Will A.I. make our government smarter and more responsive – or is that the last step towards the end of privacy? As chief scientist of U.S. Government Accountability Office, Tim Persons conceives its vision for advanced data analytics. Learn about the promise and challenges around government A.I. and what those portend for private sector companies. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He completed a PhD in from Emory University's business school and two post-docs at MIT and Harvard. He serves as a Visiting Executive In-Residence at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford. He has received both the Arthur S, Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. In 2016, Business Insider named him one of the top "24 Americans Who Are Changing the World". Dr. Timothy M. Persons is a member of the Senior Executive Service of the U.S. federal government and was appointed the Chief Scientist of the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2008. In addition to establishing the vision for advanced data analytic activities at GAO, he also serves to direct GAO's Center for Science, Technology, and Engineering (CSTE), a group of highly specialized scientists, engineers, and operations research staff. In these roles he directs science and technology (S&T) studies and is an expert advisor and chief consultant to the GAO, Congress, and other federal agencies and government programs on cutting-edge S&T, key highly-specialized complex systems, engineering policies and best practices, and original research studies in the fields of engineering, computer, and the physical and biological sciences to ensure strategic and effective use of S&T in the federal sector. Michael Krigsman: Welcome to Episode #216 of CxOTalk. I'm Michael Krigsman, I'm an industry analyst and the host of CxOTalk, where we bring truly amazing people together to talk about issues like the one we're talking about today, which is the role of AI and the impact on public policy; or maybe I should say, the impact of public policy on AI. Our guest today, we have two guests actually, are Tim Persons, who is the Chief Scientist of the General Accountability Office of the United States Government, and David Bray, who has been on CxOTalk many times, the Chief Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission. And David, let's start with you. Maybe, just introduce yourself briefly.

This was the title of a very popular book published in 2012, featuring several job interview questions (brain teasers) asked by Google's hiring managers to candidates. They apparently dropped all these questions, as they found out that they were not good indicators of career success. Do you think you are smart enough to work for Google? I had one phone interview with Google long ago, and was rejected right away. The interviewer was just focused on very technical details, and spent all her time arguing about Lasso regression, and was clearly looking for a specialist, dismissing people with a broad range of skills and non-standard approach to solving tech problems.

Notice: Faculty members who are planning to apply for funding are encouraged to login to the My Research Application (MRA) on-line system well in advance of the submission deadline to ensure that there are no problems with your login credentials. The information in the on-line form will be automatically routed to the appropriate internal approvers for review and endorsement. If you encounter problems, please consult the My Research - Application User Guide for additional information or contact the RAISE help desk (416-946-5000, RAISE@utoronto.ca). The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has announced two Research Prizes ($25,000/prize) to be given to Faculty members working in the field of Fintech. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Faculty Research Prize will support research and innovation at the University of Toronto.

Today, we'll be following up on our recent post on the Google Cloud Natural Language API. In this post, we're going to take a second look at the service and compare it to the Stanford CoreNLP, a well-known suite for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We will walk you through how to get started using the Stanford CoreNLP, and then we'll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two solutions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the hottest topics in IT. The major cloud platforms--Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure--are increasingly exposing a variety of these functions in a way that makes it easy for developers to integrate them into their apps.

When searching for Mr. or Ms. Right, online dating is now so widely accepted that personal safety sometimes gets overlooked. After all, most dates that start online end up in either a love connection or with the two of you going your separate ways. But it is easy to let your guard down or find yourself in an unsafe situation -- especially if Grey Goose swoops in. That's why it's important to have a few common-sense strategies that keep you safe, according to law enforcement experts and others. "Tell your friends where you're going and when you'll be home," said Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow with the famed Kinsey Institute and chief scientific advisor to Match.com.

Do you believe the warnings from folks like Prof. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others? Is AI the greatest tool humanity will ever create, or are we "summoning the demon"? To quote the head of AI at Singularity University, Neil Jacobstein, "It's not artificial intelligence I'm worried about, it's human stupidity." In a recent Abundance 360 webinar, I interviewed Bryan Johnson, the founder of a new company called Kernel which he seeded with $100 million. To quote Bryan, "It's not about AI vs. humans. In 2007, he founded Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider. In 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million. In 2014, Bryan launched the OS Fund with $100 million of his personal capital to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. His investments include endeavors to cure age-related diseases and radically extend healthy human life to 100 (Human Longevity Inc.), replicate the human visual cortex using ...

When Roger Melko isn't angling in northern Ontario lakes, he's angling to make Waterloo Region the leader in a remarkable new realm of technology -- quantum machine learning. Melko, a cross-appointed physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantum Computing, is pioneering the transfer of algorithms designed to solve problems in the field of artificial intelligence -- machine learning -- to generate breakthroughs in the field of quantum many-body physics. His work uses computer simulations to advance the understanding of strongly interacting condensed-matter systems. Canadian researchers affiliated with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research -- CIFAR-- were responsible for breakthroughs that turned machine learning into the current hot button of tech. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and, it seems, every other large and small player in tech are stampeding into the space.

Data is unquestionably the domain of AI, but what happens when technology is asked to process and make decisions that are more creative in nature? For a human, understanding why certain images and text make more sense as a first interaction with a consumer rather than as a secondary or final interaction is almost second nature. A machine, on the other hand, needs to be told (or programmed) with this knowledge in order to be able to judge images and text and determine where they should appear along the journey, without relying on a human.

David Cheng of DCM Ventures said: "At this point in the industry's lifecycle, there are a limited number of AI experts available who have the requisite experience from large companies or top universities to build truly innovative solutions." If you wind the clock back 8 years, those folks you are now describing as a "limited number of AI experts" were sitting out in the cold, unable to get any return phone calls from even their fellow AI researchers, let alone from investors. Then, out of the blue, they became recognized. So what do you think is happening out in the cold, where your headlights are not pointing, today? Did all of the smart people come in from the cold, 8 years ago?

A little over a year ago, TIME engaged Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima in a wide-ranging conversation about the company's fledgling mobile strategy, its struggles with the Wii U, the rise of its toys-to-life Amiibo figurines and a mystery-cloaked next-gen platform then known only as "NX." Three mobile apps and a sold-out "classic" version of its 1980s NES console later, with a $299 hybrid/TV games console dubbed Nintendo Switch due on March 3, TIME caught up with Nintendo's principal figure to talk Switch, mobile profitability, how he's liking the job so far and more. Here, following our recent chats with Nintendo EPD director Shinya Takahashi and Nintendo Switch general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi, is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation with Kimishima. Tatsumi Kimishima: Mr. Takahashi started out as a designer, and then as far as his career at Nintendo, he really worked with various development teams, where he worked as a coordinator for different environments. He was the guy they would bring in to pull all of these disparate things together. That was his main job while working with development teams. One thing that's a little bit different between [Donkey Kong and Mario creator] Mr. Miyamoto, say, and Mr. Takahashi, is that Mr. Miyamoto is of course known as the father of Mario, as well as for the characters and games he's helped develop. Mr. Takahashi, by contrast, is someone who really covers everything.