Many people are very skeptical of the governments adoption of AI to take over management of its citizen services, but which gender is more comfortable with this decision? The answer to that question, by way of surveys, is men. More men than women feel more comfortable with this technology shift. According to a report that was published by Accenture, men and women were surveyed on how they felt with AI taking over citizen services in 6 different categories. In all six, men trusted AI more than women did.

Former vice-president Joe Biden reads the news on Biden's Briefings, a podcast and connected speaker "skill" (Photo: Chris Ferenzi) LOS ANGELES -- The Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood, just launched a new "start-up studio" to develop apps for its celebrity clients, initially focused on audio for the connected-speaker market. The agency's Creative Labs has two companies in its portfolio already: Ground Control, which offers daily news updates from former vice president Joe Biden on Amazon's Alexa-activated speakers and Google Home and a trivia game from baseball great Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants. And it has Belletrist, an arts community aimed at millennial women that was co-founded by actress Emma Roberts. Labs is working with comedian Mike Epps on a new audio game that will be introduced by the end of the year. CAA, which represents such superstars as Tom Hanks and George Clooney, is also a longtime co-founder of tech firms, including the comedy site Funny or Die, and Moonshark, which created apps for celebrities like Hanks and Jennifer Lopez.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his nerd-in-chief reputation and outlined his government's vision to capitalize on Canada's early lead in artificial intelligence, or AI, during an appearance today at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Trudeau, a self-professed "geek," was a special guest at an annual business of AI conference hosted by Rotman's Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a seed stage accelerator that specializes in building AI-powered startups. Quizzed on his AI knowledge, Trudeau compared the technology to playing chess against a computer that not only made moves based on cold hard calculations, but "leaps of instinct" that mimic how the human brain works. "I think we all understand, certainly in this room, the way the world is going," Trudeau said during a 20-minute conversation with Shivon Zilis of Tesla, Bloomberg Beta and Open AI. "So let's be part of it and help shape it, and let's make sure we're benefiting from the innovations – in both the designing of them and the applications and the jobs." In recent years, Canada – and Toronto in particular – has emerged as a hotbed of AI activity thanks in part to fundamental research performed by people like U of T's University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the "godfather of deep learning" and works for Google, and U of T Associate Professor Raquel Urtasun, who is heading up Uber's self-driving car lab in Toronto.

Put Skynet from The Terminator movies to the back of your mind for a minute, and stay with me on this one. Certain political leaders are reminding us of their fragile humanity with increasing frequency these days. Prone to wild acts of emotion and unable to resist the urge to push their personal agenda at the expense of the greater good, it's enough to make the concept of an AI-controlled government sound utopian by comparison. I'm not quite naïve enough to think we're already at a point where our human leaders could be replaced by an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing machine, but artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming ever more tantalizing in their potential to simplify, accelerate, and improve many aspects of society and our lives. Governments are beginning to realize this.

Russia has been hit by a wave of reports of a giant UFO in the sky last night with spectacular pictures of an enormous glowing ball illuminating northern Siberia. Social media erupted with claims of'aliens arriving' and locals in far flung parts of the country told of'shivers down their spines'. While the source of the light remains unclear, some have suggested that it was the the trace of a rocket launched by the Russian military that caused this extraordinary phenomenon in the night sky. While the source of the light remains unknown, local experts suggest there were two possible reasons for the eerie spectacle in the Siberian night sky. The first was that a vivid display of the Northern Lights - or Aurora Borealis - was underway.

I want to tell you straight off what this story is about: Sometime in the next 40 years, robots are going to take your job. I don't care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a robot will dig them better. If you're a magazine writer, a robot will write your articles better. If you're a doctor, IBM's Watson will no longer "assist" you in finding the right diagnosis from its database of millions of case studies and journal articles. It will just be a better doctor than you. Robots will run companies better than you do. Robots will paint and write and sculpt better than you. Think you have social skills that no robot can match? Within 20 years, maybe half of you will be out of jobs. A couple of decades after that, most of the rest of you will be out of jobs. In one sense, this all sounds great. Let the robots have the damn jobs! We'll be free to read or write poetry or play video games or whatever we want to do.

This work presents a new classifier that is specifically designed to be fully interpretable. This technique determines the probability of a class outcome, based directly on probability assignments measured from the training data. The accuracy of the predicted probability can be improved by measuring more probability estimates from the training data to create a series expansion that refines the predicted probability. We use this work to classify four standard datasets and achieve accuracies comparable to that of Random Forests. Because this technique is interpretable by design, it is capable of determining the combinations of features that contribute to a particular classification probability for individual cases as well as the weightings of each of combination of features.

We propose a probabilistic framework for domain adaptation that blends both generative and discriminative modeling in a principled way. Under this framework, generative and discriminative models correspond to specific choices of the prior over parameters. This provides us a very general way to interpolate between generative and discriminative extremes through different choices of priors. By maximizing both the marginal and the conditional log-likelihoods, models derived from this framework can use both labeled instances from the source domain as well as unlabeled instances from both source and target domains. Under this framework, we show that the popular reconstruction loss of autoencoder corresponds to an upper bound of the negative marginal log-likelihoods of unlabeled instances, where marginal distributions are given by proper kernel density estimations. This provides a way to interpret the empirical success of autoencoders in domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning. We instantiate our framework using neural networks, and build a concrete model, DAuto. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DAuto on text, image and speech datasets, showing that it outperforms related competitors when domain adaptation is possible.

'White Widow' Sally Jones reportedly killed in U.S. drone strike; Trace Gallagher reports from Los Angeles. When it came to recruiting foreigners to flee the comforts of home for the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, ISIS succeeded like no other -- encouraging more than 40,000 fighters from more than 110 countries to travel to the fighting fray both before and after the declaration of the "caliphate" in June 2014. Subsequently, authorities have warned about the threat of returning jihadists to their homeland and since the falls of Mosul, Raqqa and the rapidly receding footprint of ISIS, such fears have come to the forefront. According to a new report, "Beyond the Caliphate: Foreign Fighters and the Threat of Returnees," released this week by the Soufan Center -- a Washington-based security intelligence consultancy -- there are now at least 5,600 citizens or residents from 33 countries who have returned home -- accounting for about 15 percent of the fighters. FILE - In this file picture taken on Friday, July 21, 2017, Kurdish soldiers from the Anti-Terrorism Units, carry a blindfolded an Indonesian man suspected of Islamic State membership, at a security center, in Kobani, Syria.

As far as video games go, Operation Overmatch is rather unremarkable. Players command military vehicles in eight-on-eight matches against the backdrop of rendered cityscapes--a common setup of games that sometimes have the added advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets. Overmatch does have something unique, though: its mission. The game's developers believe it will change how the U.S. Army fights wars. Overmatch's players are nearly all soldiers in real life.