The course consists of lectures for the first two-thirds of the semester. Homework problems and programming assignments illustrate the lecture material. The programs are not long; the intent is to gain some exposure to several kinds of programming systems. The latter part of the semester covers readings in the research literature; students are expected to present one or two papers to the class. Many of the world's best researchers in automatic programming are in Austin: Jim Browne, Don Batory, Elaine Kant, Ira Baxter, Ted Biggerstaff; they will be invited to present guest lectures to describe their work.

Sam was a brilliant scientist and engineer whose work deeply influenced the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, applied mathematics, neural computation, and observational science. He was also a strong advocate for the use of machine learning and computational statistics for scientific data analysis and discovery. Sam T. Roweis was born on April 27, 1972. He graduated from secondary school as valedictorian of the University of Toronto Schools in 1990, and obtained a bachelor's degree with honours from the University of Toronto Engineering Science Program four years later. His first exposure to AI and neural computation occured when--as an exceptional undergraduate--he took the graduate-level Neural Network course taught by Geoffrey Hinton.

Recently there has been renewed interest in game theory in several research disciplines, with its uses ranging from the modeling of evolution to the design of distributed protocols. In the AI community, game theory is emerging as the dominant formalism for studying strategic and cooperative interaction in multi-agent systems. Classical work provides rich mathematical foundations and equilibrium concepts, but relatively little in the way of computational and representational insights that would allow game theory to scale up to large, complex systems. The rapidly emerging field of computational game theory is addressing such algorithmic issues, and this tutorial will provide a survey of developments so far. As the NIPS community is well-poised to make significant contributions to this area, special emphasis will be placed on connections to more familiar topics.

ManpowerGroup, one of the world's largest jobs companies, released a report detailing how the technological revolution is going to change the employment market forever. The company released the report, entitled "The Skills Revolution," on conjunction with the World Economic Forum's meeting of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe in Davos, Switzerland. It surveyed more than 18,000 employers across 43 countries and six industry sectors. While technological developments will cause greater automation, a decrease in headcount or slow growth in hiring in some areas, it will actually create a lot of jobs too, according to Manpower. But the key to this is to make sure the world's workforce "upskills" to be qualified enough to take on new positions.

Amazon has published an online guide explaining how to access its virtual assistant Alexa via a Raspberry Pi. The technique presents a lower-cost alternative to buying one of its Echo devices - which are not yet available outside of the US - and an incentive to gain computer skills. The walkthrough includes access to the necessary app data and certificates in order to link the budget computer up to the tech giant's servers. The Raspberry Pi pocket-sized computer was designed by a British charity to encourage children and others to learn how to write computer programs. More than eight million units have been sold or given away.

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...

Milind Tambe and class co-designer Emma Bowring, with some exercise materiels "Science fiction is the spice," says Tambe. Students in a new class offered by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will be writing computer code for Isaac Asimov's disobedient robot Speedy, and for the sinister many-bodied Star Trek menace, the Borg. Milind Tambe, an associate professor of computer science, will be using science fiction as problem sets in a class on artificial intelligence for undergraduate programmers beginning in the fall, 2006 semester. "Computer science is catching up with the ideas in these stories," says Tambe. "We are using science fiction as the spice for the main dish of teaching an important new area of our discipline." While a number of universities use science fiction to introduce concepts in physics and other fields, Tambe believes his course is the first of its kind in computer science.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to search videos for what people are actually saying instead of relying on tags or descriptions? Koemei (pronounced "co-may") aims to do just that through their cloud-based speech recognition software that rapidly transcribes video and audio, even if people have accents or more than one person is speaking. But the startup is also targeting the large quantities of media content from videoconferencing, webcasting, and classroom lectures being produced in business, government, and educational institutions, and by indexing the transcripts, video libraries will become easily searchable. According to the company, it currently takes about an hour for its system to automatically transcribe one hour of media at a cost of about $0.09 a minute, much cheaper than manual transcription, though user pricing for the service has not been announced. Building on 8 years of research, the startup comes out of the Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, and is in the process of raising $1.5 million is a Series A round on top of its Angel funding since its 2010 launch.

The C5.0 algorithm uses the Max-Gain method of selecting the best attribute. H measures the information content or entropy in bits (i.e., number of yes/no questions that must be asked) associated with a set S of examples, which consists of the subset P of positive examples and subset N of negative examples. Note: 0 H(P,N) 1, where 0 no information, and 1 maximum information. Half the examples in S are positive and half are negative. Say all of the examples in S are positive and none are negative.