Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and “occupy” events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizenry express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of keyphrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions. We illustrate the application of our system to 10 countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Results demonstrate our successes in capturing significant societal unrest in these countries with an average lead time of 4.08 days. We also study the selective superiorities of news media versus social media (Twitter, Facebook) to identify relevant trade-offs.

The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). Bresina presents an approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity-planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, the LADEE activity scheduling system (LASS). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft's orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution. In our second article, Helping Novices Avoid the Hazards of Data: Leveraging Ontologies to Improve Model Generalization Automatically with Online Data Source, Sasin Janpuangtong and Dylan Shell describe an emerging application of an endto-end learning framework for large-scale data analytics that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model-building process.

Cannes Lions this year saw the ad industry expanding its creative capabilities. Over 13,500 delegates from about 90 countries descended on Cannes again this year hoping for a Lion in one of 17 categories. With awards honoring work from design to creative data to radio, the ceremonies reflected a complex industry drawing on a broader range of creative disciplines than in the past, but also facing unprecedented challenges in making campaigns work across channels. "There's never been so many channels or points of interactions, or agencies working on various parts of that," said Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer at Unilever. "It's important to make sure the brand experience does not get fragmented."

Not much is definitively proven about consciousness, the awareness of one's existence and surroundings, other than that its somehow linked to the brain. But theories as to how, exactly, grey matter generates consciousness are challenged when a fully-conscious man is found to be missing most of his brain. Several years ago, a 44-year-old Frenchman went to the hospital complaining of mild weakness in his left leg. It was discovered then that his skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin parameter of actual brain tissue. And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled.

Earlier this week, I found myself answering a question from a new colleague at Finning International that relates both to the research I do in the iSchool at the University of British Columbia, as well as the analytics, engineering & technology work that I lead at Finning. The questions were simple: 1) What is artificial intelligence? As I sat to reflect last evening, it dawned on me that taking time to craft a clear answer to these questions might be extremely beneficial for many. Analytics, data science, and predictive intelligence are hot topics in many communities and business areas. And yet, despite this interest, few folks I have talked to have a clear understanding of the history of the discipline; one, that frames much of the work currently going on within the space.

December's ICCV 2015 conference in Santiago, Chile has come and gone, but that's no reason not to know about its top papers. Get an update on which computer vision papers and researchers won awards.

Could Kevin Bacon have saved us from the 2008 financial crisis? But the network science behind six degrees of Kevin Bacon just well may have. According to the famous saying, every movie actor is separated from Kevin Bacon by six degrees of separation or less, going from co-star to co-star (actually most are separated from Bacon by only three degrees). Actors form a "small-world" network, meaning it takes a surprisingly small number of connections to get from any one member to any other. Natural and man-made small-world networks of all kinds are extremely common: The electric power grid of the western United States, the neural network of the nematode worm C. elegans, the Internet, protein and gene networks in biology, citations in scientific papers, and most social networks are small. Most of these small networks use hubs, or nodes with an especially large number of links to other nodes.

According to the UK-based company What3words, I live at offers.reform.curve in Brooklyn. I work for Condé Nast, which has offices in downtown Manhattan at words.artists.names--but Afterward, I'll be drinking at trick.pills.prompting. These little word-salads are cute, but you might be wondering: Why do I need a new address? If you live in the developed world, you probably don't; Google Maps knows where you live, and so does the mail carrier.

Edgar Sarmiento won the Local Motors challenge to design an urban public transportation system. His self-driving electric minibus design eventually become this vehicle called Olli. Edgar Sarmiento won the Local Motors challenge to design an urban public transportation system. His self-driving electric minibus design eventually become this vehicle called Olli. At the recent unveiling of a new self-driving shuttle bus called Olli, its designer sat perched on a stool nearby, his hands cradling a photo camera in his lap.

One way to manage additional demand is to enact policies that ensure that if car travel becomes easier, so do more efficient modes of travel. The struggle to maintain this balance is being played out at the curbside of urban centers around the world, where cars, bicycles, buses, and pedestrians all fight to use the same precious few square feet. For nearly two decades Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, has explained that the use of road and curb space is not just a tool to protect the environment, but to protect democracy, and that "an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport or bicycles." Yet the distinction between public and private transport is increasingly blurry. Ride-hailing companies now offer rides shared with other passengers at lower prices, and shared-van services like Bridj operate larger private vehicles.