PhD candidate Michelle A. Lee from the Stanford AI Lab won the best paper award at ICRA 2019 with her work "Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks". You can read the paper on arxiv here. Audrow Nash was there to capture her pitch.

As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft. The investment from Microsoft, signed early this month and announced Monday, signals a new direction for Altman's research lab. In March, Altman stepped down from his daily duties as the head of Y Combinator, the startup "accelerator" that catapulted him into the Silicon Valley elite. Now, at 34, he is the chief executive of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab he helped create in 2015 with Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla. Musk left the lab last year to concentrate on his own AI ambitions at Tesla.

Patrick Winston, a beloved professor and computer scientist at MIT, died on July 19 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A professor at MIT for almost 50 years, Winston was director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to become MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). A devoted teacher and cherished colleague, Winston led CSAIL's Genesis Group, which focused on developing AI systems that have human-like intelligence, including the ability to tell, perceive, and comprehend stories. He believed that such work could help illuminate aspects of human intelligence that scientists don't yet understand. "My principal interest is in figuring out what's going on inside our heads, and I'm convinced that one of the defining features of human intelligence is that we can understand stories,'" said Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, in a 2011 interview for CSAIL.

An organization that won the Nobel Prize in 2017 for its work to eliminate nuclear weapons is sounding the alarm about the possibility of artificial intelligence leading to unintended wars. Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, is worried that hackers could breach A.I. technologies that are used in nuclear programs or that they could use A.I. to dupe countries into launching attacks. For example, deepfakes, or realistic-looking computer-altered videos, may be used to "create a perceived threat that might not be there," she warns, prompting governments to overreact. Fihn told Fortune that she wants to convene a meeting in the fall with nuclear weapons experts and some of the leading companies in A.I. and cybersecurity. Participants in the off-the-record event, she said, would produce a document that her group would use to inform governments and others about the danger.

Patrick Winston, a beloved professor and computer scientist at MIT, died on July 19 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A professor at MIT for almost 50 years, Winston was director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to become MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). A devoted teacher and cherished colleague, Winston led CSAIL's Genesis Group, which focused on developing AI systems that have human-like intelligence, including the ability to tell, perceive, and comprehend stories. He believed that such work could help illuminate aspects of human intelligence that scientists don't yet understand. "My principal interest is in figuring out what's going on inside our heads, and I'm convinced that one of the defining features of human intelligence is that we can understand stories,'" said Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, in a 2011 interview for CSAIL.

Fernando "Corby" Corbató, an MIT professor emeritus whose work in the 1960s on time-sharing systems broke important ground in democratizing the use of computers, died on Friday, July 12, at his home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Decades before the existence of concepts like cybersecurity and the cloud, Corbató led the development of one of the world's first operating systems. His "Compatible Time-Sharing System" (CTSS) allowed multiple people to use a computer at the same time, greatly increasing the speed at which programmers could work. It's also widely credited as the first computer system to use passwords. After CTSS Corbató led a time-sharing effort called Multics, which directly inspired operating systems like Linux and laid the foundation for many aspects of modern computing.

If your CV was good enough to get you an interview, that's great, but looking good on paper is just the starting point. At interview, you have to demonstrate that you have the skills to do the job and will be a good fit with the team. An interview is an audition – your opportunity to shine and prove you are the perfect person for the role. The actor Harlan Hogan is famous for delivering the catchphrase, 'you never get a second chance to make a first impression…' and it certainly pays to be well prepared. The interview is not, however, just an exercise in self-promotion. The hiring manager has a specific brief and, in effect, you are there to convince the interviewer that you can solve their hiring problem.

The presumed data owners' right to explanations brought about by the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe has shed light on the social challenges of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we present a case study with Deep Learning (DL) experts from a research and development laboratory focused on the delivery of industrial-strength AI technologies. Our aim was to investigate the social meaning (i.e. meaning to others) that DL experts assign to what they do, given a richly contextualized and familiar domain of application. Using qualitative research techniques to collect and analyze empirical data, our study has shown that participating DL experts did not spontaneously engage into considerations about the social meaning of machine learning models that they build. Moreover, when explicitly stimulated to do so, these experts expressed expectations that, with real-world DL application, there will be available mediators to bridge the gap between technical meanings that drive DL work, and social meanings that AI technology users assign to it. We concluded that current research incentives and values guiding the participants' scientific interests and conduct are at odds with those required to face some of the scientific challenges involved in advancing XAI, and thus responding to the alleged data owners' right to explanations or similar societal demands emerging from current debates. As a concrete contribution to mitigate what seems to be a more general problem, we propose three preliminary XAI Mediation Challenges with the potential to bring together technical and social meanings of DL applications, as well as to foster much needed interdisciplinary collaboration among AI and the Social Sciences researchers.

The Bank of England's new 50-pound note will feature mathematician Alan Turing, honoring the code-breaker who helped lay the foundation for computer science. The Bank of England's new 50-pound note will feature mathematician Alan Turing, honoring the code-breaker who helped lay the foundation for computer science. Alan Turing, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence who broke Adolf Hitler's Enigma code system in World War II -- but who died an outcast because of his homosexuality -- will be featured on the Bank of England's new 50-pound note. The new note will be printed on polymer and will bear a 1951 photo of Turing, the bank announced Monday. It's expected to enter circulation by the end of 2021. It will include a quote from Turing: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be." Turing was just 41 when he died from poisoning in 1954, a death that was deemed a suicide.

Dr Mark Woods is one of our panellists in the afternoon. Mark leads the Autonomy and Robotics group at SCISYS UK. We invited him to tell us more about himself ahead of the conference. Mark, thank you so much for accepting our invitation to be a panellist. And you've developed autonomous/AI/ML based systems for Mars Exploration including the European Space Agency's first robotic mission to Mars!