Following the tragic deaths of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, during a rally for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile on Thursday night, the Dallas Police Department deployed a small robot designed to investigate and safely discharge explosives. Officers attached a bomb to the robot ad hoc-style -- detonating it and killing the sniper while keeping the investigators out of harm's way. According to companies that manufacture bomb-disposal robots interviewed by The Intercept, none were aware of their bots ever being turned into lethal weapons, though one company acknowledged the robots could be adapted to hold weapons. A spokesperson from Pedsco, a company in Canada that supplies robots to other jurisdictions in Texas, confirmed that he did not "know of any instances of an explosive used to disable a suspect" attached to a robot owned by law enforcement. Pedsco would not comment on its own robots, citing possible confidentiality conflicts with customers, but pointed to instances where explosive ordnance disposal robots had been used offensively, such as a 1993 case where Prince George's County Police Department deployed a water cannon attached to a robot to disarm a suspect hiding in a closet.

I'm not (quite) dead and intend to go back to posting stuff every now and then. Last July, I've also started a new job, as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, after having spent two years in Oxford. At some point, I might post something on the cultural difference between the European English and American communities of statisticians. In the coming weeks, I'll tell you all about a new paper entitled Coupling of Particle Filters, co-written with Fredrik Lindsten and Thomas B. Schön from Uppsala University in Sweden. We are excited about this coupling idea because it's simple and yet brings massive gains in many important aspects of inference for state space models (including both parameter inference and smoothing).

Craft beer could be the next unlikely beneficiary of the artificial intelligence revolution. London-based IntelligentX Brewing Company has revealed its new AI Beer range. These are beers that will be improved over time using advanced algorithms. The brewer is employing an online feedback system (via a Facebook Messenger bot) to obtain data on how well-liked its Pale, Amber, Black and Golden beers are by customers. The company will then employ "complex machine learning algorithms," combining reinforcement learning and bayesian optimisation, to search for trends among this feedback and tune the recipes accordingly. "Because our A.I. is constantly reacting to user feedback, we can brew beer that matches what you want, more quickly than anyone else can," says IntelligentX Brewing Company.

Because we'll need something tasty to swill when our robot overlords finally come into their full artificial intelligence, a company in the UK is attempting to figure out if robots can help humans brew a better beer. While there won't be robots stirring batches of wort or sorting hops, artificial intelligence will play a big part in London-based firm IntelligentX's plan to brew beer, CNET reports. Here's how it'd work: consumers would try one of the company's four beers -- Amber AI, Black AI, Golden AI and Pale AI ---- and then weigh in via Facebook chat bot on the experience. That feedback will be fed to an algorithm called Automated Brewing Intelligence, or ABI, which will use the information to make changes to the next batch. Reinforcement learning and a process called bayesian decision making will teach the AI about the brewing experience.

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Project Malmo is a platform for Artificial Intelligence experimentation and research built on top of Minecraft. Microsoft today announced that they are making it available for everyone on GitHub via an open-source license. This project was formerly known as Project AIX and has now been renamed Project Malmo. Minecraft is ideal for artificial intelligence research for the same reason it is addictively appealing to the millions of fans who enter its virtual world every day. Unlike other computer games, Minecraft offers its users endless possibilities, ranging from simple tasks like walking around looking for treasure to complex ones like building a structure with a group of teammates.

"Really, we're building collision avoidance for industrial drones," said Alexander Harmsen, CEO and co-founder of Iris Automation. "We see this huge need for industrial drones for mining exploration, pipeline inspection, agricultural surveying, forestry, or even package delivery." Without a way to avoid mid-air collisions, drones risk crashing into a Cessna, a flock of geese or a 747. Worst case scenario: a drone gets sucked into a jet engine causing catastrophic engine failure as high-velocity bits of metal penetrate fuel tanks, hydraulic lines and the cabin. Iris Automation's solution is an AI computer that blends real-time images and 3D maps to track incoming objects.

Intelligence, defined as the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Intelligence for the longest time possible is associated with the human brain. Artificial intelligence is basically defined as intelligence that is originating from machines. Most computer applications only make existing processes and functions faster and maybe more efficiently but cannot create new duties altogether. However, artificial intelligence has already challenged this notion.

Word embeddings have been shown to be useful across state-of-the-art systems in many natural language processing tasks, ranging from question answering systems to dependency parsing. (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) explored word embeddings and their utility for modeling language semantics. In particular, they presented an approach to automatically map a standard distributional semantic space onto a set-theoretic model using partial least squares regression. We show in this paper that a simple baseline achieves a +51% relative improvement compared to their model on one of the two datasets they used, and yields competitive results on the second dataset.

In July 2016 was the first case where Police officers in Dallas, United States, used a robot to kill an armed suspect during a Black Lives Matter protest. The device was not autonomous, but in the future it could be. And although there are many cases of remote warfare within militaries, such as the case with drones, this was the first occasion where such technology was used in public. There are real concerns around artificial intelligence causing chaos like the scenarios depicted in Hollywood movies such as Terminator, Robocop, Iron Man and iRobot in the future.