Why? What could possibly have motivated Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant, to open fire from a balcony above a Las Vegas music festival, killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500? Police found 23 guns in Paddock's hotel room, but have not discovered any connection to international terrorism, despite a claim of involvement from so-called Islamic State. President Donald Trump described the act as "pure evil" and some investigators say there is reason to believe the gunman, 64, had a history of psychological problems. Meanwhile, searches have uncovered explosives at Paddock's home in a retirement community in the small town of Mesquite, north east of Las Vegas. There is a second house in northern Nevada which Swat teams are due to check for booby-traps before carrying out a search. The authorities have yet to confirm the identities of any of the people killed, but Jordan McIldoon, 23, from British Columbia in Canada, has been named as a victim of the attack by CBC News.

RPA is a promising new development in business automation that offers a potential ROI of 30–200 percent--in the first year. Employees may like it too. Robotics are beginning to have a profound effect on business. In this interview, Xavier Lhuer, an associate principal in McKinsey's London office, speaks with Leslie Willcocks, professor of technology, work, and globalization at the London School of Economics' department of management, about his work on robotic process automation--its impact on work, and how companies can capture its strategic and financial benefits.1 1. Leslie P. Willcocks and Mary C. Lacity are coauthors of Service Automation, Robots and the Future of Work, Steve Brookes Publishing, UK, 2016. McKinsey: Can you start by defining robotic process automation (RPA)?

Harriet Green is currently general manager of Watson customer engagement, Watson Internet of Things (IoT) and education at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Prior to that, she held numerous leadership positions including that of chief executive officer (CEO) of Thomas Cook Group, CEO of Premier Farnell Plc, and senior vice-president of Arrow Electronics Inc. A recipient of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to electronics in 2010, Green was in Mumbai last week to announce IBM's partnership with Unlimit--a business venture of the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Group--to jointly develop IoT solutions. In an interview on the sidelines of that event, she explained why she is excited about IoT, the role that Watson has to play in this space and her thoughts on gender diversity. What made you join IBM after Thomas Cook? IBM was so much of an obvious choice.

In 2018, a advances in research, education, limited number of complimentary The goal of this program is to provide and application. Submissions are due technical program registrations will be a forum in which students can present November 15. View previous entries available for students who volunteer and discuss their work during its early and award winners at the AI Videos during the conference. Preference will stages, meet some of their peers who Past Competitions page (www.

We report on a series of new platforms and events dealing with AI evaluation that may change the way in which AI systems are compared and their progress is measured. The introduction of a more diverse and challenging set of tasks in these platforms can feed AI research in the years to come, shaping the notion of success and the directions of the field. However, the playground of tasks and challenges presented there may misdirect the field without some meaningful structure and systematic guidelines for its organization and use. Anticipating this issue, we also report on several initiatives and workshops that are putting the focus on analyzing the similarity and dependencies between tasks, their difficulty, what capabilities they really measure and – ultimately – on elaborating new concepts and tools that can arrange tasks and benchmarks into a meaningful taxonomy.

Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, intents, knowledge, perspectives, etc.) to others and recognize that these mental states may differ from one's own. Theory of Mind is critical to effective communication and to teams demonstrating higher collective performance. To effectively leverage the progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make our lives more productive, it is important for humans and AI to work well together in a team. Traditionally, there has been much emphasis on research to make AI more accurate, and (to a lesser extent) on having it better understand human intentions, tendencies, beliefs, and contexts. The latter involves making AI more human-like and having it develop a theory of our minds. In this work, we argue that for human-AI teams to be effective, humans must also develop a theory of AI's mind (ToAIM) - get to know its strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and quirks. We instantiate these ideas within the domain of Visual Question Answering (VQA). We find that using just a few examples (50), lay people can be trained to better predict responses and oncoming failures of a complex VQA model. We further evaluate the role existing explanation (or interpretability) modalities play in helping humans build ToAIM. Explainable AI has received considerable scientific and popular attention in recent times. Surprisingly, we find that having access to the model's internal states - its confidence in its top-k predictions, explicit or implicit attention maps which highlight regions in the image (and words in the question) the model is looking at (and listening to) while answering a question about an image - do not help people better predict its behavior.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

Psychologists are simulating neural networks to understand how we learn. Studying the human mind is tough. You can ask people how they think, but they often don't know. You can scan their brains, but the tools are blunt. You can damage their brains and watch what happens, but they don't take kindly to that.

The 25-year-old inventor of a machine learning tool to help brands uncover future ideas, has been named as the UK's most promising young technology entrepreneur by the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub. Nick Schweitzer, founder of Klydo, has received the JC Gammon Award, which provides £15,000 of funding and membership of the Enterprise Hub, as the winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering's Launchpad Competition – a nationwide search for the UK's greatest entrepreneurs in the engineering and technology sector, between the ages of 19 and 25. Up to 90% of attempted innovation in business fails. Nick aims to change this by creating a web tracking and machine learning technology that offers novel solutions to business problems, using the internet as its source of inspiration. It identifies what the future of an industry should be, helping business innovation succeed where it currently fails.

It's not exactly news that Hugh Hefner, the perpetually robed Playboy founder who died Wednesday at the age of 91, is a polarizing figure. For decades Americans have disagreed about whether he should be remembered as a great liberator of Americans from their sexual puritanism or as a sexist exploiter of women. On Thursday, columnist Robin Abcarian came down strongly on the latter side, writing that although we shouldn't forget Hefner's support for smart journalism, reproductive rights and civil liberties, we should also not lose sight of the fact that his core business was the objectification of women -- mostly women under 30 -- and the exalting of exclusively male fantasies. Before Abcarian's column was published, the letters on Hefner's death reflected the typical mix of opinions we get after most notable celebrity passings: Several mentioned the existence of strong polarization over Hefner's work without taking a side, others reflected dispassionately on his work, and a few recounted their own experiences with Hefner. It was only in response to Abcarian's column that more readers started expressing stronger opinions on Hefner's work itself.