This paper presents a framework for generating adventure games from open data. Focusing on the murder mystery type of adventure games, the generator is able to transform open data from Wikipedia articles, OpenStreetMap and images from Wikimedia Commons into WikiMysteries. Every WikiMystery game revolves around the murder of a person with a Wikipedia article and populates the game with suspects who must be arrested by the player if guilty of the murder or absolved if innocent. Starting from only one person as the victim, an extensive generative pipeline finds suspects, their alibis, and paths connecting them from open data, transforms open data into cities, buildings, non-player characters, locks and keys and dialog options. The paper describes in detail each generative step, provides a specific playthrough of one WikiMystery where Albert Einstein is murdered, and evaluates the outcomes of games generated for the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Britain's Home Office unveiled a tool Tuesday that algorithmically detects ISIS propaganda videos on small video hosting sites. The technology, developed by ASI data science, is designed to detect and remove videos that have been created by ISIS. Thousands of hours of ISIS video content was analyzed in order to "teach" the software's artificial intelligence what to look out for. The program looks for certain cues, but much of the proprietary information wasn't released for security reasons. The British government said that the technology was developed in order to prevent smaller video content publishers without large budgets from inadvertently spreading ISIS content.

Tue 13 Feb 2018 11.00 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 11.01 EST Drones invoke varying perceptions, from fun gadget to fly in the park to deadly military weapons. In the future, they may even be viewed as a handy tool in the battle to fight climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions from the tra...

But six months after China seemed to mimic that Obama-era road map, A.I. experts in industry and academia in the United States say that the Trump White House has done little to follow through on the previous administration's economic call to arms. "We are still waiting on the White House to provide some direction" on how to respond to the competition, said Tim Hwang, who worked on A.I. policy at Google and is now the director of the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a new organization created by the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and others to fund ethical research in artificial intelligence. China's embrace of A.I. comes at a crucial time in the development of the technology and just as the lead long enjoyed by the United States has started to dwindle. For decades, artificial intelligence was more fiction than science. In the past few years, however, dramatic improvements have prompted some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley and Detroit -- and China -- to invest billions on everything from self-driving cars to home appliances that can have a conversation with a human.

As we stated following our presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there is an arms race for cutting-edge AI tech. SingularityNET is positioned at the center of that opportunity. "Google recently announced a major initiative in the cybersecurity space, and with the data and computing power and AI chops at their disposal, I have no doubt they can do some quality work. However, I worry about the prospect of advanced cybersecurity becoming monopolized by big tech firms, particularly given recent revelations of the close connections between these firms and government surveillance projects," said SingularityNET CEO, Ben Goertzel. Our team is working incessantly to meet the mounting demand for our network.

Despite the gory headlines, objective data show that people all over the world are, on average, living longer, contracting fewer diseases, eating more food, spending more time in school, getting access to more culture, and becoming less likely to be killed in a war, murder, or an accident. When pessimists are forced to concede that life has been getting better and better for more and more people, they have a retort at the ready. We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe, they say, like the man who fell off the roof and said, "So far so good" as he passed each floor. Or we are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are bound to catch up to us. Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. The renowned robot-maker Boston Dynamics released a new, and likely highly produced, video on Monday of its latest robot "dog," the SpotMini. From the looks of it, it's an incredible piece of machinery with remarkably lifelike movements, showing a level of dynamism and coordination between its body and software that I've never seen before, and it certainly left some people at least slightly worried that we're nearing a future in which robots will be able to let themselves out of the lab. In the video, a little robot dog prances over to a door, only to realize it has no hands and can't open it. A few seconds later, a larger Spot robot dog that has an articulated arm with a grabber for a hand where its head should be emerges from around a corner.

Shenzhen, photographed in November 2010. The city is now home to more than 11 million people. A few months ago, I stumbled across a line in a business title that stopped me in my tracks: at that point, 15 Chinese startups had reached unicorn status that year alone; effectively, 30 per cent of the world's billion-dollar companies were created in China in 2017. The relentless nature of a news cycle dominated by the commotion of Trump and Brexit has served to mask the potent undertow of what is likely to prove the most significant shift of this century – namely, the transfer of global power from the west to China. As political turmoil transpires elsewhere, China is re-shaping the world around trade, economics and technology, placing itself firmly at the centre.

The economic weather has been clearing. In the United States, unemployment stands at a little more than 4 percent; at long last, wages are growing faster than productivity. Investors expect the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to fight the inflation that accompanies full employment. There are even labor shortages in key industries, such as manufacturing, construction, and trucking, according to the Fed. In December, 2.2 percent quit their jobs, the highest rate since 2001.

We hear much about artificial intelligence these days and the threats it might hold for our future (and little about the opportunities). However, like the most pernicious threats facing the world; global warming, resource depletion, the destruction of natural habitats it's all a few decades off so why, some short-sighted observers might say, worry? However, forget maybe the threat of artificial intelligence, how about the nearer term threat caused by the reluctance of our political elite to apply their intelligence (it must be there?). Even by the usual standards of politics recent events across the Western World seem breathtakingly disappointing. I woke up last weekend.