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.

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees' special awards. "Behind a multi-domain competition there is always a large technical committee, I feel privileged to have worked with such an amazing team of volunteer referees, technical assistants and safety pilots and divers. We were delighted to give these awards to recognise teams' effort, fair play and hard work. The experience of participating in this robotics competition will prove beneficial for team members to develop further their professional career", said Marta Palau Franco.

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition consisted of four scenarios, inspired by the nuclear accident of Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and designed specifically for multi-domain human-robot teams. The first scenario is The Grand Challenge made up of three domains – sea, air, land, and the other three scenarios are made of only two domains. The Awards, given for each scenario to the best performing teams, were introduced by Alan Winfield from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency Coordinator. "The energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation among the teams competing in ERL Emergency was amazing. We witnessed not only great performances from the teams and their robots, but also the drama and excitement of last minute field repairs and workarounds to the robots", said Alan Winfield.