This week, a short novel written by an AI program did well in a Japanese literary contest, scientists spotted traces of a possible new particle that could shake the foundations of physics and a team of researchers discovered in the human genome a "nearly intact" genetic blueprint for a 700,000-year-old stowaway virus. A short novel written by a Japanese artificial intelligence software program passed the first screening round for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. "The day a computer wrote a novel," the program wrote near the end of the piece, "the computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A team of scientists from Tufts University and the University of Michigan Health System has found a "nearly intact" genetic copy of an ancient virus that spliced itself into our DNA. The team doesn't rule out the possibility that it could come alive again.

Reducing data in the data center has been a mentality in the past, but the Internet of Things (IoT) demands more, more, and more still. Withholding information from analytics systems is in essence selling IoT systems short; actively seeking it, on the other hand, invites challenges perhaps never-before-seen by even the most seasoned data scientists. In this interview with Chris O'Connor, General Manager of Watson Internet of Things Offerings at IBM, he discusses how the power of cognitive computing is being harnessed through the company's Watson platform – now exposed to developers through a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) – to turn the IoT data deluge into increasingly valuable insights. For those unfamiliar, can you briefly describe Watson, and then fill us in on what it's been up to since its Jeopardy! O'CONNOR: Watson is a true learning platform.

Dr. Quoc Viet Le is a research scientist at Google Brain known for his path-breaking work on deep neural networks (DNN). He is especially famous for his Ph.D work in image processing under Andrew Ng, one of the pioneers of the DNN revolution. Le's and Ng's work demonstrated how computers could be used to learn complicated features and patterns in a way similar to how the mammalian brain learns, with better performance than earlier neural network technology. One of their first breakthroughs was demonstrating the training of a large neural network to detect cats from YouTube videos. This revolutionized the interest in DNNs, and got the current giants of the computer industry such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft in a race to incorporate AI techniques into their software.

"The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A pretty profound line--considering this sentence is part of a book that was actually co-authored by an artificial intelligence (AI). While it may not have won the top prize, this short-form novel, which was a collaboration between humans and an AI program, managed to make it through the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan called the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. Titled'The Day A Computer Writes A Novel,' the short story was a team effort between human authors, led by Hitoshi Matsubara from the Future University Hakodate, and, well, a computer. Matsubara, who selected words and sentences for the book, set the parameters for the AI to construct the novel before letting the program take over and essentially "write" the novel by itself.

Marvin Minsky, an American scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) who co-founded vthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI laboratory, wrote several books on AI and philosophy, and was honored with the ACM A.M. Turing Award, passed away on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016 at the age of 88. Born in New York City, Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Phillips Academy, before entering the U.S. Navy in 1944. After leaving the service, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. He then went to Princeton University, where he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC), before earning his Ph.D in mathematics there in 1954. Doctorate in hand, Minsky was admitted to the group of Junior Fellows at Harvard, where he invented the confocal scanning microscope for thick, light-scattering specimens, decades in advance of the lasers and computer power needed to make it useful; today, it is in wide use in the biological sciences.

The Yomiuri ShimbunA short-form novel "coauthored" by humans and an artificial intelligence (AI) program passed the first screening process for a domestic literary prize, it was announced on Monday. However, the book did not win the final prize. Two teams submitted novels that were produced using AI. They held a press conference in Tokyo and made the announcement, which follows the recent victory of an AI program over a top Go player from South Korea. These achievements strongly suggest a dramatic improvement in AI capabilities. The following sentences come from the end of one of the the novels, "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (The day a computer writes a novel): "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.

Just last week, an evil, god-like robot defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, a tragic accomplishment that seemed decades away in 2012. In some ways it completed the Triple Crown of robot-fun-killing which began with Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of DeepBlue in 1997 and continued with the ritual slaughter of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy in 2011. And now, the robots are coming for our books. As reported by Japan News, researchers from Japan's Future University Hakodate have announced that a book co-written by team members and artificial intelligence made it onto the long list of the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The prize itself is somewhat unique.

While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.

An intelligent agent interacting with the real world will encounter individual people, courses, test results, drugs prescriptions, chairs, boxes, etc., and needs to reason about properties of these individuals and relations among them as well as cope with uncertainty. Uncertainty has been studied in probability theory and graphical models, and relations have been studied in logic, in particular in the predicate calculus and its extensions. This book examines the foundations of combining logic and probability into what are called relational probabilistic models. It introduces representations, inference, and learning techniques for probability, logic, and their combinations. The book focuses on two representations in detail: Markov logic networks, a relational extension of undirected graphical models and weighted first-order predicate calculus formula, and Problog, a probabilistic extension of logic programs that can also be viewed as a Turing-complete relational extension of Bayesian networks.

Q: Whenever I teach artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning or intelligent robotics, my class and I end up having what I call'The Terminator Conversation'. My point in this conversation is that the dangers from AI are overblown by media and non-understanding news, and the real danger is the same danger in any complex, less-than-fully-understood code: edge case unpredictability. In my opinion, this is different from'dangerous AI' as most people perceive it, in that the software has no motives, no sentience and no evil morality, and is merely (ruthlessly) trying to optimise a function that we ourselves wrote and designed. Your viewpoints (and Elon Musk's) are often presented by the media as a belief in'evil AI,' though of course that's not what your signed letter says. Students that are aware of these reports challenge my view, and we always end up having a pretty enjoyable conversation. How would you represent your own beliefs to my class?