Artificial intelligence has to go in new directions if it's to realize the machine equivalent of common sense, and three of its most prominent proponents are in violent agreement about exactly how to do that. Yoshua Bengio of Canada's MILA institute, Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, and Yann LeCun of Facebook, who have called themselves co-conspirators in the revival of the once-moribund field of "deep learning," took the stage Sunday night at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan for the 34th annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The three, who were dubbed the "godfathers" of deep learning by the conference, were being honored for having received last year's Turing Award for lifetime achievements in computing. Each of the three scientists got a half-hour to talk, and each one acknowledged numerous shortcomings in deep learning, things such as "adversarial examples," where an object recognition system can be tricked into misidentifying an object just by adding noise to a picture. "There's been a lot of talk of the negatives about deep learning," LeCun noted.

AWS is pleased to announce a new feature in Amazon Polly called Brand Voice, a capability in which you can work with the Amazon Polly team of AI research scientists and linguists to build an exclusive, high-quality, Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voice that represents your brand's persona. Brand Voice allows you to differentiate your brand by incorporating a unique vocal identity into your products and services. Amazon Polly has been working with Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Canada and National Australia Bank (NAB) to create two unique Brand Voices, using the same deep learning technology that powers the voice of Alexa. The Amazon Polly team has built a voice for KFC Canada in a Southern US English accent for the iconic Colonel Sanders to voice KFC's latest Alexa skill. The voice-activated skill available through any Alexa-enabled Amazon device allows KFC lovers in Canada to chat all things chicken with Colonel Sanders himself, including re-ordering their favorite KFC.

Much of what sets The Next Platform apart from other tech publications is depth and analysis. As it turns out, the key to getting both of those facets is knowing what questions to ask and pushing for answers that go beyond the basic and cut through marketing and hype. This time we are conducting interviews in a new format--and we want you involved in the process. Please join us on March 10, 2020 at The Glasshouse in downtown San Jose, CA for an all-day event featuring the same in-depth conversations you expect from TNP (and from our sold-out Next AI Platform event last year), live on-stage followed by a cocktail reception and evening dinner opportunities for networking with key people defining the next generation of AI infrastructure. Meet the Next Platform team with plenty of time to talk about what matters to you, get first access to exclusive interviews, and spend the day with us in an intimate setting at San Jose's premier event venue, The Glasshouse. Just some of the best interviewers in the high-end infrastructure space and a lineup of thought leaders building the next generation of large-scale infrastructure to support emerging AI workloads.

Dialogue research tends to distinguish between chit-chat and goal-oriented tasks. While the former is arguably more naturalistic and has a wider use of language, the latter has clearer metrics and a straightforward learning signal. Humans effortlessly combine the two, for example engaging in chit-chat with the goal of exchanging information or eliciting a specific response. Here, we bridge the divide between these two domains in the setting of a rich multi-player text-based fantasy environment where agents and humans engage in both actions and dialogue. Specifically, we train a goal-oriented model with reinforcement learning against an imitation-learned ``chit-chat'' model with two approaches: the policy either learns to pick a topic or learns to pick an utterance given the top-K utterances from the chit-chat model. We show that both models outperform an inverse model baseline and can converse naturally with their dialogue partner in order to achieve goals.

The Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The award will be given annually at the conference for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in February, and is accompanied by a prize of $1,000,000 plus travel expenses to the conference. Financial support for the award is provided by Squirrel AI. The award will be given for the first time in 2021. Candidates may be individuals, groups, or organizations that are directly connected with the main contribution stated in the nomination.

Yoshua Bengio: Yoshua Bengio OCFRSC (born 1964 in Paris, France) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning.[1][2][3] He was a co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his work in deep learning.[4] He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). Geoffrey Hinton: Geoffrey Everest HintonCCFRSFRSC[11] (born 6 December 1947) is an English Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. Since 2013 he divides his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto.

Dr. Zoe Danielle Birnbaum and James Matthew Frankel are to be married Feb. 9 by Rabbi Jeffrey Sirkman at Tappan Hill Mansion in Tarrytown, N.Y. The bride and groom graduated from Colgate. Dr. Birnbaum, 30, is a third-year resident in the field of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, and received a medical degree from N.Y.U. She is a daughter of Dr. Lisa Turtz and Jesse Birnbaum of Larchmont, N.Y. The bride's father is a member of the quality assurance team at the Mahwah, N.J., manufacturing facility of Nobel Biocare, the Swiss-based maker of dental implants and individualized prosthetics.

Facial recognition systems from large tech companies often incorrectly classify black women as male -- including the likes of Michelle Obama, Serena Williams and Sojourner Truth. That's according to Joy Buolamwini, whose research caught wide attention in 2018 with "AI, Ain't I a Woman?" a spoken-word piece based on her findings at MIT Media Lab. The video, along with the accompanying research paper written with Timnit Gebru of Microsoft Research, prompted many tech companies to reassess their facial recognition data sets and algorithms for darker and more female-looking faces. "Coded Bias," a documentary directed by Shalini Kantayya which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January, interweaves Buolamwini's journey of creating the Algorithmic Justice League, an advocacy organization, with other examples of facial recognition software being rolled out around the world -- on the streets of London, in housing projects in Brooklyn and broadly across China. Jennifer 8. Lee, a journalist and documentary producer, caught up with Joy Buolamwini and Shalini Kantayya in Park City, Utah after the premiere of Coded Bias.

Indian-origin technology executive Arvind Krishna has been named as the chief executive officer of American IT giant International Business Machines (IBM). The IBM Board of Directors elected Krishna as company CEO and member of the Board of Directors effective April 6 2020. Krishna is currently IBM senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software. "I am thrilled and humbled to be elected as the next chief executive officer of IBM," says Krishna. "IBM has such talented people and technology that we can bring together to help our clients solve their toughest problems," he added. Arvind Krishna's story is similar to those of many Indians in the US tech industry -- he finished a degree from IIT Kanpur, before moving to the US to complete his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Those who might also be wondering: I asked to Nobel Prize organization why do they not consider to add a Digital/Technology prize category since the rise of ethical Artificial Intelligence discussions. This is their reaction: Feb 7, 14:27 CET The Nobel Prizes, as designated in the will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Only once during these years has a prize been added, "a Memorial Prize": The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, donated by Sweden's central bank to celebrate its tercentenary in 1968. The Board of Directors later decided to keep the original five prizes intact and not to permit new additions.