The outlook for AI is not all dystopian. Used wisely, automation can provide a big boost to productivity. Artificial Intelligence is the defining technology of our generation and, surprisingly, some experts think New Zealand is well placed to take advantage. Partly that's to do with our perceived ability to adapt to the great changes that AI will bring about. Tom White, a senior lecturer in media design at Victoria University, is one of this country's foremost experts in AI.

Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments and especially in South America which exhibits a mixed culture and social predisposition. This article presents the "Social Participation Ontology" (OPS from the Brazilian name \emph{Ontologia de Participa\c{c}\~ao Social}) implemented in compliance with the Web Ontology Language standard (OWL) for fostering social participation, specially in virtual platforms. The entities and links of OPS were defined based on an extensive collaboration of specialists. It is shown that OPS is instrumental for information retrieval from the contents of the portal, both in terms of the actors (at various levels) as well as mechanisms and activities. Significantly, OPS is linked to other OWL ontologies as an upper ontology and via FOAF and BFO as higher upper ontologies, which yields sound organization and access of knowledge and data. In order to illustrate the usefulness of OPS, we present results on ontological expansion and integration with other ontologies and data. Ongoing work involves further adoption of OPS by the official Brazilian federal portal for social participation and NGO s, and further linkage to other ontologies for social participation.

Recommendation systems occupy an expanding role in everyday decision making, from choice of movies and household goods to consequential medical and legal decisions. The data used to train and test these systems is algorithmically confounded in that it is the result of a feedback loop between human choices and an existing algorithmic recommendation system. Using simulations, we demonstrate that algorithmic confounding can disadvantage algorithms in training, bias held-out evaluation, and amplify homogenization of user behavior without gains in utility.

Ever since the beginning of industrial society, people have simultaneously marveled at the power of automation and lamented that human capabilities are being irredeemably devalued. Demanding better conditions and higher pay, textile workers in England smash machinery and set factories on fire. These workers will come to be known as Luddites, after their mythical leader, Ned Ludd, and the name will become a synonym for opponents or critics of technology. But it's a misnomer: this is a class protest more than a technological one. The stocking-frame machines the Luddites vandalize have been around since the 1600s.

YANGON, Myanmar – Myanmar authorities have charged two foreign journalists, a local freelancer who works as an interpreter and their driver for allegedly flying drones illegally over and around the government's parliament buildings, police said Sunday. Mok Choy Lin, a Malaysian, and Lau Hon Meng, a Singaporean, journalists for Turkish Radio and Television, were detained along with their local interpreter and freelance journalist Aung Naing Soe after flying drones over the parliament building on Friday, police said. The four were charged under the Export and Import Law and face up to three years in prison if found guilty, police said, adding that a trial would begin at the end of a 15-day remand. Police officer San Aung said the drone was imported without permission. The detained journalists and driver have not been allowed to see family members since the arrest on Friday, one of the family members said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. President Donald Trump will agree on their countries' cooperation toward the development of next-generation mobile communication and other new technologies when they meet in Tokyo next month, a source close to Japan-U.S. relations said Saturday. Such an accord will be in line with Tokyo's pursuit of mutually agreeable economic cooperation with Washington when the world's biggest and third-largest economies are at odds over the U.S. drive to promote bilateral free trade deals to address trade imbalance. Abe is also expected to make a renewed push for exporting Japan's high-speed rail and other infrastructure technologies as Trump visits during his first official trip to Asia, the source said. Areas of cooperation will include autonomous driving and next-generation computers for developing artificial intelligence, the source said. In the second round of the high-level economic dialogue between the two countries in Washington earlier this month, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence expressed the Trump administration's interest in commencing talks for a Japan-U.S. free trade agreement and stressed the need to reduce the U.S. trade deficit in goods.

Businesses are spending on artificial intelligence, but, according to a recent study, the barriers and opportunities are so significant that they need a C-level position dedicated to AI strategy. Enterprises are wise to the business value of artificial intelligence (AI). They are spending on it and see that it is a competitive necessity. However, business leaders also realize that challenges abound – challenges significant enough to call for a new executive in the c-suite to drive AI strategy, ensure adoption and measure return on investment (ROI). Those are the findings of a new survey by market research firm Vanson Bourne, who conducted the study on behalf of Teradata, a company that specializes in the data and analytics.

Keep up with the latest news from Wisconsin's innovation community with these recent headlines: The four-year college's goal in constructing the 64,000-square-foot research center is to position MSOE "at the forefront in artificial intelligence, deep learning, cybersecurity, robotics, computing, and other next-generation technologies," according to a press release. The facility will have classrooms, laboratories, an auditorium, and space for businesses that partner with MSOE, the school said. MSOE plans to break ground on the new center by mid-2018. Phoenix sells neutron generators and other machines to organizations in industries ranging from healthcare to defense to renewable energy. The company plans to use some of the proceeds from the funding round to construct a new headquarters that can house all of its workers and equipment.

Some people are afraid that heavily armed artificially intelligent robots might take over the world, enslaving humanity – or perhaps exterminating us. These people, including tech-industry billionaire Elon Musk and eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, say artificial intelligence technology needs to be regulated to manage the risks. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg disagree, saying the technology is not nearly advanced enough for those worries to be realistic. As someone who researches how AI works in robotic decision-making, drones and self-driving vehicles, I've seen how beneficial it can be. I've developed AI software that lets robots working in teams make individual decisions, as part of collective efforts to explore and solve problems. Researchers are already subject to existing rules, regulations and laws designed to protect public safety.

Late in 2015, Gilberto Titericz, an electrical engineer at Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, told his boss he planned to resign, after seven years maintaining sensors and other hardware in oil plants. By devoting hundreds of hours of leisure time to the obscure world of competitive data analysis, Titericz had recently become the world's top-ranked data scientist, by one reckoning. "Only when I wanted to quit did they realize they had the number-one data scientist," he says. Petrobras held on to its champ for a time by moving Titericz into a position that used his data skills. But since topping the rankings that October he'd received a stream of emails from recruiters around the globe, including representatives of Tesla and Google.