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.

Self-supervised learning could lead to the creation of AI that's more human-like in its reasoning, according to Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. Bengio, director at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and LeCun, Facebook VP and chief AI scientist, spoke candidly about this and other research trends during a session at the International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR) 2020, which took place online. Supervised learning entails training an AI model on a labeled data set, and LeCun thinks it'll play a diminishing role as self-supervised learning comes into wider use. Instead of relying on annotations, self-supervised learning algorithms generate labels from data by exposing relationships among the data's parts, a step believed to be critical to achieving human-level intelligence. "Most of what we learn as humans and most of what animals learn is in a self-supervised mode, not a reinforcement mode. It's basically observing the world and interacting with it a little bit, mostly by observation in a test-independent way," said LeCun.

April 30th, 2020, Delaware - The Business Intelligence Group today announced the winners of its inaugural Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. This business awards program sets out to recognize those organizations, products and people who bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to life and apply it to solve real problems. Nominations were received and winners were chosen in all four of the categories of AI including Reactive Machines, Limited Memory, Theory of Mind, and Self-Awareness. "We are so proud to name John Snow Labs as a 2020 winner in our Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program", said Maria Jimenez, chief nominations officer for Business Intelligence Group. "John Snow Labs wins our best AI product or service award thanks to exceptional success turning AI research into real & dependable systems for a global community. John Snow Labs has been chosen as a winner because it uniquely combines an end-to-end AI platform that is enterprise-grade in the most demanding sense of the term, with an impressive roster of customer success stories in this challenging field. As a result of its unique set of capabilities, the AI Platform has attracted a number of Fortune 500 companies who use it as the basis for their own enterprise AI platform (by extending, branding, and integrating it into the rest of their software architecture) – as well as small companies and start-ups who need to get to market fast with a proven, end-to-end solution. This AI Platform can be deployed on a new cluster in as little as two hours – although John Snow Labs bundles it with a longer onboarding session that includes training and personalized design & architecture sessions. John Snow Labs also offers turnkey services that combine licensing its AI Platform with custom development of machine learning, deep learning, or natural language processing models that address the needs of specific customers. Such projects are usually done by a joint team that combines data scientists & engineers from John Snow Labs and the customer team – so that in addition to getting to market quickly, the customer's team gains hands-on expertise and on-the-job training in using the platform on a daily basis. "We are honoured by this award and the industry recognition it represents.

Whether employers are currently operating as normal, teleworking, or planning for the future, the Covid-19 experience may lead them to turn to the proliferation of workplace artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help streamline recruiting and hiring so they can continue maintaining social distancing best practices. Employers should be aware, however, that using such AI tools brings with it various regulatory challenges regardless of its utility in these trying times. AI has been exerting an ever-growing influence on companies' employment decisionmaking for some time. AI tools that have long been used to market services and products to customers (e.g., algorithms for personalized pop-up ads) are making increasing inroads into the employment arena, including those that mine data from an applicant's social media and internet presence to determine personal attributes and those that evaluate an applicant's responses during a video interview in making employment decisions. Employers considering using AI recruitment and selection tools during the Covid-19 crisis, which some experts expect to last for months after the curve has "flattened," should be mindful of the potential for misuse and of discriminatory impact raised by these technologies.

Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart--if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. Gagliano, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, talks to plants. Plants summon her with instructions on how to live and work. Some of Gagliano's conversations happened in prophetic dreams, which led her to study with a shaman in Peru while tripping on psychoactive plants. Along with forest scientists like Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Gagliano raises profound scientific and philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence and the possibility of "vegetal consciousness." But what's unusual about Gagliano is her willingness to talk about her experiences with shamans and traditional healers, along with her use of psychedelics. For someone who'd already received fierce pushback from other scientists, it was hardly a safe career move to reveal her personal experiences in otherworldly realms. Gagliano considers her explorations in non-Western ways of seeing the world to be part of her scientific work.

Slate is making its coronavirus coverage free for all readers. Subscribe to support our journalism. I've been single for about two and a half years. Not unhappily so, but I keep a busy schedule that allows me time to go out and meet new people or to go on dates, but rarely both. Despite that, I've been able to maintain a rather pleasing love life, thanks in great part to the apps. Obviously, I haven't yet settled down with Mr. Right Enough just yet, but I've connected with great friends, met remarkable lovers, and explored both fleeting and long-term romance on my own terms.