As good as artificial intelligence (AI) has become in answering queries and writing code, there will still be a need for developers, says GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. That's because human intelligence still reigns when it comes to solving complex problems, and people can do it more productively with the help of AI to offload menial tasks. Dohmke should know, as GitHub is used by millions of open source developers around the world not only to host their code, but increasingly to automate their software builds, testing and deployment through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). On a recent trip to key markets in Asia, Dohmke spoke to Computer Weekly about GitHub's work in the region, its synergies with Microsoft, which acquired GitHub in 2018, and how GitHub's Copilot AI assistant and Codespaces cloud-based development environment can improve the lives of developers. Can you tell me more about your time in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region and what you're hoping to accomplish while you're here?

Welcome to our December 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we hear from best paper award winners at ICIP and NeurIPS, and find out more about teleoperation, multilingual translation, and quality-diversity algorithms. We also have exciting news, in the form of a new focus series. We're delighted to announce the launch of our new focus series on AI around the world, where we cover exciting applications of AI across the globe. To kick off the series, we spoke with Rose Nakasi.

There's a running joke in my household that I'm living in the future because I really never know what year I'm in at the time because I'm always focused two to three years, four years out. So even while we're sitting in the beginnings of '23, I'm focused on '25, 2026. This is CES Tech Talk. CES 2023 is January 5th through 8th in Las Vegas. We are here to get you hyped and get you smart about the world's most influential tech event. At CES, innovation is everything and everywhere, so much so that the word itself may seem to lose its meaning. But what does innovation mean, and how do you do it right? To find out, let's talk with Tom Butler, executive director of global commercial portfolio and product management at Lenovo, where he works on ThinkPad and ThinkBook laptops. What are you excited about for CES 2023? Well, James, I wish I could show you because there's some really cool things coming, but we're not quite ready to share those just yet.

Clifford Seth Stein (born December 14, 1965), a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Stein is chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, Stein was a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Stein's research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, combinatorial optimization, operations research, network algorithms, scheduling, algorithm engineering and computational biology. Stein has published many influential papers in the leading conferences and journals in his fields of research, and has occupied a variety of editorial positions including in the journals ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Mathematical Programming, Journal of Algorithms, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and Operations Research Letters.

The year opened with a bang. The successful film Don't Look Up, in which a comet is found to be on a collision course with Earth, had been released just before Christmas 2021. In the bleak days of post-festive gloom, the news media were on an adrenaline high, chasing any and every story about potential asteroid collisions to cheer us all up. Five asteroids were to pass close to the Earth in January alone! Happily for the health and wellbeing of humanity, none was predicted to come within a whisker of hitting the planet.

Two weeks ago, I gave a lecture setting out my current thoughts on AI safety, halfway through my year at OpenAI. I was asked to speak by UT Austin's Effective Altruist club. You can watch the lecture on YouTube here (I recommend 2x speed). The timing turned out to be weird, coming immediately after the worst disaster to hit the Effective Altruist movement in its history, as I acknowledged in the talk. I then spent 20 minutes taking questions. For those who (like me) prefer text over video, below I've produced an edited transcript, by starting with YouTube's automated transcript and then, well, editing it. Thank you so much for inviting me here. I do feel a little bit sheepish to be lecturing you about AI safety, as someone who's worked on this subject for all of five months. But this past spring, I accepted an extremely interesting opportunity to go on leave for a year to think about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety. I'm doing this at OpenAI, which is one of the world's leading AI startups, based in San Francisco although I'm mostly working from Austin. Despite its name, OpenAI is famously not 100% open … so there are certain topics that I'm not allowed to talk about, like the capabilities of the very latest systems and whether or not they'll blow people's minds when released. By contrast, OpenAI is very happy for me to talk about AI safety: what it is and and what if anything can we do about it. So what I thought I'd do is to tell you a little bit about the specific projects that I've been working on at OpenAI, but also just, as an admitted newcomer, share some general thoughts about AI safety and how Effective Altruists might want to think about it. I'll try to leave plenty of time for discussion. Maybe I should mention that the thoughts that I'll tell you today are ones that, until last week, I had considered writing up for an essay contest run by something called the FTX Future Fund. Unfortunately, the FTX Future Fund no longer exists. It was founded by someone named Sam Bankman-Fried, whose a net worth went from 15 billion dollars to some negative number of dollars in the space of two days, in one of the biggest financial scandals in memory. This is obviously a calamity for the EA community, which had been counting on funding from this individual. I feel terrible about all the projects left in the lurch, to say nothing of FTX's customers. Let's start with this: raise your hand if you've tried GPT-3.

