Artificial intelligence is pegged as the tool of the future, so it's only fitting that two Calgary students, the future generation, are organizing a conference on the technology. Grade 11 students Claire Du and Gerry Lu organized an event they're calling the AI4Youth Canada Conference. It took a lot of cold calls, bottle drive cash and organizing, but the event is set to go ahead on Sunday and is already picking up interest with more than 200 people expected to attend. "AI is going to be changing our lives as the next generation," said Du. "So, it's going to be very useful in the future for us to change AI as well." Polling their fellow students at schools, they found most teens didn't know what kind of artificial intelligence technology they encounter on a daily basis.

The inaugural "Governor's Cup" competition is happening Saturday at Plymouth State University featuring more than 20 teams from high schools across the state. In addition to one-semester scholarships to the state's public universities and community colleges, scholarships worth $2,000 each will be awarded to five seniors.

Originally posted on The Horizons Tracker. Most AI systems these days have a learning component to them, and I've touched on the ways in which systems learn a few times previously. One of the more interesting approaches aims to mimic the way humans learn. Such approaches have their roots in a theory that was first published in 1995, which suggested that learning is a two pronged approach. The first system acquires knowledge gradually based upon our exposure to new experiences.

About 300 students primarily from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area attended the Girls Computing League's second-ever Artificial Intelligence Summit at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly on Oct. 6 and 7. The summit's organizers, most of whom are still high school students themselves, hoped to make an impact with the two-day event beyond its direct participants. In addition to introducing middle and high school students to artificial intelligence with speeches from professionals in the field as well as hands-on activities, Girls Computing League presented donations to four Fairfax County schools as well as the D.C. Housing Authority so that they can start coding clubs. The Girls Computing League, a nonprofit founded by Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology graduate Kavya Kopparapu, is also contributing funds to host multiple artificial intelligence summits at the college level next year. "It's a mission of Girls Computing League in general to give access to computer science and technology education to those that might not have the opportunity to do so themselves," Girls Computing League chief innovation officer and Kavya's brother Neeyanth Kopparapu said.

As 2018 continues on its downward slope toward a new year, artificial intelligence technologies are becoming more and more useful in every aspect of our lives. Just look around: They're in our smartphones, our social networks, our home smart speakers, our personal vehicles--you name it, there's AI at work somewhere. In fact, experts predict they will only become more prevalent in both our personal and professional experiences, and that's not much of a stretch to believe. Now, as with any newly widespread technology, we're confronted with a global need to make best of use of all this new IT; specifically, how to educate our communities on how to apply guard rails that will ensure the use of AI as both ethical and beneficial to all. There are lots of questions to be answered here; we can only get to a few right now.

Technology companies need to diversify their hiring practices to include more people from backgrounds in philosophy and psychology if they want to tackle the problem of misinformation online, the head of one of the biggest internet charities has warned. Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla Foundation, has warned that hiring employees who mainly come from Stem – science, technology, engineering and maths – will produce a new generation of technologists with the same blindspots as those who are currently in charge, a move that will "come back to bite us". "Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created a framework for teaching artificial intelligence systems to learn motion from being shown video clips on YouTube. The framework incorporates computer vision and reinforcement learning to train AI skills from videos. Altogether the team was able to train AI to perform more than 20 acrobatic tasks like cartwheels, handsprings, backflips, and some martial arts. The method does not require the use of motion capture video, the kind often used to transfer human action to digital forms, such as the movement of LeBron James incorporated into NBA 2K18 or the performance of Andy Serkis as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The framework works by first ingesting the video to understand the poses seen in each video frame; then a simulated character is trained to imitate the movement using reinforcement learning.

Artur Garcez gave a lecture on Relational Neuro-Symbolic AI at the EurAI Advanced Course on AI, 2018, which took place in beautiful Ferrara, Italy. All the lectures, with overarching theme Statistical Relational AI, are available from the University of Ferrara's YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/KeFhKi-tOTs?list Artur Garcez gave two talks: Part 1 gives an overview of two decades of research on neuro-symbolic AI. Part 2 describes in some detail two neuro-symbolic systems for relational learning: Connectionist ILP and the Logic Tensor Networks framework.

We have recently been exploring how cognitive science and learning theory underpins effective digital learning tools such as video-based learning. Today I wanted to explore infographics, why they work, and how best to construct them so that they are not only sexy communication devices, but actually achieve what you need them to. Infographics are a bit of a craze at the moment (to be precise they've been trending since 2009), and many great online resources have emerged to help teachers construct infographics with the view to condensing a lot of information into an easy to use, and visually interesting one-pager. Some of the best resources online to use when creating your infographic include: Venngage, Canva, Infogr.am, I won't extrapolate on what each system offers as they all pretty much offer the same thing: infographic and chart templates, alongside a range of off-the-shelf icons, images and fonts.

Data science and big data analytics are gradually making waves with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning. Data science is essentially used to delve into huge datasets to extricate significant information. The experiences that data analysts and scientists acquire from huge volumes of data remain the mystery responsible for the swift transformation of the world around us. Companies and institutions across different divisions of the Industry are presently utilizing data science tools to control the changes driven by the recent innovations. Truth be told, about 55% of organizations have implemented huge big data analytics in 2017, which is a huge development from 18% in 2015.