This week, as leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to "create a shared future in a fractured world," many of the conversations will center on the role of humans and robots in a future of automation or augmentation. The teaser for a breakfast conversation that Microsoft is hosting on the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence captures the challenges and the opportunity well: "AI offers profound potential benefits and the opportunity to help tackle some of the world's most pressing issues including accelerating economic growth, tackling the urgent issues of environmental sustainability, and transforming healthcare," it reads. "But the accelerating pace of technology-driven change is also creating disruption and anxiety. It risks contributing to a sense of a fractured world, between a small group of people who benefit and a broader group of people who fear that they are being left behind. We need to come together to chart a path forward that ensures AI contributes to building a positive shared future for every community."

Modern computers do lots of things at the same time. Your computer and your phone simultaneously run several applications--or apps. Your browser has several windows open. A cloud computer runs applications for many different computers. All of those applications need to be isolated from each other.

National security advocates enjoyed a signal boost to their agenda after the Senate reauthorized Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for another six years. According to Politico, these cybersecurity hawks are concerned about evolving attack methods. Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr noted, "If you look at the threat matrix today, it's worse than it was six years ago. According to PwC, maturing artificial intelligence (AI) will help drive effective security intelligence analytics and improve cyberdefense. It will also empower cyberattacks.

By all accounts, "Maple Valley" is thriving. Based on available data to date, it is estimated that funding raised by Canadian AI companies in 2017 will exceed US$250 million, representing an almost two-fold increase from the previous record historical high of US$143 million in 2015.[ii] This healthy injection of private-sector funding has been accompanied by significant public investment. Notably, the 2017 federal budget provided for C$125 million in research and development funds earmarked for AI initiatives and nearly C$1 billion over 5 years to promote innovation superclusters.[iii] Access to unprecedented levels of capital, a strong network of academic institutions, improving infrastructure and availability of talent facilitated by open immigration rules have fuelled the development of a burgeoning industry north of the border.

We have seen how the internet of things and the growing phenomenon of'big data' will throw up major problems for consumers and citizens, problems that have as yet barely been grasped by most policy-makers. In this world of growing complexity, the potential for an unintended consequence becomes greater and greater from machines performing an action that was not anticipated. There are key issues, too, about our reliance on data at a time of massive data generation, data storing and data preservation which have the potential to both obscure results and generate injustices. Perhaps the greatest issue that we now face is caused by our blind faith in machines. We have invested them with certainty and – as we have pointed out – we trust them. Part of the reason for this is an odd confusion that has conflated the machines of the industrial age with the machines of the information age.

Data association, the reasoning over correspondence between targets and measurements, is a problem of fundamental importance in target tracking. Recently, belief propagation (BP) has emerged as a promising method for estimating the marginal probabilities of measurement to target association, providing fast, accurate estimates. The excellent performance of BP in the particular formulation used may be attributed to the convexity of the underlying free energy which it implicitly optimises. This paper studies multiple scan data association problems, i.e., problems that reason over correspondence between targets and several sets of measurements, which may correspond to different sensors or different time steps. We find that the multiple scan extension of the single scan BP formulation is non-convex and demonstrate the undesirable behaviour that can result. A convex free energy is constructed using the recently proposed fractional free energy (FFE). A convergent, BP-like algorithm is provided for the single scan FFE, and employed in optimising the multiple scan free energy using primal-dual coordinate ascent. Finally, based on a variational interpretation of joint probabilistic data association (JPDA), we develop a sequential variant of the algorithm that is similar to JPDA, but retains consistency constraints from prior scans. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on a bearings only target localisation problem.

Selecting the right drugs for the right patients is a primary goal of precision medicine. In this manuscript, we consider the problem of cancer drug selection in a learning-to-rank framework. We have formulated the cancer drug selection problem as to accurately predicting 1). the ranking positions of sensitive drugs and 2). the ranking orders among sensitive drugs in cancer cell lines based on their responses to cancer drugs. We have developed a new learning-to-rank method, denoted as pLETORg , that predicts drug ranking structures in each cell line via using drug latent vectors and cell line latent vectors. The pLETORg method learns such latent vectors through explicitly enforcing that, in the drug ranking list of each cell line, the sensitive drugs are pushed above insensitive drugs, and meanwhile the ranking orders among sensitive drugs are correct. Genomics information on cell lines is leveraged in learning the latent vectors. Our experimental results on a benchmark cell line-drug response dataset demonstrate that the new pLETORg significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method in prioritizing new sensitive drugs.

