning.

On May 10, the world-class admin behind John Chambers's success was honored with one of the top awards in her field: Debbie Gross received the Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence. Clearly, Debbie is a force. This CNBC story gives us a peek into her life keeping John at the top of his game. People are rightly saying she's a role model for next-generation administrators. But what people aren't saying is that some next-gen admins are made not of flesh and blood like Debbie but of compute cycles.

EXCLUSIVE: New satellite imagery obtained by Fox News shows that China, for the first time, has deployed a drone with stealth technology to a contested island in the South China Sea, in another sign of escalating tensions in the region. The new development comes as President Obama visits Japan. He lifted an arms embargo against Vietnam while visiting Hanoi earlier this week, drawing criticism from the Chinese government about stoking tensions in the region. The newly obtained satellite images from ImageSat International (ISI) show a Chinese Harbin BZK-005 long range reconnaissance drone on Woody Island in the South China Sea. The Chinese drone did not appear armed in the satellite image taken last month.

This is a torch implementation of the paper A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, and Matthias Bethge. The paper presents an algorithm for combining the content of one image with the style of another image using convolutional neural networks. Applying the style of different images to the same content image gives interesting results. The algorithm allows the user to trade-off the relative weight of the style and content reconstruction terms, as shown in this example where we port the style of Picasso's 1907 self-portrait onto Brad Pitt: By resizing the style image before extracting style features, we can control the types of artistic features that are transfered from the style image; you can control this behavior with the -style_scale flag. Below we see three examples of rendering the Golden Gate Bridge in the style of The Starry Night.

On May 10, the world-class admin behind John Chambers's success was honored with one of the top awards in her field: Debbie Gross received the Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence. Clearly, Debbie is a force. This CNBC story gives us a peek into her life keeping John at the top of his game. People are rightly saying she's a role model for next-generation administrators. But what people aren't saying is that some next-gen admins are made not of flesh and blood like Debbie but of compute cycles.

Two engineers who helped build Siri, the famous voice assistant built into every iPhone, have claimed to have gone one step better with an all new digital assistant nicknamed Viv. Unlike her predecessor promiscuous Viv flirt will not be locked down to one ecosystem – an advantage which is likely to set it apart from the likes Facebook's M, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now and Siri itself by Apple. Anyone familiar with existing voice assistants will feel instantly at home with the latest version, which relies on users clicking on a'Viv' button before posing it a question or voice command. Unlike prior iterations however Viv promises to be a whole lot more advanced; as Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of Viv demonstrated by querying: "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 pm on the day after tomorrow?" For which he received a detailed answer within 10 milliseconds.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering's (IEEE) published "AI's 10 to Watch" – a list of 10 people who are doing phenomenal work in the field of artificial intelligence. A Pakistani researcher Haris Aziz, who had graduated from LUMS, had his name published in this prestigious list for his work in the field related to computational social choice, an intersection between artificial intelligence and economics. Its seems that was just the beginning of the road for Haris Aziz, who is now back in the news for solving an'unsolvable' mathematical situation. Who will get the larger share of the profit from a business? Shall it be equally allocated or otherwise? Perhaps its your child's birthday and its time to cut and divide the cake in a way that none of the children gets sad by his/her share?

BEIJING – A Chinese government bureau is planning a base station for an advanced rescue ship in the disputed Spratly Islands, state media reported on Monday, as China continues its push to develop civilian and military infrastructure in the contentious region. The ship, which would carry drones and underwater robots, is set to be deployed in the second half of the year, said Chen Xingguang, political commissar of the ship, which is under the South China Sea Rescue Bureau of the Ministry of Transport, according to the official China Daily. The civilian bureau has 31 ships and four helicopters conducting rescue missions in the South China Sea, and officials from the department told the China Daily they work with the military on such efforts. Officials said the rescue ship base station would enable rescue forces to aid fishing boats in trouble, and shorten the distance they need to travel. It is unclear on which island the ship will be based, but China has carried out land reclamation and construction on several islands in the Spratly Archipelago, parts of which are also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.