This editorial introduces answer set programming, a vibrant research area in computational knowledge representation and declarative programming. We give a brief overview of the articles that form this special issue on answer set programming and of the main topics they discuss.

A resident expresses her anger about police-involved shootings in South Los Angeles. A resident expresses her anger about police-involved shootings in South Los Angeles. Prop 64 divides medical marijuana community, the battle to seize Mosul, the vice presidential debate is tonight, and Southern California's earthquake fears. Prop 64 divides medical marijuana community, the battle to seize Mosul, the vice presidential debate is tonight, and Southern California's earthquake fears.

Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. The South Korean electronics company, which has been grappling with extended fallout from its recalled Galaxy Note 7, announced Wednesday that it was buying Viv, the machine-learning virtual assistant company started by Siri founder Dag Kittlaus. Where interactions with many of today's virtual assistants still requires users to dumb down their requests into somewhat robotic language, the AI goal is natural language interaction with a virtual assistant that can process layered requests and remember contextual user details. Dag Kittlaus, founder of AI company Viv, was also the man behind Siri, which he sold to Apple.

Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum will head the new AI division, according to GeekWire. In addition to his old department, the new group will include products like Cortana and Bing with the Ambient Computing and Robotics teams, as well as the company's Information Platform Group. It's similar to how Microsoft internally pivoted to collectively harness the Internet in the mid-90s, GeekWire points out. Hopefully, byproducts from the AI division's R&D will produce fewer missteps like last March's foul-mouthed Twitterbot and more advancements like their pilot project using AI to discover cancer treatments.

Besides being a major player in the earthquake prediction method discussed here, the ionosphere is important because it's the layer of the atmosphere that reflects electromagnetic waves back to Earth and enables radio communication. There was increased ionization over Japan before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and a spike in radio wave emissions near Haiti before the 2010 quake there. Enough historical data linking ionospheric activity to earthquakes needs to be collected in order to generate patterns, and the patterns then need to be matched to real-time data. When the Tohoku earthquake hit, Tokyo residents received a one-minute warning via Japan's earthquake early warning system.

If you are NOT using Model Evaluation Library you may skip this release. CNTK (http://www.cntk.ai/), the Computational Network Toolkit by Microsoft Research, is a unified deep-learning toolkit that describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. In this directed graph, leaf nodes represent input values or network parameters, while other nodes represent matrix operations upon their inputs. This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is betting on Google Assistant. SAN FRANCISCO -- The star of Google's splashy launch event in San Francisco was the one with the speaking part: The super-smart digital helper Assistant whose task is to maintain the Internet giant's tight grip on consumers and their wallets as their attention shifts to smartphones and Internet-connected devices. Assistant will create a "two-way conversation between our users and Google," CEO Sundar Pichai said at a splashy launch event in San Francisco. It's a major transition from the days of typing a query into the Google search engine, allowing the Internet giant to show lucrative ads.

After all, consider that bees' markings are instantly distinctive to each other and across species as a biological imperative. The idea of the brand goes from optimistic (bees were a brand, man!) Will we ever start to see distinct, convincing personalities emerge as brands--or at least a few decent archetypes? Because right now, I don't think that most of us could really distinguish a Siri response from a Cortana response from an Alexa response, beyond the specific voice.

The Google Research team says it has enough images to train a neural network "from scratch," so if you'd like to try your hand at a DeepDream-style project, better version of Google Photos or the next Prisma then it's ready to go. On the other hand, the YouTube8-M file points to 8 million videos (adding up to more than 500,000 hours of footage) that the group says "represents a significant increase in scale and diversity compared to existing video datasets." The idea here is to create a library for video analysis that rivals those already in existence for still images, that's also accessible for people without big data. Part of that is because Google has also extracted and tagged still images from the videos for researchers to download.

We are the market leader in providing service assurance for large service providers around the world and large enterprises. Before, it took them four months, four to five months, between the moment the process starts where we have the big sales targets and the time the sales rep in every country receives the letter that tells him, okay you need to sell this product with this discount -- four to five months. So we're at the very early days of narrow applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think that what you're going to find is that in any kind of specific category where you can frame a problem you can bring predictive algorithms; you can bring machine learning; you can bring neural networking.