In multiagent systems, social choice functions can help aggregate the distinct preferences that agents have over alternatives, enabling them to settle on a single choice. Despite the basic manipulability of all reasonable voting systems, it would still be desirable to find ways to reach plausible outcomes, which are stable states, i.e., a situation where no agent would wish to change its vote. One possibility is an iterative process in which, after everyone initially votes, participants may change their votes, one voter at a time. This technique, explored in previous work, converges to a Nash equilibrium when Plurality voting is used, along with a tie-breaking rule that chooses a winner according to a linear order of preferences over candidates. In this paper, we both consider limitations of the iterative voting method, as well as expanding upon it. We demonstrate the significance of tie-breaking rules, showing that no iterative scoring rule converges for all tie-breaking. However, using a restricted tie-breaking rule (such as the linear order rule used in previous work) does not by itself ensure convergence. We prove that in addition to plurality, the veto voting rule converges as well using a linear order tie-breaking rule. However, we show that these two voting rules are the only scoring rules that converge, regardless of tie-breaking mechanism.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A Chilean startup that has built artificial intelligence software to help recreate animal-based foods using plants is looking toward U.S. multinationals after signing deals at home to sell its products, the company's founders said. NotCo, founded around a year ago by three Chileans, has already persuaded Cencosud's Jumbo supermarkets to stock its'Not Mayo' across Chile, and has signed a deal to supply a national food manufacturer with one of its products, said Chief Executive Matias Muchnick. The company has also spoken to international companies including Hershey, Coca-Cola and Mars about creating new versions of chocolate and soda. "We want to promote these products as mainstream. It will only have an impact if meat-eaters who don't care about sustainability buy them," said Muchnick, adding that they can be retailed at the same price as the non-vegan version.

Alberto Arvelo is used to hiring composers to set music to his films. The Venezuelan director's most recent feature, "Libertador," employed none other than Gustavo Dudamel -- in his debut film score -- for that task. The roles were reversed, however, on Arvelo's new assignment: setting film to Dudamel-led concerts of Joseph Haydn's epic oratorio, "The Creation." "It's exactly what should happen with a good music in film," Arvelo said. "Good music is something that you can feel, that can create something that's not there. Basically, if music is there, it's because we have to add something to that moment, to provoke this combustion in some way. This is more or less the same concept, but exactly in a reverse way."

Astro Teller has an unusual way of starting a new project: He tries to kill it. Teller is the head of X, formerly Google X, the advanced technology lab of Alphabet. At X's headquarters not far from the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., Teller leads a group of engineers, inventors, and designers devoted to futuristic "moonshot" projects like self-driving cars, delivery drones, and Internet-beaming balloons. To turn their wild ideas into reality, Teller and his team have developed a unique approach. It starts with trying to prove that whatever it is that you're trying to do can't be done--in other words, trying to kill your own idea. As Teller explains, "Instead of saying, 'What's most fun to do about this or what's easiest to do first?' we say, 'What is the most likely reason this project won't make it?' The ideas that survive get additional rounds of scrutiny, and only a tiny fraction eventually becomes official projects; the proposals that are found to have an Achilles' heel are ...

With AI becoming integral to nearly every industry, it's no surprise that banking is increasingly automated. Chatbots like BankBot and Nao are slowly taking us one step further than digital banking, but there are still privacy risks that come with feeding both banks and their bots more information. BankBot is an app prototype designed by the Polish digital design and communication agency K2. BankBot itself is a robotic bank teller, financial advisor, and personal assistant all in one. The automated sidekick provides a conversational text-based interface, but users can also use their voices instead of typing.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

JPL and National Cancer Institute Renew Big Data Partnership Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries. The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers.

This is the 2-part blog version of a talk I've given at DOAG Conference this week. I've also uploaded the slides (no ppt; just pretty R presentation;-)) to the articles section, but if you'd like a little text I'm encouraging you to read on. That is, if you're in the target group for this post/talk. For this post, let me assume you're a SQL girl (or guy). With SQL you're comfortable (an expert, probably), you know how to get and manipulate your data, no nesting of subselects has you scared;-).

"When my father was misdiagnosed and administered the wrong medication placing him in a coma nearly 20 years ago, I saw firsthand the need for technology to help physicians make accurate decisions," said Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist of the Medical Sieve Radiology Grand Challenge Project at IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, Calif. This week in Chicago, Dr. Syeda-Mahmood's mission meets the real world as IBM Research debuts a new Watson-powered demo that shows the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in radiology. The demo is the result of a shared vision by Dr. Syeda-Mahmood and Dr. Eugene Walach from IBM Research – Haifa to help radiologists make accurate patient diagnoses quickly and easily. In any given day, radiologists can review up to thousands of medical images to make health diagnoses. To date, accuracy has relied mainly on medical professionals piecing together multiple sources of clinical information visually and manually to make critical decisions, including electronic health records, research publications and other data.

The next Angry Birds AI competition will be held at IJCAI 2017 in Melbourne, Australia, August 24-25, 2017. For more details please refer to the Call for Participation and the detailed Competition Rules. This year we will again have two competition tracks, the standard track and a competitive track where two AI agents try to solve the same level with alternating shots. Previous Angry Birds AI competitions were held in Sydney in December 2012 during the Australasian AI conference, in Beijing in August 2013 during the IJCAI conference, in Prague in August 2014 at the ECAI conference, in Buenos Aires in July 2015 at the IJCAI conference, and most recently at the IJCAI 2016 conference in New York. Further details about these past competitions can be found here.