While the future of artificial intelligence is probably going to be driven by Silicon Valley, the folks in Washington DC want their say about how it will work, too. In two reports today, the White House outlined its strategy for promoting artificial intelligence research and development in the US. While most of the bigger questions were punted to future legislators ("more research is needed" is a key phrase), the executive branch did draw some lines in the sand. And most importantly to the research community, the White House is not pushing for AI to be broadly regulated--instead, the use of the technology will be held to specific standards in the automotive, aviation, and finance industries. Three key guiding philosophies were presented across the reports: AI needs to augment humanity instead of replacing it, AI needs to be ethical, and there must be an equal opportunity for everyone to develop these systems.

TOKUSHIMA – The Tokushima Prefectural Government and e-books distributor Media Do Holdings Co. announced Tuesday they will launch an experiment to use AI to summarize the governor's news conferences in a bid to make more administrative documents available online more quickly. Under the experiment, which they plan to start Monday, they will use a speech recognition system to catch remarks at news conferences given by the governor, and the complete transcription will be posted on the prefectural government's website after being checked by prefecture officials. Users can choose the amount of words they want to read from 10 percent to 90 percent, and AI summarizes the documents in accordance with the users' requests. The new system will reduce the time needed to transcribe news conferences from roughly 10 hours to two hours, and will enable the prefecture to post documents about four hours after the news conferences are held, according to the officials. "Government agencies create a lot of documents but most of them are difficult to read. I hope summarized documents will help people familiarize themselves with the government," said Tokushima Gov. Kamon Iizumi, adding that the move will also help reduce prefectural officials' working hours.

More than two years after Los Angeles lawmakers unveiled a proposal to legalize and regulate the popular practice of renting out rooms or whole homes for short stays, the city has yet to pass any new restrictions on Airbnb and similar platforms. For the second time this year, hundreds of people crowded into City Hall on Tuesday for a hearing on the proposed regulations, but a City Council committee held off voting on the plan. Instead, lawmakers asked city staff to report back with additional options, including loosening the proposed rules to allow people to rent out a second home for short stays. Renting out a home or room for less than 30 days at a time is currently illegal in many residential areas of Los Angeles, according to planning officials. But as the phenomenon has exploded with the rise of Airbnb and similar platforms that allow hosts to offer rooms or entire homes to travelers, those rules have rarely been enforced.

Many matching, tracking, sorting, and ranking problems require probabilistic reasoning about possible permutations, a set that grows factorially with dimension. Combinatorial optimization algorithms may enable efficient point estimation, but fully Bayesian inference poses a severe challenge in this high-dimensional, discrete space. To surmount this challenge, we start with the usual step of relaxing a discrete set (here, of permutation matrices) to its convex hull, which here is the Birkhoff polytope: the set of all doubly-stochastic matrices. We then introduce two novel transformations: first, an invertible and differentiable stick-breaking procedure that maps unconstrained space to the Birkhoff polytope; second, a map that rounds points toward the vertices of the polytope. Both transformations include a temperature parameter that, in the limit, concentrates the densities on permutation matrices. We then exploit these transformations and reparameterization gradients to introduce variational inference over permutation matrices, and we demonstrate its utility in a series of experiments.

Despite their increasingly sophisticated decision-making abilities, AI systems still need human inputs. In 1983, during a period of high Cold War tensions, Soviet information systems abruptly sounded an alert that warned of five incoming nuclear missiles from the United States. A lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, Stanislav Petrov, faced a difficult decision: Should he authorize a retaliatory attack? Fortunately, Petrov chose to question the system's recommendation. Instead of approving the retaliation, he decided that a real attack was unlikely based on several outside factors -- one of which was the small number of "missiles" reported by the system -- and moreover, even if it was real, he didn't want to be the one to complete the destruction of the planet.

Lobbyists for Google and Amazon today appeared in Washington to caution lawmakers against legislation, taxation, or regulation that could hamper the develop of AI in America. The concern over AI has been largely fueled by speculation. When Elon Musk expressed his concerns that AI would be the most likely cause of World War III, he was predicting a dark turn. Facebook and Google have been called to task over algorithms in the wake of election tampering and concerns about fake news. The algorithm – a set of instructions for a computer that tells it how to interpret data and make decisions – has taken a beating in the media lately.

Michel Fornasier, one of the presenters of the Cybathlon, uses his bionic hand prosthesis to demonstrate one of the Cybathlon disciplines. In the movie Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker is given a mechanical hand that moves and perform functions as well as his real hand. Konrad Kording, an avid Star Wars fan, has no doubt that advances in brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) will make this bit of science fiction a reality; he just doesn't know when. "We have applications for one channel and a few channels," says Kording, a neuroscientist and professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Physiology, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. "The question is, what are the BMI applications with hundreds of thousands of channels, and no one knows that at the moment." The channels he's referring to are electrical wires or optical connectors that can be attached to the brain and can be controlled and measured.

Following the wave of U.K. terror attacks in the spring of 2017, prime minister Theresa May called on technology companies like Facebook and YouTube to create better tools for screening out controversial content--especially digital video--that directly promotes terrorism. Meanwhile, in the U.S., major advertisers including AT&T, Verizon, and WalMart have pulled ad campaigns from YouTube after discovering their content had been appearing in proximity to videos espousing terrorism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate speech. In response to these controversies, Google expanded its advertising rules to take a more aggressive stance against hate speech, and released a suite of tools allowing advertisers to block their ads from appearing on certain sites. The company also deployed new teams of human monitors to review videos for objectionable content. In a similar vein, Facebook announced that it would add 3,000 new employees to screen videos for inappropriate content.

Laurel D. Riek (lriek@ucsd.edu) is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She directs the Healthcare Robotics lab and builds autonomous robots that can sense, understand, and learn from real people in the real world.

Diversity was a central theme in the ACM SIGIR 2017 held in Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo, Japan. Fuji, a view of Shinjuku sky-scrapers, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (Office), as seen from Keio Plaza the conference hotel, and fireworks celebrating the 40th anniversary. The colorfulness of the fireworks and the circles within and enclosing the logo represent diversity and inclusion." SIGIR 2017 featured a session on Women in IR (Information Retrieval) organized by Laura Dietz of the University of New Hampshire on the first day, just before the welcome party. A week before the conference, I received an email from the secretary of the session, Maram Hasanain, a graduate student in computer science (CS) at Qatar University, asking if I would like to prepare a one-minute introduction of myself for the session. I was so overwhelmed by her beautifully written e-mail, and the excitement of a first-time contact with someone from Qatar, that I immediately accepted her invitation.