In the past decade, countries and regions around the globe have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. Roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU have been in place for some years and have had time to mature and evolve. Meanwhile roadmaps from other countries such as Australia and Singapore are just now being developed and launched. How did these strategic initiatives come to be? What do they hope to achieve? Have they been successful, and how do you measure success?

Today in Entertainment: Megyn Kelly swats back at Jane Fonda; and the Razzie nominees for worst in film are... 'Transformers,' 'Fifty Shades' lead Razzie Award nominations Megyn Kelly fires back at'Hanoi Jane' Fonda over plastic-surgery feud Princess Eugenie is engaged and tying the knot in the same venue as her cousin Prince Harry Morgan Freeman confirms it was Lily Tomlin who interrupted his SAG Awards speech Sterling K. Brown makes history at SAG Awards -- and says Time's Up Sterling K. Brown makes history at SAG Awards -- and says Time's Up Nominations for the 2018 Razzie Awards came out Monday, with the bulk of the loathing -- nine nominations each -- heaped on "Transformers: The Last Knight" and "Fifty Shades Darker," with "The Mummy" and its eight nods close behind. The mock honors, now in their 38th year and formally known as the Golden Raspberry Awards, are given out annually the day before the Academy Awards and honor the worst in film. Winners get a raspberry statue spray-painted gold. Tom Cruise, "The Mummy" Jamie Dornan, "Fifty Shades Darker" Mark Wahlberg, "Transformers: The Last Knight" and "Daddy's Home 2" Johnny Depp, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" Zac Efron, "Baywatch" Johnny Depp, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" Javier Bardem, "Mother!" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" Russell Crowe, "The Mummy" Josh Duhamel, "Transformers: The Last Knight" Mel Gibson, "Daddy's Home 2" Anthony Hopkins, "Collide" and "Transformers" The Last Knight" Javier Bardem, "Mother!" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" Any combination of two characters, two sex toys or two sexual positions, "Fifty Shades Darker" Any combination of two humans, two robots or two explosions, "Transformers XVII: Last Knight" [sic] Any two obnoxious emojis, "The Emoji Movie" Johnny Depp and his worn-out drunk routine, "Pirates of the Caribbean XIII: Dead Careers Tell No Tales" [sic] Tyler Perry and either the ratty old dress or worn-out wig, "Boo 2! A Madea Halloween" Johnny Depp and his worn-out drunk routine, "Pirates of the Caribbean XIII: Dead Careers Tell No Tales" [sic] In 2017, the director, actor, actress and worst-picture awards all went to the 2016 documentary "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party," which featured director-narrator Dinesh D'Souza and actress Rebekah Turner, who played Clinton.

Around half of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria and it causes around half a million deaths each year. However, the parasites that cause malaria are becoming more resistant to the drugs we currently use to combat them, meaning the global malaria risk stands to increase if we don't develop new drugs quickly enough. Well new research published recently in Scientific Reports finds that a common chemical used in everything from soap and toothpaste to clothing and furniture might be an effective treatment, and it was done with the help of AI. Many popular antimalarial drugs target a specific enzyme found in malaria-causing parasites, an enzyme important for the parasites' growth. So researchers used AI-powered Robot Scientist Eve to screen a slew of FDA-approved compounds to see how well they were able to inhibit that enzyme and it found that triclosan was able to inhibit the enzyme from two different species of malaria-causing parasites, including variants that had developed resistance to common malaria treatments. The researchers then tested triclosan against the enzyme in a number of different ways in order to confirm its effectiveness, and that, combined with previous research showing that the chemical can also inhibit an additional enzyme found in these parasites, led the researchers to conclude that triclosan may be a useful therapeutic with multiple targets.