We consider planning with uncertainty in the initial state as a case study of incremental quantified Boolean formula (QBF) solving. We report on experiments with a workflow to incrementally encode a planning instance into a sequence of QBFs. To solve this sequence of incrementally constructed QBFs, we use our general-purpose incremental QBF solver DepQBF. Since the generated QBFs have many clauses and variables in common, our approach avoids redundancy both in the encoding phase and in the solving phase. Experimental results show that incremental QBF solving outperforms non-incremental QBF solving. Our results are the first empirical study of incremental QBF solving in the context of planning and motivate its use in other application domains.

From Facebook to Amazon to Microsoft to Apple, big tech companies are racing to improve speech-synthesis systems. And the systems, which have become increasingly realistic-sounding, have a lot of potential benefits--from serving the blind, to helping people who are illiterate access information online, to assisting the elderly. TechRepublic spoke to Alan Black, a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researcher who studies speech-synthesis systems. Black explained what's new in voice-recognition, the current challenges, and what we should be concerned about. What is the current technology behind speech-recognition?

WASHINGTON – A government-sponsored committee is recommending standards that could clear the way for commercial drone flights over populated areas and help speed the introduction of package delivery drones and other uses not yet possible, The Associated Press has learned. The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over populated areas, especially crowds. That ban frustrates a host of industries that want to take advantage of the technology. "Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere," said Jim Williams, a former head of the FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm. Cellular network providers also want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect cell towers, which often are in urban areas.

Peter Brand, the fictional sports analyst in the movie Moneyball, was portrayed to be the stereotypical nerdy number cruncher. This makes a good story line in a movie, but the real life architect of the Oakland A's analytical success in baseball, Paul DePodesta, required more than number crunching ability to succeed. He played both varsity football and baseball at Harvard, worked as a professional baseball scout and later became a general manager in Major League Baseball. Paul exemplifies the "unicorn" that businesses seek as analytics professionals. The term "unicorn," a mythical creature that does not exist, is used to describe the individual that can bridge the gap between the world of technology and the world of practical application. To succeed as an Analytics Professional, one must possess a broad set of skills and personal attributes beyond the technical tool kit.

In the late 00's some clever academics rebranded a subset of neural network techniques to'Deep Learning', which just means a stack of different nets on top of one another, forming a sort of computationally-brilliant lasagne. When I say'machine learning' in this blogpost, I'm referring to some kind of neural network technique.) Robotics has just started to get into neural networks. This has already sped up development. This year, Google demonstrated a system that teaches robotic arms to learn how to pick up objects of any size and shape.

Workers set up a commercial drone display at the AEE Technology booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center for the 2016 CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 5, 2016. WASHINGTON -- A government-sponsored committee is recommending standards that could clear the way for commercial drone flights over populated areas and help speed the introduction of package delivery drones and other uses not yet possible, The Associated Press has learned. The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over populated areas, especially crowds. That ban frustrates a host of industries that want to take advantage of the technology. "Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere," said Jim Williams, a former head of FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm.

Imagine a future in which a personal travel assistant looks over your schedule, checks traffic for you, tells you when to leave for an appointment, ferrets out parking spaces and alerts people of your arrival time -- all while learning your driving patterns to get more helpful over time. That assistant will be BMW Connected, whose first version made its debut Thursday at Build 2016, Microsoft's developer conference in San Francisco. "Mobility needs are unique and personal and a very important aspect of our everyday life," says Thom Brenner, BMW Group vice president of Digital Life. "We are really focused on how we can integrate our offerings smoothly and seamlessly into the digital life of our customers." Powered by the Open Mobility Cloud, which is based on Microsoft Azure, and available for iOS, BMW Connected is part of the automaker's vision for the "future of mobility," which includes digital services, automated driving and assistance, and interiors designed for digital seamlessness.

We recently ran some fresh benchmarks for Spark v1.1 and v1.2 and Graphlab clusters, and included some updated numbers from other recent published benchmarks. RCV1-v2 (Reuters news data, LYR2004 distribution) benchmarks are for OAA (One Against All) classification, since RCV1-v2 has 103 independent topic labels. RCV1-v2 is a small dataset (0.5 GB). BIDMach was run on a single Amazon g2.xlarge instance, while Spark was run on a cluster of m3.2xlarge high-memory instances. The other systems were run on an 8-code Intel E-2660 system.

A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original Watson is still here--it's about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines' backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive. Today's Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred "instances" of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand.

Legal is one of the industries faced with a huge potential impact through the advent of AI. AIBusiness.org met with Counselytics Founder Jason Gabbard in New York City, one of the most exciting start-ups in this space. Counselytics client Gavin Solotar, Partner of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz stated that'Counselytics is the first truly significant innovation I've seen in the legal field since word processing'. We call ourselves a cognitive augmentation company rather than an artificial intelligence company. The notion with cognitive augmentation is that while we may not have true thinking machines (ie, true AI), we do have really powerful and sophisticated technologies that people can utilize to perform their jobs more intelligently and more efficiently.