People in England can return to work if they can't work from home Restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus are being eased slightly in England this week, but many have criticised the government for creating confusion with a new slogan telling people to "stay alert", which replaces previous advice to "stay at home." In a video message broadcast on Sunday evening, prime minister Boris Johnson announced the following changes to the government's policy in England, which are listed in full online and will come into effect from Wednesday 13 May: These new policies mean that social distancing rules in England are now different from the advice given to UK citizens in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon said people should continue to "stay at home", and Northern Ireland's first minister Arlene Foster also rejected the new slogan. Some London Underground platforms were packed with passengers this morning following last night's announcement.

The world is in trouble and not just because of COVID-19. Hype and fraud fascinates her and Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas rife in both. Milne is on a mission to get everyone talking about it...properly. 'Smoke Mirrors' is Milne's first book and focuses on the misuse of technical terminology. You might not think incorrectly using terms like AI is a big deal in the grand scheme of things but you'd be wrong.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talks with Jen Jones, CMO of Dataminr, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect risks, about the role AI is playing in the effort to keep companies informed during the COVID-19 crisis. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation. Jen Jones: Our platform is an artificial intelligence platform that pulls information from over 10,000 public information sources, things like social media platforms or blogs or even information sensors like what you would get from a ship transponder or a plane transponder. And our clients right now span from either corporate enterprises who are using us to gain early information so that they can mitigate risks very quickly and with confidence, depending on their business needs, or public sector agencies who are on the front lines dealing with the current COVID-19 crisis. They're getting very early alerts from us on breaking news so that they know where to deploy equipment and resources.

Whilst many will be familiar with our Women in AI lists which include those currently pushing boundaries in the present day, we thought we would put together a list of women who have been instrumental in the advancement of Computer Science and Data Science, providing the foundations for AI in the 21st Century. How many of the below are you familiar with? Dame Mary Cartwright was a University of Oxford Graduate in Mathematics at a time in which Women had only just been allowed to take degree classifications at the prestigious school. Mary then obtained a Yarrow fellowship at Cambridge University, later pursuing research in the theory of Functions through until her retirement in 1968, becoming one of the first to study what would later become known as Chaos theory. Cartwright had a distinguished career in analytic function theory and university administration, publishing over 100 papers on classical analysis, differential equations and related topological problems.

Benjamin Lee, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Allen School's Artificial Intelligence group working with professor Daniel Weld, has been named a 2020 Innovator in Residence by the Library of Congress. Now in its second year, the Innovator in Residence program aims to enlist artists, researchers, journalists, and others in developing new and creative ways of using the library's digital collections. During his residency, Lee will apply deep learning to enable the automatic extraction and tagging of photographs and illustrations contained in the more than 15 million newspaper scans comprising the library's Chronicling America collection. His goal is to produce interactive visualizations, searchable by topic, that will make the content more accessible to users and support cultural heritage research. "A primary motivation behind my project is to excite the American public by demonstrating the possibilities of applying machine learning to library collections," Lee explained in an interview posted on the library's blog.

If, like many people these days, you're trying to get a firmer understanding of what AI is and how it works but are secretly panicking a little because you're struggling with terminology so opaque that you're lost before you get to Markov chains, you may want to crack open Janelle Shane's new book. She recently sat down with VentureBeat to talk about the book, whose title, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, is actually an AI-generated pickup line. Shane maintains the AI Weirdness blog and combines knowledge from her Ph.D. in electrical engineering, fascination with AI, and propensity for slightly deadpan absurdist humor to explain AI in a way that is both hilarious and easy to understand. More importantly, she uses humor as a frame to display how AI is actually dangerously bad at most things we wish it could do. Her take is a refreshing counter to the often overly fantastical notions about AI, its looming sentience, and its capacity for either utopia or dystopia. Although the book walks the reader through what AI is and explains how AI "thinks" and how we should think about how AI thinks, it's full of giggle-inducing hand-drawn illustrations and endless comical examples.

To build Sounding Board, we develop a system architecture that is capable of accommodating dialog strategies that we designed for socialbot conversations. The architecture consists of a multi-dimensional language understanding module for analyzing user utterances, a hierarchical dialog management framework for dialog context tracking and complex dialog control, and a language generation process that realizes the response plan and makes adjustments for speech synthesis. Additionally, we construct a new knowledge base to power the socialbot by collecting social chat content from a variety of sources. An important contribution of the system is the synergy between the knowledge base and the dialog management, i.e., the use of a graph structure to organize the knowledge base that makes dialog control very efficient in bringing related content to the discussion. Using the data collected from Sounding Board during the competition, we carry out in-depth analyses of socialbot conversations and user ratings which provide valuable insights in evaluation methods for socialbots. We additionally investigate a new approach for system evaluation and diagnosis that allows scoring individual dialog segments in the conversation. Finally, observing that socialbots suffer from the issue of shallow conversations about topics associated with unstructured data, we study the problem of enabling extended socialbot conversations grounded on a document. To bring together machine reading and dialog control techniques, a graph-based document representation is proposed, together with methods for automatically constructing the graph. Using the graph-based representation, dialog control can be carried out by retrieving nodes or moving along edges in the graph. To illustrate the usage, a mixed-initiative dialog strategy is designed for socialbot conversations on news articles.

The heads of two prominent artificial intelligence firms came under public scrutiny this month for ties to far right organizations. A report by Matt Stroud at OneZero identified the founder and CEO of surveillance firm Banjo, Damien Patton, as a former member of the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who was charged with a hate crime for shooting at a synagogue in 1990. The report led the Utah Attorney General's office to suspend a contract worth at least $750,000 with the company, and reportedly the firm has also lost a $20.8 million contract with the state's Department of Public Safety. Only a few weeks earlier, Luke O'Brien at the Huffington Post uncovered that Clearview AI's founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, affiliated with far right extremists including former Breitbart writer Chuck Johnson, Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, and neo-Nazi hacker Andrew'weev' Auernheimer. Moreover, the reporters found evidence that Ton-That collaborated with Johnson and others in the development of Clearview AI's software.

The College of Engineering Awards acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the college's teaching and research assistants, staff, and faculty members. The College of Engineering Awards ceremony scheduled for April 20 has been canceled. Since joining UW in 2014, Cole DeForest has established himself as an innovative researcher, an effective teacher and a collaborative colleague, holding appointments in Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and the Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine. His research focuses on the development of (de)polymerization reactions that can be triggered using light in the presence of cells, and "represents a major advancement in cell culture niches that allow unprecedented control of the cellular microenvironment, and is enabling him to conduct newfound experiments that were previously impossible." Cole has received numerous honors, including an NSF Career Award, a Young Investigator Award through the American Chemical Society, and a UW Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award.

The algorithms are well understood -- natural language processing, speech analytics, computer vision, and biometrics -- but we're only starting to come to grips with applications and with data, bias, and ethical implications. Emotion AI has many applications: consumer and market research, conversational interfaces, contact center operations, policy-making and finance, education, and, notably, healthcare uses that include suicide prevention. Potential but not-yet-fully-realized applications include emotionally intelligent design, design that aims to humanize technology. Actually, I wouldn't call the emotion AI potential of any application fully realized. That thought was the starting point for an exploratory conversation I had with Andy, who is professor of digital life at Bangor University in Wales and who'll be speaking at the up-coming Emotion AI Conference, taking place online on May 5th.