Is there a global theory for the shapes of fish? But for most of the history of biology, it's not the kind of thing anyone would ever have asked. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And it's now 100 years since D'Arcy Thompson published the first edition of his magnum opus On Growth and Form--and tried to use ideas from mathematics and physics to discuss global questions of biological growth and form. Stretch one kind of fish, and it looks like another. Yes, without constraints on how you stretch. It's not quite clear what this is telling one, and I don't think it's much. But just to ask the question is interesting, and On Growth and Form is full of interesting questions--together with all manner of curious and interesting answers. D'Arcy Thompson was in many ways a quintessential British Victorian academic, steeped in the classics, and writing books with titles like A Glossary of Greek Fishes (i.e. But he was also a diligent natural scientist, and he became a serious enthusiast of mathematics and physics. And where Aristotle (whom Thompson had translated) used plain language, with perhaps a dash of logic, to try to describe the natural world, Thompson tried to use the language of mathematics and physics.

In the west, AI and machine learning startups and tech giants of all stripes have been doing the M&A dance. Google, Apple and the like have been busy snapping up AI/ML startups and according to CB Insights, 30 companies in the space have been acquired since 2011 (five in this year alone). Activity in Asia has been decidedly quieter, with AI research and development mostly happening at the institutional and corporate level. In the region, it seems that Japan, South Korea and China are front runners in terms of AI activity. While Japan's Toyota is putting in $1 billion to ramp up AI research, mainly into autonomous vehicles, the South Korean government is also reportedly injecting $860 million into an AI research institute.

The biggest recent news in the crypto world is that China issued a ban on ICOs, swiftly followed by South Korea. Japan is also rumored to be considering a similar ban. The U.S. SEC has also issued a warning against "pump-and-dump" ICO schemes, and is evaluating whether some offerings were not disguised securities following the DAO case. The above raises questions about the meaning of money, securities, and might help "correct the market". Some of it is reminiscent of China's ban of digital currencies for use in the "real world" way back in 2009 -- especially Tencent's.

The recent Association of Public Data Users (APDU) Conference gave me the opportunity to meet some people who have made tremendous contributions to the world of Open Data. One of the most popular R packages I've published is choroplethrZip. This package contains the US Census Bureau's Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) map, as well as metadata and visualization functions. It literally never occurred to me to think about who created the first ZCTA map, the methodology for creating it, and so on. It turns out that one of the people who created the ZCTA map – Jon Sperling – was at the conference.

Smart cities, which were once confined to the realms of science fiction books, are rapidly becoming a reality all around the globe. Unfortunately, like all revolutionizing innovations, smart cities are developing their own unique challenges alongside of their perks. So what are industry insiders and tomorrow's city planners doing to face these challenges? The security issues facing smart cities are unlike anything ever before seen, and solutions to these problems haven't yet sprung up en masse, meaning many different interest groups have proposed their own respective plans. By combing through some of today's proposed solutions, we can identify some of the leading trends that will come to dominate the future of smart city security.

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. We're already seeing small crumbs of evidence that they understand how AI can make public services more efficient and citizen-friendly.

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.