Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?

2QBF is a special case of general quantified Boolean formulae (QBF). It is limited to just two quantification levels, i.e., to a form forall-exists. Despite this limitation it applies to a wide range of applications, e.g., to artificial intelligence, graph theory, synthesis, etc.. Recent research showed that CEGAR-based methods give a performance boost to QBF solving (e.g, compared to QDPLL). Conjunctive normal form (CNF) is a commonly accepted representation for both SAT and QBF problems; however, it does not reflect the circuit structure that might be present in the problem. Existing attempts of extracting this structure from CNF and using it in 2QBF context do not show advantages over CNF based 2QBF solvers. In this work we introduce a new workflow for 2QBF, containing a new semantic circuit extraction algorithm and a CEGAR-based 2QBF solver that uses circuit structure and is improved by a so-called "cofactor sharing'' heuristics. We evaluate the proposed methodology on a range of benchmarks and show the practicality of the new approach.

A major challenge in cyber-threat analysis is combining information from different sources to find the person or the group responsible for the cyber-attack. It is one of the most important technical and policy challenges in cyber-security. The lack of ground truth for an individual responsible for an attack has limited previous studies. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by building a dataset from the capture-the-flag event held at DEFCON, and propose an argumentation model based on a formal reasoning framework called DeLP (Defeasible Logic Programming) designed to aid an analyst in attributing a cyber-attack to an attacker. We build argumentation-based models from latent variables computed from the dataset to reduce the search space of culprits (attackers) that an analyst can use to identify the attacker. We show that reducing the search space in this manner significantly improves the performance of classification-based approaches to cyber-attribution.

We study the automatic reply of email business messages in Brazilian Portuguese. We present a novel corpus containing messages from a real application, and baseline categorization experiments using Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines. We then discuss the effect of lemmatization and the role of part-of-speech tagging filtering on precision and recall. Support Vector Machines classification coupled with non-lemmatized selection of verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs was the best approach, with 87.3% maximum accuracy. Straightforward lemmatization in Portuguese led to the lowest classification results in the group, with 85.3% and 81.7% precision in SVM and Naive Bayes respectively. Thus, while lemmatization reduced precision and recall, part-of-speech filtering improved overall results.

In the field of General Game Playing the imperfectinformationgames present a special challenge for researchers.In general the search space is larger, and thelack of information requires a different decision makingtechnique. A simple Monte Carlo sampling using a particlefilter may serve for the simple games, but this soonfails when more complex games are played. The HyperPlaytechnique was one such ”simple” player, soonenhanced to HyperPlay-II capable of handling the mostcomplex of games. However, this technique is very resourcehungry and may not scale well for larger games.We explore the scalability of HyperPlay-II for a varietyof imperfect-information games and test some perfectinformationpruning techniques to see if they will improveefficiency.

Today I was invited to give a KeyNote Lecture about Artificial Intelligence in the beautiful city of Zaragoza, by Javier Khunel the CEO of the main business school there, media group Heraldo and CaixaBank, to a diverse audience of business owners, entrepreneurs, c level execs, intrapreneurs and many more, at a great venue The CaixaForum building. I have been in the field for the last 21 years, and the last ones as clear advocate of AI and Deep Learning, with a company in the field, and advising Emotiv Inc the Leader in Brain Computer Interfaces about Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. So it is fair to say that I play in a field I know very well. Anyway I always get my facts and figures up to date, and to my surprise I discover an amazing fact: the father of Artificial Intelligence according to the MIT Technology Review is from my own backyard so to speak, from the country I was born Spain. He develop a machine in 1912 called "El Ajedrecista" or "The Chess Player" a very limited precursor of IBM's Deep Blue, and the first true chess computer, but by all means a pioneer (electro mechanical) work in the Artificial Intelligence field, he also build an Algebraic Formula Machine and many other mostly unknown marvels.

It represents a particular pure quantum state of a specific isolated system of one or more particles. By choosing a specific system of coordinates, e.g.

April 5, 2016 – NEW YORK, NY – Persado, the leading cognitive content generation platform, today announced that it has closed a 30 million Series C financing led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from all previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, StarVest Partners, American Express Ventures and Citi Ventures. Persado fuses language with data to transform people into the most effective communicators. The only existing solution of its kind, and one of few to successfully productize and commercialize cognitive computing technologies to date, Persado's platform employs natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to generate the precise combination of words, phrases and images that motivate any audience, at scale, in real time. "Persado is revolutionizing how organizations communicate by propelling creativity into the data-driven age, arming brands with'smart content' that resonates with any audience, every time, and inspires them to act," said Alex Vratskides, CEO and Co-Founder of Persado. "This latest round of funding will enable us to continue investing in distribution and product development. It will also accelerate our expansion into more digital channels and potentially other sectors beyond marketing, such as pharmaceutical adherence, fitness and personal motivation, civic engagement, human resources and more."

We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important ways. As Mark Twain pointed out in 1903, to presume that evolution has been a long path leading to humans as its crowning achievement is just as preposterous as presuming that the whole purpose of building the Eiffel Tower was to put that final coat of paint on its tip. Moreover, evolution is not synonymous with progress, but simply change over time. And humans aren't even the youngest, most recently evolved species.

A new eGames international gaming tournament will make its debut in Rio during this summer's Olympic Games. The event, launched as part of this week's London Games Festival, offers medals and national pride rather than cash prizes for the winners. The competition, backed by the UK government, will be run by the new International eGames Committee (IEGC). Britain, Canada, Brazil and the USA are the only confirmed entrants so far with more expected to follow. In Olympic years, both summer and winter, the eGames will take place in the host cities - with future tournaments planned for Pyeongchang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2020.