A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.

The intelligent Processing technique is more and more attractive to researchers due to its ability to deal with key problems in Vehicular Ad hoc networks. However, several problems in applying intelligent processing technologies in VANETs remain open. The existing applications are comprehensively reviewed and discussed, and classified into different categories in this paper. Their strategies, advantages/disadvantages, and performances are elaborated. By generalizing different tactics in various applications related to different scenarios of VANETs and evaluating their performances, several promising directions for future research have been suggested.

Elizabeth Keatinge tells us about Elon Musk's DNA Friend makes fun of the at-home DNA testing craze. The government's contempt of court case against Tesla CEO Elon Musk is moving forward. Federal Judge Alison Nathan has set a court date of April 4 to hold oral arguments. The Securities and Exchange Commission is asking Nathan to find Musk in contempt for allegedly violating terms of an October court-approved securities fraud settlement with a Feb. 19 tweet. In the tweet, Musk wrote: "Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019."

The team at Guardian Voice Labs is experimenting with generating an audio news summary by blending human and synthetic voices. It's designed for Google Assistant and based on existing Guardian journalism and curation. The idea is to capitalise on the text-to-speech technology on the Assistant platform, and create a new way for people to digest the news of the day. To better explain exactly how the technology works, Jordan Erica Webber invited the product manager for the Guardian Voice Lab, Jeremy Pennycook, into the studio.

Last December, entrepreneur Amin Khoury gave Northeastern University's College of Computer Science a $50 million gift. The money was slated for programs that would help new graduates compete in a marketplace increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and automation. The university's press release touted, "As the global economy adapts to the influence of artificial intelligence … Northeastern is empowering humans to be agile learners, thinkers, and creators, beyond the capacity of any machine." The school, like quite a few others, is reimagining itself as an incubator for skills that are difficult to automate: creativity, imagination, mental flexibility. Indeed, Joseph Aoun, Northeastern's president, literally wrote the book on this.

McDonald's is looking to supercharge sales by using A.I. backed software capable of tailoring products to customers in real-time. America's most iconic fast food chain announced that it has acquired an Israeli company, Dynamic Yield, whose software will use machine-learning to adapt digital menus to feature products based on time, location, preference, demand and more. The Wall Street Journal reported that McDonald's deal to purchase Dynamic Yield was closed at $300 million but neither company has confirmed. McDonald's has revamped its image across the world by deploying a mobile app, renovating stores, and now buying a tech company to help personalize menu items. McDonald's purchase Israeli company, Dynamic Yield which employs data and analytics to increase sales.

Estonia is building an artificial intelligence powered robo-judge that will rule over a backlog of small court cases. It will be fed legal documents and analyse them before coming to a decision based on its pre-programmed algorithms and training. The'robot judge' would preside over disputes of less than €7,000 (£6,000/$8,000) and free up more time for humans to work on bigger cases. Any ruling would be legally binding but could be appealed to a human judge. The project and technology is still in its infancy and no set date has been announced for its roll-out, but the larger AI project it is part of will announce its results in May.

A range of robots capable of instantly making sushi at the touch of a button has been created by engineers. The machines do not require the years of training and hard-work needed for a human to become an accomplished sushi chef but can churn out the fishy delicacies relentlessly. Sushi-making firm AUTEC say the device can create 2,400 nigiri rice balls and 200 sushi rolls per hour. Monk Conveyors, based in the UK, manufactures the AUTEC robots. Monk Conveyors, based in the UK, manufactures the AUTEC robots.

Scientists may finally be close to understanding the mechanisms behind hallucination. Despite the dramatic perceptual changes that take place during a bout of hallucination, what exactly happens in the brain during these moments has long been a mystery. A new study on drugged mice has found that the phenomena associated with these episodes may be the result of reduced signaling in the visual cortex – not an increase, as was expected. The images revealed that even after taking the drug, the signals being sent were largely similar to those seen in its absence, indicating that the information itself does not change. 'You might expect visual hallucinations would result from neurons in the brain firing like crazy, or by mismatched signals,' says senior author Cris Niell, an associate professor and member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon.

UPS will leverage drones to deliver medical samples in the first FAA-backed and continuous commercial deployment of drone technology in America. According to UPS, an autonomous drone -- Matternet's M2 quadcopter -- will travel between locations at WakeMed's campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, flying distances of up to 12.8 miles along a fixed, pre-determined route. Currently, the samples are delivered on the ground via courier cars, says UPS, making the shipments susceptible to road traffic. The use of drones will both increase efficiency and lower costs, the company says. Samples are loaded onto the drone which then flies a predetermined route to a landing pad located within the hospital.