Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and a renowned mathematicial and computer scientist, died on Sunday, 24 January 2016 of a cerebral hemmorhage. He was 88. In this article, AI scientists Kenneth D. Forbus (Northwestern University), Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), and Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) recall their interactions with Minksy and briefly recount the impact he had on their lives and their research. A remembrance of Marvin Minsky was held at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University on March 22. Video remembrances of Minsky by Danny Bobrow, Benjamin Kuipers, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Waldinger, and others can be on the sentient webpage1 or on youtube.com.

In addition, we illustrate the potential of ASP including molecular biology (Gebser et computational hardness of our application problem al. 2010a, 2010b), decision support system for space by explaining its connection to the NPcomplete shuttle controllers (Balduccini, Gelfond, and decision problem Exact-3-SAT.

PARIS – Molecular machines, which earned their inventors the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, are a fraction of the width of a human hair but strong enough to move things 10,000 times their size. The devices have yet to find practical use in nanoscale engineering, but scientists look forward to the day when microscopic motors or delivery vehicles will be omnipresent, whether in the human body or a microchip. Inspired by natural proteins, which act as biological "machines" within cells, synthetic nanobots can be prodded by light or changes in temperature to produce mechanical motion. Their use in localized drug delivery is "probably the most short-term achievable" application, according to Nicholas White of the Australian National University's Research School of Chemistry. The tiny machines, constructed from groups of molecules, may be used to protect the human body from exposure to the toxic effects of certain medicines, such as those used in chemotherapy.

Miniature robots that doctors could guide through a patient's body to kill cancer cells are closer to reality thanks to winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Three winners share the 727,000 prize for developing nanoscale machines--1000th the width of a human hair--that pave the way for applications in medicine, computing and engineering. The winners were Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France, Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Each devised different groups of molecules with moving parts that they could control remotely, despite their tiny size. "It's early days, but once you can control movement, you have many possibilities," said Feringa, interviewed after receiving notification of the prize.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded for the design and synthesis of the world's smallest machines. The work has overtones of science fiction, but holds huge promise in fields as diverse as medicine, materials and energy. This is especially true of efforts to develop nano-scale machines (1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair), which are always destined to remain tiny however big our ambitions for them grow. It's difficult to trace the development of molecular machines to one person or scientific step. But a 1959 lecture by the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman is as good a point as any.

Alfred Nobel wanted the prizes that bear his name to recognize achievements that offered the "greatest benefit to mankind." The world's tiniest machines -- celebrated in this year's chemistry prize -- may revolutionize daily life. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the final Nobel prize in sciences for 2016. The 8 million kronor ( 930,000) chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France, Sir Fraser Stoddart of Britain, and Bernard "Ben" Feringa of the Netherlands. The scientists were recognized for their breakthroughs on molecular machines, which began with Dr. Sauvage linking two ring-shaped molecules in 1983.

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing the world's smallest machines, work that could revolutionize computer technology and lead to a new type of battery. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, British-born Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard "Ben" Feringa share the 8 million kronor ( 930,000) prize for the "design and synthesis of molecular machines," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Machines at the molecular level are 1,000th the width of a human hair and have taken chemistry to a new dimension, the academy said. Molecular machines "will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy storage systems." Stoddart has already developed a molecule-based computer chip with 20 kB memory.

KDnuggets recently ran an Automated Data Science and Machine Learning blog contest, which garnered numerous entries and lots of appreciation for the winning posts and a pair of honorable mentions. The winning post, titled Contest Winner: Winning the AutoML Challenge with Auto-sklearn, written by Matthias Feurer, Aaron Klein, and Frank Hutten, all of the University of Freiburg, provides an overview of Auto-sklearn, an open-source Python tool that automatically determines effective machine learning pipelines for classification and regression datasets. The project is built around the successful scikit-learn library and won the recent AutoML challenge. Given the popularity of the post, we asked the authors if they would be interested in answering a few followup questions on themselves, their project, and automated data science in general. What follows is the result of this conversation. What if we start by having you introduce the members of the team and provide a little information on each of your backgrounds?

Brilliant minds like Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nicola Tesla, and of course Albert Einstein are equally known for the application of knowledge to problem solving. While we doubt we'll be winning a Nobel Prize any time soon, we're pleased to announce that Email Studio now includes artificial intelligence (AI) powered by Salesforce Einstein. Einstein combines machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, smart discovery, and predictive analytics to help our customers get smarter and more predictive about their customers. Admittedly, the idea of adding AI to your email program may seem a little like science fiction, but in reality it's something you can do today. Machine learning is a lot more common than we may realize.

What are the best practices for creating artificial intelligence? It's a question posed by the "partnership on AI" formed by major American technology firms. The goal of the partnership, which includes Google, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook, is to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license (sic) in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology." Now, a clarification of terms: AI and robots are different. I should know: I wrote a series of novels about self-replicating humanoid robots.