Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a challenging NLP research field with wide real world applications. The great progress of this field in recent years is mainly due to the emergence of large-scale datasets and deep learning. At present, a lot of MRC models have already surpassed the human performance on many datasets despite the obvious giant gap between existing MRC models and genuine human-level reading comprehension. This shows the need of improving existing datasets, evaluation metrics and models to move the MRC models toward 'real' understanding. To address this lack of comprehensive survey of existing MRC tasks, evaluation metrics and datasets, herein, (1) we analyzed 57 MRC tasks and datasets; proposed a more precise classification method of MRC tasks with 4 different attributes (2) we summarized 9 evaluation metrics of MRC tasks and (3) 7 attributes and 10 characteristics of MRC datasets; (4) We also discussed some open issues in MRC research and highlight some future research directions. In addition, to help the community, we have collected, organized, and published our data on a companion website(https://mrc-datasets.github.io/) where MRC researchers could directly access each MRC dataset, papers, baseline projects and browse the leaderboard.

Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of the election is decided based on the number of seats won by the different parties. The electors (voters) can cast their votes only in the district of their residence. Thus, locations of the electors and boundaries of the districts may severely affect the election result even if the proportion of popular support (number of electors) of different parties remains unchanged. This has led to significant amount of research on whether the districts may be redrawn or electors may be moved to maximize seats for a particular party. In this paper, we frame the spatial distribution of electors in a probabilistic setting, and explore different models to capture the intra-district polarization of electors in favour of a party, or the spatial concentration of supporters of different parties. Our models are inspired by elections in India, where supporters of different parties tend to be concentrated in certain districts. We show with extensive simulations that our model can capture different statistical properties of real elections held in India. We frame parameter estimation problems to fit our models to the observed election results. Since analytical calculation of the likelihood functions are infeasible for our complex models, we use Likelihood-free Inference methods under the Approximate Bayesian Computation framework. Since this approach is highly time-consuming, we explore how supervised regression using Logistic Regression or Deep Neural Networks can be used to speed it up. We also explore how the election results can change by varying the spatial distributions of the voters, even when the proportions of popular support of the parties remain constant.

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. Would you trust an artificial intelligence algorithm that works eerily well, making accurate decisions 99.9 percent of the time, but is a mysterious black box? Every system fails every now and then, and when it does, we want explanations, especially when human lives are at stake. And a system that can't be explained can't be trusted. That is one of the problems the AI community faces as their creations become smarter and more capable of tackling complicated and critical tasks.

Jasmine Lawrence works with the Everyday Robots project from Alphabet's X moonshot factory. She thinks there's a lot of unanswered ethical questions about how to use robots and how to think of them: Are they slaves or tools? Do they replace or complement people? As a product manager, she said, confronting some of those questions can be frightening, and it brings up the question of bias and the responsibility of the creator. Lawrence said she wants to be held accountable for the good and bad things she builds.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the world's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of unmanned systems and robotics, has compiled a list of "wow-worthy" examples of the vision that the fifth generation of wireless technology (5G) is inspiring for the use of connected drones. It says that 5G can: bring data-throughput speeds of up to 10 gigabytes per second, enabling real-time sharing of aerial video and other sensor data; enable devices to stay connected while traveling hundreds of miles per hour, allowing for remote deployment of AI-enabled, ultra-responsive autonomous fleets; and it could support up to a million connected devices per square kilometer -- enough capacity to absorb an explosion in the Internet of Things alongside increasingly sophisticated mobile applications, on the ground and aloft. "5G is going to be transformative," says Tom Sawanobori, chief technology officer for CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association). He cited a 2017 study by Accenture which estimated 5G would bring 3 million new jobs, $275 billion in new investment and a $500 billion boost to the U.S. gross domestic product. Active tech companies in the markets this week include FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLIR), Plymouth Rock Technologies Inc. (CSE: PRT) (OTCQB: PLRTF), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), Raytheon Technologies Corporation (NYSE: RTX), QUALCOMM Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM).

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a California law that barred internet sites from disclosing the ages of screen actors. The 2017 law, which the Screen Actors Guild had sought as a means to reduce age discrimination, violates the 1st Amendment, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided unanimously. The law was challenged by the Internet Movie Database -- IMDb.com -- a free website that provides information about movies, television shows and video games and offers encyclopedic profiles of actors. In addition to its publicly available site, IMDb has a subscription-based service for the entertainment industry, known as IMDbPro, which the court described as "Hollywood's version of LinkedIn." Actors, writers, set designers, makeup artists and others create resumes by uploading head shots, prior jobs and biographical information to the site.

Chinese philosophy, yin and yang represent how the seemingly opposite poles can complement each other and achieve harmony. In cybersecurity, this ancient philosophy perfectly represents the relationship between supervised and unsupervised machine learning. For example, monitored machine learning processes can be used for detection, while unsupervised machine learning uses clustering. In the case of cybersecurity and data security research and development, monitored machine learning is often implemented in the form of machine learning algorithms. It is not easy to describe Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has no clear definition.

Once upon a time, Japan was widely expected to eclipse the United States as the technological leader of the world. In 1988, the New York Times reporter David Sanger described a group of U.S. computer science experts, meeting to discuss Japan's technological progress. When the group assessed the new generation of computers coming out of Japan, Sanger wrote, "any illusions that America had maintained its wide lead evaporated." Replace "computers" with "artificial intelligence," and "Japan" with "China," and the article could have been written today. In AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, which unsurprisingly became an instant bestseller, former Google China President Kai-Fu Lee argues that China's unparalleled trove of data, culture of copying, and strong government commitment to artificial intelligence give it a major leg up against the United States.

Sony unveiled the PlayStation 5 last week, sharing with the world the console's design, specs, games and accessories. One question remains in everyone's mind: How much will it cost? Devindra and Cherlynn are joined by deputy managing editor Nathan Ingraham to discuss this device's eye-catching appearance, size and speculate how much it will cost. Nate also tells us why The Last Of Us II is a heartbreaking game worth the emotional investment. Then, our hosts take a look at the latest developments in major tech companies' facial recognition systems, as well as Twitter's new voice message format.

At a speech at the US Military Academy last weekend, President Donald Trump appeared lethargic and occasionally slurred words. He seemed to have difficulty lifting a glass of water to his lips, and apparently shuffled slowly down a ramp leading away from his dais. The images caught fire on social media and in the press. What might have been a nothingburger for any other elderly, overweight gentleman a day shy of his 74th birthday turned into a news peg--and for renewed demands that the president release results from a comprehensive physical examination, including a neurological assessment to determine if he had motor or cognitive disabilities. Well, here is a counterproposal: Nobody needs to see this president's exam results except the president and his doctors.