Throughout her life, Eileen Lach has been a leader. Growing up in northeast Minneapolis, she knew at a young age she wanted to move to New York City and travel the world. Lach accomplished that and more, carving out a position on Wall Street early in her career and later serving as the first general counsel and chief compliance officer for The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is considered a thought leader, especially in the area of ethics and artificial intelligence (AI). During a conversation with Lach last summer, it was hard not to be wowed by her achievements and admire her dedication to philanthropic causes.

For the second year in a row, Canada has refused visas to dozens of researchers - most of them from Africa - who were hoping to attend an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Vancouver. The hassles have caused at least one other AI conference to choose a different country for their next event. The Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), which brings together thousands of experts and researchers from all over the world, will be held in Vancouver next month. Last week, NeurIPS began hearing that several attendees had had their visas denied. It was the second year in a row the conference has had visa troubles.

Robotic emissaries explore the universe for us. Whether traveling to our moon, to other planets, or beyond the Solar System, robots are sometimes much more useful than humans. What are future trends in robotic space exploration? To learn more about this topic, we spoke to Andrew Jones, a doctoral candidate at North Dakota State University who specializes in it. What do you think next steps are in using robots to explore the universe?

Known as the "Nobel Prize of computing," the Turing Award is regarded as the highest honor in computer science. The three researchers received this prestigious accolade for their contributions to deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) development that's largely responsible for the technology's current renaissance. While deep learning has unlocked vast advances in facial recognition, natural language processing, and autonomous vehicles, it still struggles to explain causal relationships in data. Not one to rest on his laurels, Bengio is now on a new mission: To teach AI to ask "Why?". Bengio views AI's inability to "connect the dots" as a serious problem. Deep learning's pattern recognition capabilities have revolutionized technology.

Worldwide, the annual value of securities transactions is nearing US$2 Quadrillion, (DTCC). Financial services, already in the top 5 in digital transformation and technology adoption, is moving rapidly to embrace the 5th Machine Age Unlimited X-Revolution. What is the 5th Machine Age Unlimited X-Revolution? The "5th Machine Age" term refers to the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across all industries and particularly through an area of AI called machine learning (ML). This is accentuated by the ACM (No.1 in computing science) in March announcing their A.M. Turing Award Winners and deep learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.

What did you choose to do as a writer, then? I was very naive when it comes to writing a series. I had no idea what was going to happen. I wanted it to be a lighthearted, realistic tale and I also wanted it to have a sense of drama, emotion, and suspense. I had no idea what I should do with the main characters in the first place, but I knew I had to make it a lighthearted, realistic story that would have the main characters struggling to find their happiness and love.

When you are solving a problem, in what circumstances will you apply machine learning? Is it true that in every circumstance, machine learning will always outperform rules and heuristic approaches? Before I graduated from university, I am fascinated by how machine learning models could potentially solve any problems in the world. Whenever I am facing any kind of problem, I will first think of how this could be solved by using a machine learning approach. For instance, when I was searching for a property to rent in Singapore, I would like to know the price range of one particular area.

AutoAI, a powerful, automated AI development capability in IBM Watson Studio, won the Best Innovation in Intelligent Automation Award yesterday at the AIconics AI Summit in San Francisco. Chosen by a panel of 13 independent judges, the AIconics awards recognize breakthroughs in AI for business. To share what went behind the development of AutoAI and how it accelerates time to value with data science projects, I interviewed one of our principal inventors: Jean-Francois Puget, PhD, a distinguished engineer for machine learning and optimization at IBM and a two-time Kaggle Grandmaster. What challenge led you to start developing AutoAI? Jean-Francois Puget: As data scientists, our work is a mix of applying general-purpose recipes and creating domain-specific insights.

Due to the increasing involvement of state players in automation warfare, when AI-driven automation is on its way to becoming a war weapon, what will it mean for an enterprise to stay competitive for survival? Artificial intelligence is redefining the very meaning of being an enterprise. The rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) capability is on its way to revolutionizing every aspect of an enterprise. The ability to access data has leveled the playing field and brought every enterprise a unique possibility of progress. What needs to be seen is in this level playing field, which enterprises will be able to compete and lay a new foundation for fundamental transformation and which ones will decline.

Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America." Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Ray's many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.