Something shifted in the last two weeks on the zeitgeist about the use of artificial intelligence in our daily personal and professional lives. The launch of the first large-scale, general purpose chatbot using OpenAI's GPT3 AI engine on November 30 has reenergized the whole tech industry all at once. I wrote a story on it which will give you a good sense why. To get an understanding of why there is so much buzz about Generative AI – the sub-sector with larger AI world which includes creation of text, images, audio and video – and what this means for our daily lives, for the travel industry and even travelers, I talked to the best expert analyst and writer on it I know, David Mattin. He writes an excellent newsletter called New World Same Humans on trends, technology, and our shared future and has been doing a deep dive into Generative AI all this year with his writings. This is a fascinating conversation you would want to listen to from start to finish, to understand the implications of it for our industry and indeed our daily lived reality. Ali: Welcome to the podcast, David. David Mattin, who I've known for many years. I used to know him when he was running trends and insight for TrendWatching, which is a trend watching consultancy called TrendWatching that we used to be good friends with. I've known the company for a while and since then he has started, he since left and started one new newsletter which David if you want to talk about, and in which you've been writing a lot about AI and its effect and a particular sub area of AI that we're going to talk about today. What it means for the travel industry and what it means for content creation of which is a huge part of the travel industry as well. I don't know if you'd like to be called that because I know a lot of folks don't like to be called that. The newsletter is called New World Same Humans and it's a newsletter about trends, technology, and our shared future and it really is underpinned by this idea that so much of the human story, our history, but also what's ahead of us, our shared future, is fueled by this collision between a changing world, often emerging technologies and fundamental human needs, this eternal shared nature we have that doesn't change, and it's in the collision of those two things, often in the collision of a new technology and a fundamental human need that our future emerges, that the human story emerges out of that.

Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a special type of social robots that focus on providing support through social interaction. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this work, I assess the effect of socially assistive robots' roles, functions, and communication approaches in the context of a social agent providing service or companionship to users with developmental disabilities. In this thesis, I describe an exploratory study of interaction design for a socially assistive robot that supports people suffering from developmental disabilities. While exploring the impacts of visual elements to robot's visual interface and different aspects of robot's social dimension, I developed a series of prototypes and tested them through three user studies that included three residents with various function levels at a local group home for people with developmental disabilities. All user studies had been recorded for the following qualitative data analysis. Results show that each design factor played a different role in delivering information and in increasing engagement, and there are more aspects of HRI to consider besides robot's graphical user interface and speech, such as proxemics and robot's physical appearance and dimensions. I also note that some fundamental design principles that would work for ordinary users did not apply to our target user group. I conclude that socially assistive robots could benefit our target users and acknowledge that these robots were not suitable for certain scenarios based on the feedback from our users.

British people have a lot of questions, and these days all they have to do is shout at their voice assistant Alexa and they will probably get the answer. Amazon has now revealed its most asked questions for Alexa in Britain this year, ranging from the weird, wonderful and straight-up nosey. From the height of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Gordon Ramsay's net worth, hundreds of questions have been asked, with some being more popular than others. The net worth of the second richest man in the world, and new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, was one of the most frequently asked question from Alexa owners. One of the most popular questions was'Alexa, how tall is Rishi Sunak'.

Welcome to insideBIGDATA's annual technology predictions round-up! The big data industry has significant inertia moving into 2023. In order to give our valued readers a pulse on important new trends leading into next year, we here at insideBIGDATA heard from all our friends across the vendor ecosystem to get their insights, reflections and predictions for what may be coming. We were very encouraged to hear such exciting perspectives. Even if only half actually come true, Big Data in the next year is destined to be quite an exciting ride. There are many reasons why a customer would choose to implement their architecture on multiple clouds whether it's technology, market, or business-driven. When this happens, many times this leads to transactional and operational data being stored on multiple cloud platforms. The challenge this brings is how to gain insight into these without resorting to implementing multiple disparate data platforms. Historically data virtualization tools have been ...