Changing world: "As the first generation of self-driving cars and battlefield warbots filter into society, scientists are working to develop robots with moral decision-making skills." THE World Science Festival held in Brisbane in early March confirmed that robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning were now part of our lives. Thousands attending the festival came to watch, touch and play with cute, shiny robots capable of dodging objects, following commands and engaging in smart banter. However, if the future has arrived, now we have to deal with it. The World Science Festival was also an important forum as world experts discussed robot morality and ethics and what role we wanted robots to play in the future.

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.

U.S. President Barack Obama discussing his Computer Science for All plan to give students across the country the chance to learn computer science in school. In late January, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve 4.1 billion in spending in the coming fiscal year to support the Computer Science for All initiative, aimed at providing computer science education in U.S. public schools. Obama pointed out computer science is no longer "an optional skill" in the modern economy," yet "only about a quarter of our K–12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) schools offer computer science. Twenty-two states don't even allow it to count toward a diploma." While many organizations have contributed to the national effort to see real computer science exist and count toward graduation requirements in U.S. public schools, former ACM CEO John R. White said, "ACM has been there from the beginning." Indeed, White contends Obama's Computer Science for All initiative "in a way represents the ...

Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios', and is reminiscent of the fictional Skynet service from Terminator. A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'. Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios' A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'.

Supercomputers are about to achieve a quantity and level of intelligence which allows them to grow hyper-exponentially over a short period of time. We call them superintelligences and this sudden growth poses some risks because they will be much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills (Nick Bostrom). I don't question that this will happen, as Ray Kurzweil said "Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.".

Cambridge Science Festival 2016 was the biggest and best ever, organisers have revealed. More than 350 events were held during the fortnight-long festival, attracting 60,000 visitors. Cambridge University, which runs the events, said the festival's main theme, artificial intelligence, sparked "considerable interest". This year was the 22nd in the festival's history, and it finished last Sunday with dozens of events on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. A spokeswoman said: "We had two momentous weeks of over 350 events and 60,000 visits, making it the largest festival to date in terms of both events and visits. "This year was marked by the considerable interest from both the public and the media in many of the artificial intelligence and machine learning events, testament to both the fascination and the concern we all feel with our growing interaction and reliance on machines.

The United Nations Children's Fund, perhaps better known as UNICEF, has recently launched a new initiative through which they will begin to invest more money into technology start-ups that have the potential to better the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable children all over the world. The new initiative, called Innovation Fund, has put a special focus on certain technologies that have the potential to help children, which include 3D printing, blockchain, wearables and sensors, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy. UNICEF, the United Nations program that has as its mandate the promotion of children's rights all over the world, has through its Innovation initiative put its focus on progessive projects and ideas that have the potential to help their cause. As stated on their website, UNICEF Innovation is "tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling technologies and practices that strengthen UNICEF's work." UNICEF is currently accepting submissions from various start-ups until February 26, 2016 through their website, though there are some requirements for being considered for funding.

UPDATE: Mar 20, 2016 - Added my new follow-up course on Deep Learning, which covers ways to speed up and improve vanilla backpropagation: momentum and Nesterov momentum, adaptive learning rate algorithms like AdaGrad and RMSProp, utilizing the GPU on AWS EC2, and stochastic batch gradient descent. We look at TensorFlow and Theano starting from the basics - variables, functions, expressions, and simple optimizations - from there, building a neural network seems simple! Deep learning is all the rage these days. What exactly is deep learning? Well, it all boils down to neural networks.

Manuela Veloso is the new head of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department. Manuela Veloso, a computer scientist renowned for her work in artificial intelligence and robotics, is the new head of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science, announced today. She succeeds Tom Mitchell, E. Fredkin University Professor and the founding head of the Machine Learning Department (MLD), who remains a member of the faculty. Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science, has been a faculty member since earning her Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 1992. "Carnegie Mellon's AI community has long nurtured the field of machine learning -- software that acquires knowledge and improves its performance with experience -- culminating in the creation of the world's first machine learning department 10 years ago," Moore said.

In a sparse lecture room at Stanford University, six students are rehearsing a presentation they'll later give to a roomful of VIPs from the university's artificial intelligence lab. Papers are strewn across the table. Hoodies hang over the cloth-covered cushion chairs. One student wears a pair of Pi earrings. Another wears a t-shirt that reads: "i: Be rational! A sheet of white poster board sits in the corner, with a few words scrawled in black marker. "Monitoring Hand Sanitation in Hospitals Using Computer Vision," it says. After a while, they give it a dry run. Scripts in hand, the students describe the images they captured from cameras mounted above hand dispensers at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, and they explain the machine learning techniques they've used--including something called "climbing the hill"--to analyze the footage and automatically determine whether doctors and visitors are practicing proper hand hygiene.