Organizations yearning for digital transformation should take heed, competitors and consultants may steal your digital-savvy employees. That's one finding from the "Constellation Research 2017 Digital Transformation Study" published Oct. 19. The demand for workers that understand how to implement and use big data, IoT, artificial intelligence and synchronous ledger technologies (SLT) and blockchain will only grow. Those who invest in building a digital workforce by cultivating talent and offering a digital training program will keep the talent poachers away, according to Constellation Research report authors Chris Kanaracus, Courtney Sato and R "Ray" Wang. Constellation received 105 responses; 18 percent of which were CEOs, 20 percent lines-of-business managers and 16 percent IT managers.

The welcome was given by University of Pittsburgh President Wesley Posvar. The conference cochairmen, Stellan Ohlsson and Jeff Bonar, also gave brief welcomes to the participants. The relatively small size of the conference, about 425 participants, was undoubtedly in part responsible for the congenial ambiance of the meeting. In addition to the opportunity to reunite with old friends, it was easy to establish new relationships with nearly everyone at the conference. With so many attendees from abroad (The Netherlands, Japan, Canada, West Germany, England, Sweden, France, and Hong Kong were all represented by speakers), the international flavor of the conference was well established.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who's an accountant. He has his own accounting firm and lives an upper-class lifestyle in the Chicago suburbs. He said he will happily pay for his daughter's college education, provided she won't pursue a degree in accounting. This isn't the first time I've heard a parent say they don't want their child following in their career footsteps; a lawyer recently told me the same thing. And it's not because they feel they've been unsuccessful or that their career was too demanding.

I consider myself strong in algorithms, data structures and programming. From last few years, I was interested to be an expert in Deep Learning Technologies. My initial understanding was that to be a good consultant in Deep Learning, I need to learn too many things to make the application work, write monstrous code using a lot of APIs, understand lot of mathematics (calculus, algebra and probability) to grasp the concepts. But my passion to master this new technology made me jump into it a year back. Then there was no looking back.

R B. Abhyankar Emphasizing theory and implementation issues more than specific applications and Prolog programming techniques, Computing with Logic Logic Programming with Prolog (The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Company, Menlo Park, Calif., 1988, 535 pp., $27 95) by David Maier and David S. Warren, respected researchers in logic programming, is a superb book Offering an in-depth treatment of advanced topics, the book also includes the necessary background material on logic and automatic theorem proving, making it self-contained. The only real prerequisite is a first course in data structures, although it would be helpful if the reader has also had a first course in program translation. The book has a wealth of exercises and would make an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in computer science; it is also appropriate for programmers interested in the implementation of Prolog The book presents the concepts of logic programming using theory presentation, implementation, and application of Proplog, Datalog, and Prolog, three logic programming languages of increasing complexity that are based on horn clause subsets of propositional, predicate, and functional logic, respectively This incremental approach, unique to this book, is effective in conveying a thorough understanding of the subject The book consists of 12 chapters grouped into three parts (Part 1 chapters 1 to 3, Part 2. chapters 4 to 6, and Part 3 chapters 7 to 12), an appendix, and an index The three parts, each dealing with one of these logic programming languages, are organized the same First, the authors informally present the language using examples; an interpreter is also presented. Then the formal syntax and semantics for the language and logic are presented, along with soundness and completeness results for the logic and the effects of various search strategies Next, they give optimization techniques for the interpreter Each chapter ends with exercises, brief comments regarding the material in the chapter, and a bibliography Chapter I presents top-down and bottom-up interpreters for Proplog Chapter 2 offers a good discussion of the related notions: negation as failure, closed-world assumption, minimal models, and stratified programs Chapter 3 considers clause indexing and lazy concatenation as optimization techniques for the Proplog interpreter in chapter 1 Chapter 4 explains the connection between Datalog and relational algebra. Chapter 5 contains a proof of Herbrand's theorem for predicate logic.

IAAI is the premier venue for learning about AI's impact through deployed applications and emerging AI technologies. Case studies of deployed applications with measurable benefits arising from the use of AI technology provide clear evidence of the impact and value of AI technology to today's world. The emerging applications track features technologies that are rapidly maturing to the point of application. The seven articles selected for this special issue are extended versions of the papers that appeared at the conference. Four of the articles describe deployed applications that are already in use in the field.

Serving hors d'oeuvres is not as easy as it might seem! You have to move carefully between people, gently and politely offer them hors d'oeuvres, make sure that you have not forgotten to serve someone in the room, and refill the serving tray when required. These are the challenges that robots have to face in the Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? For the fifth year that this event has now been held, five entries took on the challenge of creating service robots who can offer hors d'oeuvres to attendees of the robot exhibition. Such robots require the ability to move safely in a crowded environment, cover a serving area, find and stop at people to offer food and interact with them, detect when more food is needed, and take the actions necessary to refill the serving tray.

The AAAI-2002 Robot Exhibition offered robotics researchers a venue for live demonstrations of their current projects. Researchers ranging from undergraduates working on their own to large multilab groups demonstrated robots that performed tasks ranging from improvisational comedy to urban search and rescue. This article describes their entries. At the 2002 exhibition in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 12 robots were demonstrated by a variety of laboratories and institutions. Many of these systems were works in progress, providing the audience an opportunity to see snapshots of research programs in midphase.

The 1994 AAAI Robot-Building Laboratory (RBL-94) was held during the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The primary goal of RBL-94 was to provide those with little or no robotics experience the opportunity to acquire practical experience in a few days. Thirty persons, with backgrounds ranging from university professors to practitioners from industry, participated in the three-part lab. The event was meant to appeal to the hacker yearnings of participants to experience for themselves the joys and excitement of constructing a robot and to learn about the real problems of such an endeavor. RBL-94 was inspired by and shared a common history with a couple of robot-building laboratories.

SINCE WE ARE FIRMLY CONVINCED that ideas like people have histories and can only be fully understood in the context of those histories, we will begin by discussing the underlying ideas that motivated us to initiate the Steamer effort. Without richer and more detailed understandings of the nature of these models, instructional applications will be severely limited. Graphical Interfaces for Interactave Inspectable Simulatzons - We believe that graphical interfaces to simulations of physical systems deserve extensive exploration. They make possible new types of instructional interactions by allowing one to control, manipulate, and monitor simulations of dynamic systems at many different hierarchical levels The key idea in Steamer is the conception of an znteractive inspectable simulation. We have consistently sought to make the system inspectable.