Machine-learning algorithms increasingly make decisions about credit, medical diagnoses, personalized recommendations, advertising and job opportunities, among other things, but exactly how usually remains a mystery. Now, new measurement methods developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers could provide important insights to this process. Was it a person's age, gender or education level that had the most influence on a decision? Was it a particular combination of factors? CMU's Quantitative Input Influence (QII) measures can provide the relative weight of each factor in the final decision, said Anupam Datta, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

In retrospective assessments, internet news reports have been shown to capture early reports of unknown infectious disease transmission prior to official laboratory confirmation. In general, media interest and reporting peaks and wanes during the course of an outbreak. In this study, we quantify the extent to which media interest during infectious disease outbreaks is indicative of trends of reported incidence. We introduce an approach that uses supervised temporal topic models to transform large corpora of news articles into temporal topic trends. The key advantages of this approach include, applicability to a wide range of diseases, and ability to capture disease dynamics - including seasonality, abrupt peaks and troughs. We evaluated the method using data from multiple infectious disease outbreaks reported in the United States of America (U.S.), China and India. We noted that temporal topic trends extracted from disease-related news reports successfully captured the dynamics of multiple outbreaks such as whooping cough in U.S. (2012), dengue outbreaks in India (2013) and China (2014). Our observations also suggest that efficient modeling of temporal topic trends using time-series regression techniques can estimate disease case counts with increased precision before official reports by health organizations.

Donald Trump can buy himself many things, but he will never be able to officially build a 10,000-block-high statue of himself in Minecraft. And no, don't expect to mine Moria as part of a Lord of the Rings server. Microsoft and its Mojang subsidiary said Tuesday that they will begin blocking corporations and politicians from using Minecraft to promote their own agendas, including the sale of products, movies, or political views. "We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we're not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server," Mojang wrote in a blog post. The new additions are now part of Mojang's Commercial Usage Guidelines.

Cooney goes on, "With Fun LoL DARPA is looking for information about mathematical frameworks, architectures, and methods that would help answer questions such as: What are the number of examples necessary for training to achieve a given accuracy performance? What are important trade-offs and their implications? How close is the expected achievable performance of a learning algorithm compared to what can be achieved at the limit? What are the effects of noise and error in the training data? What are the potential gains possible due to the statistical structure of the model generating the data?"

The "Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan," which the Air Force released today, is an attempt to identify the battlefields of the future, and see what the Air Force needs to put in motion today to do its job right in the future. Unspoken, but alluded to throughout the document, is a move away from expensive, long-in-development aircraft. The Air Force can "no longer afford to develop weapon systems on the linear acquisition and development timelines using traditional approaches," reads the report. It continues later: "the Air Force must reject thinking focused on "next generation" platforms. Such focus often creates a desire to push technology limits within the confines of a formal program."

Leading the charge to update the traffic code is New York Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Joseph Robach, who also fears the law could allow police to ticket drivers for using vehicle features that are already available like assisted parking or Tesla's Autopilot. Due to the outdated law, Audi was reportedly unable to demonstrate the technology when it showed up in Albany with one of its self-driving vehicles last week. "We are just trying to have the law match up to the technology that people are using today and I think is only going to grow down the road," Senator Robach told the Daily News. Although six other states and Washington, D.C. have already passed legislation allowing autonomous vehicles on public roads, Robach's bill is meeting some resistance from other state lawmakers who don't believe the technology is quite ready yet. Earlier this year, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided that an autonomous vehicle's piloting system can be considered "the driver" under federal law.

Czech writer Karel?apek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which famously introduced the word robot to the world, begins with synthetic humans--the robots from the title--toiling in factories to produce low-cost goods. It ends with those same robots killing off the human race. Thus was born an enduring plot line in science fiction: robots spiraling out of control and turning into unstoppable killing machines. Twentieth-century literature and film would go on to bring us many more examples of robots wreaking havoc on the world, with Hollywood notably turning the theme into blockbuster franchises like The Matrix, Transformers, and The Terminator. Lately, fears of fiction turning to fact have been stoked by a confluence of developments, including important advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, along with the widespread use of combat drones and ground robots in Iraq and Afghanistan. The world's most powerful militaries are now developing ever more intelligent weapons, with varying degrees of autonomy and lethality.

Cyberattacks are increasingly making headlines with alarming regularity. They are becoming more and more difficult to detect, to the extent that many remain under the radar for long periods of time before they are even noticed. These highly sophisticated attacks are overpowering the traditional defensive mechanisms that many organisations currently have in place. Thankfully, while hackers are becoming increasingly more cutting-edge, so too are the developments that will outpace them. Though it's a constant struggle to remain vigilant, here's how we're going to get from where we currently are to where we should be going: According to the Ponemon Report, it takes larger organisations up to 200 days to detect advanced threats.

Sometimes, really brilliant folks with a reputation for being brilliant start to comment on subjects outside their area of expertise, as if their level of genius so transcends the intelligence of the unwashed masses that they can be called on as an authority in literally any subject. Stephen Hawking has arguably been guilty of this before, and has faced criticism for his recent pontifications on the dangers of artificial intelligence in particular. But on Tuesday, Hawking admitted to being utterly stumped by something -- or, rather, someone: Donald Trump. ITV's "Good Morning Britain" cheekily asked whether the physics genius could explain the American billionaire's rise to presidential candidacy. "He's a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator." Hawking, who has lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for more than half a century, uses a computer controlled by tiny movements of his cheek muscles to type out communications.

We here at Carnegie Mellon University wanted to let you know about a great event on artificial intelligence that we're hosting in conjunction with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in late June. You may have seen this recent article on these workshops featured in Wired. While we are but one of the four workshops going on in the coming months, we are the ONLY workshop in the series with a clear focus on the technical aspects of safe and controlled AI. We want to dive deep on how we can bring together machine learning, math-based systems reasoning, and software architecture to build AI systems with a high level of assurance. And we'd love for you to be a part of that conversation here in Pittsburgh.