Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves, one notices those too, but with little thought for a matrix that may spread as deep and wide as the branches above. Fungi don't register at all except for a sprinkling of mushrooms; those are regarded in isolation, rather than as the fruiting tips of a vast underground lattice intertwined with those roots. The world beneath the earth is as rich as the one above. For the past two decades, Suzanne Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied that unappreciated underworld. Her specialty is mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn't just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well. Simard went on to show how mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks, with individuals she dubbed Mother Trees at the center of communities that are in turn linked to one another, exchanging nutrients and water in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest's life.

We recently had the opportunity to catch up with Attila Toth, CEO, zesty.ai, the Silver Winner of the 2019 Zurich Innovation World Championship, to discuss how Artificial Intelligence is impacting the Property & Casualty Insurance market across personal and commercial lines. Click the link to have a listen. You can also read the full transcript of the conversation below. With me today is Attila Toth, CEO of zesty.ai Today we have an interesting show planned for you where we're going to talk about the global insurance industry as it undergoes a digital transformation. As insurance companies find themselves trying to make sense of all these new technologies – artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, – understanding the business case for each can be extremely confusing and daunting. With insurance companies being held to higher customer expectations, the time is now to embrace new technologies to leapfrog the competition. Being status quo is no longer an option. Technology is driving diversity across many industries – insurance included – as it reshapes the value chain. Age-old processes are being disrupted, while new market entrants and changing business models are bringing new threats, as well as opportunities for those who act on them. Some of the questions we'll cover today include: What is the value that AI is delivering to the insurance industry, and how are insurance providers reacting to these seismic changes?

Do you think the traffic is bad where you live? Try moving to Boston, where commuters suffer the worst highway congestion in the nation. Residents of the New England city spent an average of 164 hours sitting in their vehicles going nowhere slowly last year, losing as much as $2,291 in personal value for the privilege. And that's nothing compared to the city found to be cursed with the worst highway tie-ups on the planet. Moscow commuters are known to have lost an average of 210 hours each last year to traffic jams.

All persons, organizations and entities that attend AAAI conferences and events are subject to the standards of conduct set forth on the AAAI Code of Conduct for Events and Conferences. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence is pleased to present the 2019 Fall Symposium Series, to be held Thursday through Saturday, November 7–9 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia adjacent to Washington, DC. An informal reception will be held on Thursday, November 7. A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium will be presented, will be held on Friday, November 8. For further information, please contact: AAAI Fall Symposium Series 2275 East Bayshore Road, Suite 160 Palo Alto, California 94303 650-328-3123 650-321-4457 (fax) fss19@aaai.org The 2019 Plenary Session, to be held November 8 at 6:00 PM, will have a modified format this year.

The following is an excerpt of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane. Listen to a radio interview with Janelle Shane about the mistakes artificial intelligence can make. Will the music, movies, and novels of the future be written by AI? Maybe at least partially. AI-generated art can be striking, weird, and unsettling: infinitely morphing tulips; glitchy humans with half-melted faces; skies full of hallucinated dogs. AT. rex may turn into flowers or fruit; the Mona Lisa may take on a goofy grin; a piano riff may turn into an electric guitar solo.

I had more than a month to try out the new Honor 10 and here is my honest review on what I think of the phone. Hint – AI camera is awesome! I got the chance to review the Honor 10 over the period of more than a month recently and there are tons of stuffs that I like about it. Of course there are some misses along the way but I feel those are forgivable. But when it comes to AI features in the camera, the Honor 10 scores high in my books.

We have actual people being affected by these algorithms. We see things in the news such as algorithms that predict recidivism -- whether someone will re-commit a particular crime -- and set a bail amount or pass that information on to a judge who decides whether or not to set bail. The algorithms used to make these predictions end up relying on correlations with socioeconomic status, or race, or gender. So someone who might have a very similar background to you but differs across race or gender might have a very different outcome because of what the algorithm predicts. Do you think people are generally aware of the degree to which these algorithms are already part of everyday life?

It's very abstract and it's something that deep neural networks can't do even in the simplest form. They can't recognize same… If you give them an example of something in which two things are the same versus two things are different in general, it can't do that task.

The School of Science has announced that 14 of its faculty members have been appointed to named professorships. The faculty members selected for these positions receive additional support to pursue their research and develop their careers. Riccardo Comin is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. He has been named a Class of 1947 Career Development Professor. This three-year professorship is granted in recognition of the recipient's outstanding work in both research and teaching.

In this Q&A on Explainable AI, Andrea Brennen speaks with In-Q-Tel's Peter Bronez about descriptive vs. prescriptive models, "white box" vs. "black box" explanation techniques, and why some models are easier to explain than others. Peter also discusses the reproducibility crisis in Psychology and why good experiment design is so important. Peter is a VP on the technical staff at IQT. Could you tell me about your experience with machine learning and AI? PETER: As an undergraduate, I studied econometrics and operations research, so my exposure to machine learning was in the context of designing models of the world that you could test mathematically -- basically, doing hypothesis testing using statistics. Afterwards, I worked at the Department of Defense and used a lot of the same techniques. From there, I went to the private sector and [worked on] social media and data mining in marketing applications, trying to create mathematical models to categorize people, activities, and messages in order to understand them better.