The selection committee for the ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is pleased to announce that the Decision Service created by the Real World Reinforcement Learning Team from Microsoft, has been chosen as the winner of the inaugural 2019 award. The committee was impressed with the identification and development of cutting-edge research on contextual-bandit learning, the manifest cooperation between research and development efforts, the applicability of the decision support throughout the broad range of Microsoft products, and the quality of the final systems. All these aspects made the Microsoft team well worthy of this award. See the call for nominations.

At OW2con'19, June 12-13 in Paris Châtillon, open source projects ProActive (Activeeon solution), XWiki and CLIF receive unique recognition from the community for their contributions to the OW2 code base. OW2, the international community dedicated to develop and to promote an open source code base, announces the winners of OW2con'19 Best Project Awards. The OW2con Best Project Awards recognize OW2 projects for their outstanding contribution in several categories including community, innovation, and market performance. ProActive wins the OW2con'19 Best Project Innovation Award, with its comprehensive Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning platform. Machine Learning Open Studio (MLOS) is a set of workflows and pipelines based on ProActive core technology that accelerates the development and the deployment of complex AI models and reduces the operational costs.

Amid the news-packed chaos that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo -- or E3 for short -- TIME caught up with Doug Bowser, the president of Nintendo of America. Our conversation followed a busy day for Nintendo, which on Tuesday announced a sequel to the much-loved The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and revealed more details about Luigi's Mansion 3, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and more. Unlike some of its competitors, however, Nintendo was tight-lipped when it came to hardware, using this year's E3 to instead focus on new games for its console/mobile hybrid Switch platform. Speaking via phone from the E3 floor, Bowser discussed Nintendo's latest news, the company's efforts to appeal to a wide range of gamers, and how it can help address crunch and burnout among video game developers. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups is coming, and today it releases its final shortlist after an intense round of public voting and judges' delioberations. The awards will be held on 27 June 2019, in London, U.K. and TechCrunch is once more the exclusive media sponsor of the awards, alongside new "tech, culture & society" event creator The Pathfounder. The awards cover 20 categories, including new additions such as cover AgTech / FoodTech, SpaceTech, GovTech and Mobility Tech. Attendees, nominees and winners will get discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year. The Europas Awards results are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself.

You could try a subtle approach, as one Oxford researcher did. He proposes a different model from "artificial general intelligence" (think like people). Rather, he introduces "Comprehensive AI Services" (CAIS), relying on the work of Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation: Instead of relying on some unforeseen breakthrough, the CAIS model of AI just assumes that specialized, narrow AI will continue to improve at performing each of its tasks, and the range of tasks that machine learning algorithms will be able to perform will become wider. Ultimately, once a sufficient number of tasks have been automated, the services that an AI will provide will be so comprehensive that they will resemble a general intelligence. One could then imagine a "general" intelligence as simply an algorithm that is extremely good at matching the task you ask it to perform to the specialized service algorithm that can perform that task.

With more access to data and growing computing power, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly powerful. But for it to be effective and meaningful, we must embrace people-first artificial intelligence strategies, according to Soumitra Dutta, professor of operations, technology, and information management at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. "There has to be a human agency-first kind of principle that lets people feel empowered about how to make decisions and how to use AI systems to support their decision-making," notes Dutta. Knowledge@Wharton interviewed him at a recent conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning in the financial industry, organized in New York City by the SWIFT Institute in collaboration with Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business. In this conversation, Dutta discusses some myths around AI, what it means to have a people-first artificial intelligence strategy, why it is important, and how we can overcome the challenges in realizing this vision. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the biggest myths about AI, especially as they relate to financial services?

Jeff Bezos wants to colonize space in order to'save the Earth.' At Amazon's inaugural Re:MARS conference in Las Vegas, Bezos broke down how his rocket company, Blue Origin, could play a major role in the future of space exploration. Bezos recently unveiled Blue Origin's lunar lander, which is a key component of the company's plans to conduct space missions and explore the moon's surface. At Amazon's inaugural Re:MARS conference in Las Vegas, CEO Jeff Bezos broke down how his rocket company, Blue Origin, could play a major role in the future of space exploration The comments came during an interview with Jenny Freshwater, Amazon's director of forecasting. The interview was briefly disrupted by an animal rights protester, Priya Sawhney of Direct Action Everywhere, who grilled Bezos on the treatment of chickens at Amazon-affiliated farms, before being briskly whisked off stage.

We, at NextBigWhat, are attempting to drive forward the conversation around Artificial Intelligence in India beyond headlines that scream for attention but don't offer much, buzzwords that make your head buzz after a while, and countless utopian tales that vie for your eyes only to leave you with a scratching head and a lingering itch to actually get to the meat of the matter. In this spirit, the #AIBoss series intends to educate, inform and elevate our readers understanding of the subject as well as the space. If you're part of the leadership team of an AI based product, from enterprise or startup, willing to share your AI learnings – then reach out to us and become part of this initiative (you can apply using this form). Here is the first of our three part interview with Shailendra Tiwari, founder of Fasal, an Ag-tech (agriculture tech) startup that is focused on building AI and IOT (Internet-of-things) based SAAS solutions to address the woes of Indian horticulture farmers. Fasal's primary aims are to increase and improve the quality of the yield and lower input costs for the farmer.

In 2002, veteran Capcom game director Hideaki Itsuno – then working on a pitch for an original action-RPG that later turned into Dragon's Dogma – was called upon to get an ailing Devil May Cry 2 out of the door. It sold decently, in the end, but was widely regarded as a critical flop. "When it finished up, they all realised they could have done better," explains Devil May Cry producer Matt Walker (and Itsuno's translator for this interview). "So he and others at Capcom said, we're going to take all of our collective knowledge on how to make a good fighting game, a good action game, and put everything we can into making Devil May Cry 3. "And if this isn't received well, if this doesn't sell well, that's it. We'll just have to quit Capcom, and do something else." For the person helming one of the most outrageously hyperactive action game series out there, Itsuno is rather reserved in person. But his passion for action games is intense. Devil May Cry 3 was a massive success, and this year's Devil May Cry 5 has been celebrated as a return to form for the whole genre. "We didn't look at other action games for DMC5," Itsuno explains, "though one thing we did do was look at Monster Hunter World, which was a massive effort for Capcom – it made a lot of improvements to make it easier for people to get into." Instead, he says, they focused on what was great about Devil May Cry in the first place. "What makes action games fun hasn't changed in 30 years," explains Itsuno. "You come up against a challenge, and maybe you don't beat it the first time, but you know what you did wrong.

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