The government is due to announce a £17.3m ($22m) investment in artificial intelligence and robotics research carried out by British universities. It is part of the government's digital strategy, to be published by Culture Secretary Karen Bradley on Wednesday. A report by Accenture released last year estimated that AI could contribute up to £654bn to the UK economy by 2035. But the government was criticised last year for its support of the UK tech scene. As part of the new digital strategy, computer scientist Prof Dame Wendy Hall and tech CEO Jerome Pesenti, former chief data scientist at IBM, have been asked to review the UK's artificial intelligence sector.

In this paper, we propose TopicRNN, a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based language model designed to directly capture the global semantic meaning relating words in a document via latent topics. Because of their sequential nature, RNNs are good at capturing the local structure of a word sequence - both semantic and syntactic - but might face difficulty remembering long-range dependencies. Intuitively, these long-range dependencies are of semantic nature. In contrast, latent topic models are able to capture the global underlying semantic structure of a document but do not account for word ordering. The proposed TopicRNN model integrates the merits of RNNs and latent topic models: it captures local (syntactic) dependencies using an RNN and global (semantic) dependencies using latent topics. Unlike previous work on contextual RNN language modeling, our model is learned end-to-end. Empirical results on word prediction show that TopicRNN outperforms existing contextual RNN baselines. In addition, TopicRNN can be used as an unsupervised feature extractor for documents. We do this for sentiment analysis on the IMDB movie review dataset and report an error rate of $6.28\%$. This is comparable to the state-of-the-art $5.91\%$ resulting from a semi-supervised approach. Finally, TopicRNN also yields sensible topics, making it a useful alternative to document models such as latent Dirichlet allocation.

MIT's Kate Darling, who writes the rules of human-robot interaction, says an AI-enabled apocalypse should be the least of our concerns. A s a law student in Switzerland, Kate Darling's interest in robots was just a hobby. She had purchased a PLEO robot dinosaur that was designed to respond to human contact emotionally and act independently. "It really struck me that I responded to the cues the robot was giving me, even though I knew exactly how the toy worked," Darling says. "I knew where all the motors were and how it worked, and why it would cry when you held it up by the tail, but I was just so compelled to comfort it and make it stop crying."

With outstanding performance recently attained, both market and macroeconomic factors will combine to produce consolidation of share price around or above recent highs for Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA). It is likely that the February 2017 high of $120.92 will be exceeded in coming months. Thereafter, a marked downturn is expected, the severity and duration of which will largely, but not wholly, be determined by macroeconomic factors. This scenario, as it unfolds, paves the way for a timed profitable short of the stock, which is not yet priced in. Stock price is close to its exceptional 18-month highs, having climbed by 224% during the last financial year.

Photo Caption: DARPA categorizes artificial intelligence in three waves - Handcrafted Knowledge, Statistical Learning, Contextual Adaptation - to explain what it AI can do, what it can't do, and where it is headed.

In my work to prepare for the Future of Labor conversation we had at NewCo Shift a few weeks ago, I talked to a number of experts who are studying job losses due to automation and thinking about what might be done about it. Two ideas that came up a number of times were the "robot tax" and the "basic income." The ideas are complementary and one might fund the other. At its simplest, a "robot tax" is a tax on companies that choose to use automation to replace human jobs. There are obviously many variants of this idea and to my knowledge, no country or other taxing authority has implemented a robot tax yet.

In this excerpt from a #TalkingTech Live broadcast, the panelists weigh in on Uber's bad week, and what's next in ride hailing. LOS ANGELES -- This week's tech news was dominated by charges of sexual harassment and discrimination at ride-hailing service Uber, a potential push from Google to bring ride-sharing to the mass market and a move from Facebook to bring more ads to the social network. But Uber owned the most headlines, which started on Sunday with a blog from a former female engineer who described how the company's human resources department repeatedly deflected her and other women's reports of sexual harassment from their colleagues, even telling her that she could expect a negative performance review if she stayed on her alleged harasser's team. The blog post was seen as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley, where six out of 10 women say they've experienced unwanted sexual advances, according to a survey released last year. Still, many pointed out that the male-dominated tech industry has had several such "wake-up calls" -- to little avail.

This is "Cosmic Disclosure", and we have a special guest here with us, Corey Goode, and also, of course, William Henry, investigative mythologist who is the spiritual voice on "Ancient Aliens". And he's been out there as long as I have, bringing you all kinds of amazing knowledge about ascension. And since 2002, he's been very firmly on the heels of the Blue Sphere story. So we're having a stunning convergence now in which an investigative link that he's been tracking now for 13 years has finally come to fruition in people having experiences that link the past, the present, the future all together in a continuum of one phenomenon. William Henry: Thank you very much. David: I mean, you've been going through some amazing changes yourself. David: Do you think that these changes that you're going through – people are noticing obviously that you've lost a lot of weight. Do you think that this has something to do with your contact with these Blue Spheres? Corey: I was asked to go on a high vibratory diet. And instead, I was scarfing down corn dogs and ignoring them and gaining weight. And last time I was here, I got food poisoning from eating meat and other things that I probably shouldn't eat. It's like my medulla oblongata shut everything off and I mean, I couldn't eat meat. All I've eaten since January is fruit – are berries, bananas.

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American's sister publication, as "Digitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur." "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years' time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money. Everything will become intelligent; soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet? The field of artificial intelligence is, indeed, making breathtaking advances. In particular, it is contributing to the automation of data analysis. Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself. Recently, Google's DeepMind algorithm taught itself how to win 49 Atari games. Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms. News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today's jobs will be threatened by algorithms. It can be expected that supercomputers will soon surpass human capabilities in almost all areas--somewhere between 2020 and 2060.

Industry-leading toy company Mattel (NASDAQ:MAT) had a rough 2016. Its problems, however, started much earlier. Mattel's iconic Barbie has fallen out of fashion, and in September of 2014, the company also lost the licensing for the lucrative Walt Disney Princess line to rival Hasbro after being the sole beneficiary for nearly 20 years. After that stumble, Mattel's performance has suffered -- the shoes left by the Disney darlings have simply been too big for Barbie to fill. As a result, investors have been left wondering if Mattel's best days are behind it.