Amazon's Alexa is now your personal butler at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. Self-learning software developed by Google defeated the world's best player of the highly complex Chinese strategy game Go. IBM's Watson saved the life of a woman in Japan by correctly diagnosing her with a rare form of cancer that doctors missed. We are rapidly approaching an inflection point in human history where artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, and debates about humans vs. machines have become part of our common vernacular. How can we prepare our next generation of students to compete?

Just imagine, if 100 years ago the Wright brothers would have tried to build an'artificial bird' rather than calling it an airplane? We would have had endless discussions around engineering this machine to emulate birds in every detail. Would you feel comfortable to fly on an artificial bird? Does an artificial factory produce better cars than a human-centered production environment? Artificial intelligence was invented as a term in the 1950's when computer science professors at Dartmouth College convened a conference in order to teach computers to think during one summer - a slightly optimistic view as it turned out.

FILE - In this April 6, 2016, file photo, Iranian students prepare their robots during the international robotics competition, RoboCup Iran Open 2016, in Tehran, Iran. Universities in the U.S. say President Donald Trump's revised travel ban would block hundreds of graduate students who play key roles in research. Twenty-five of America's largest universities told The Associated Press they've sent acceptance letters to more than 500 students from the six banned countries for next fall, mostly from Iran, who are known for their strength in engineering and sciences.

We propose a neural probabilistic structured-prediction method for transition-based natural language processing, which integrates beam search and contrastive learning. The method uses a global optimization model, which can leverage arbitrary features over non-local context. Beam search is used for efficient heuristic decoding, and contrastive learning is performed for adjusting the model according to search errors. When evaluated on both chunking and dependency parsing tasks, the proposed method achieves significant accuracy improvements over the locally normalized greedy baseline on the two tasks, respectively.

An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the misconceptions exhibited by many students in their class, thus improving the quality of instruction. In this paper, we propose a new natural language processing-based framework to detect the common misconceptions among students' textual responses to short-answer questions. We propose a probabilistic model for students' textual responses involving misconceptions and experimentally validate it on a real-world student-response dataset. Experimental results show that our proposed framework excels at classifying whether a response exhibits one or more misconceptions. More importantly, it can also automatically detect the common misconceptions exhibited across responses from multiple students to multiple questions; this property is especially important at large scale, since instructors will no longer need to manually specify all possible misconceptions that students might exhibit.

Big data is no longer the hot buzzword it was a few years ago that people strained their brains to understand. It's now entered the mainstream and can be viewed as an extension of traditional data crunching. That's one of the takeaways from a Deloitte report on trends in data analytics released on Wednesday. "Big data and traditional analytics are merging," said Tom Davenport, an independent senior advisor to Deloitte who helped write the report and who is also a Babson College professor. "It's getting harder and harder to distinguish the two."

The concept of a robot assistant in the home is moving from sci-fi to reality thanks to a new product that claims to be the first personalised household robot. BIG-i is able to interpret voice commands and perform simple household tasks, such as controlling other smart devices and providing reminders. NXROBO, the company behind the robot, believes that in the future every family will have a robot which will act as the'hub for all smart home appliances.' BIG-i is a natural-interaction robot with mobility, 3D vision, voice programming, and active perception. The robot, which stands 2ft 6ins (80 centimetres) tall, is able to move freely around the home as necessary, avoiding obstacles and can be controlled via a smartphone app as well as voice commands. It also has facial recognition technology that allows it to recognise family and friends in order to carry out specific tasks, such as reminding the children to remember their school lunchbox before they leave the house.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) help address global challenges such as poverty, hunger, health, education, equality and the protection of our environment? The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is hosting the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva this June. The summit, to be held in partnership with UN agencies, including OHCHR, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNICRI, UNIDO, UNITAR and UN Global Pulse, will evaluate opportunities presented by AI and how it can benefit humanity. It seeks to convene representatives of government, industry, UN agencies, civil society, and the AI research community to explore the latest developments in AI and their implications for regulation, ethics and security and privacy. Breakout sessions will invite participants to collaborate and propose strategies for the development of AI applications and systems to promote sustainable living, reduce poverty and deliver citizen-centric public services.

Today, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is kicking off a new seminar series focused on connecting the campus's growing artificial intelligence (AI) community. The series has evolved out of a long tradition of AI research at the institution. There are 43 AI-focused courses and approximately 40 faculty-researchers in 27 lab groups across RIT involved in using AI and related areas, RIT News reported. This past February, RIT hosted the Move78 retreat, which brought together individuals from the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Saunders College of Business, the College of Science and the College of Liberal Art. More than 200 faculty, students and staff members teaching or researching AI had a chance to learn more about the field, as well as the direction that RIT might take to expand its capabilities. "The retreat is to determine three things: What will RIT's role be in this arena and what role will we have in new AI discoveries," Provost Jeremy Haefner told RIT News.

The other day, I went to meet someone in downtown Sydney, Australia. On my way, back on the local train, I looked at my mobile to check my emails and found a message asking me whether I would like to meet the person I had just connected with on my LinkedIn network. So, was this some form of artificial intelligence (AI) at play? We now live in a brave new world where AI is the next frontier. We keep hearing about bots, chatbots, teacherbots, digital assistants, machine learning, deep learning and many more such words and often wonder what do they mean.