Late last week my Twitter and Instagram were blowing up with photos of President Obama, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and entrepreneur/"Shark Tank" star Daymond John on the Stanford campus. Those three were among the 1,500 or so people who came to the university for the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and there was clearly a lot of excitement. The global summit offered participants a wide range of workshops, panels, exhibitions and networking sessions, with one of the highlights being an in-depth panel discussion on the future -- and societal benefits -- of artificial intelligence. "In my own area of health and biomedicine, the opportunities [for AI] are ridiculously exciting," panel co-chair Russ Altman, MD, PhD, said during his opening remarks Thursday evening. He noted that the amount of biomedical data that electronic health records and "the little devices we wear" generate have become "far too big for us to interpret without intelligent assistance." From there, 15 experts from government and academia, including keynote government speaker Megan Smith, the U.S. chief technology officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, discussed issues surrounding the technology.

In the military world, fighter pilots have long been described as the best of the best. As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, only those with the "right stuff" can handle the job. Now, it seems, the right stuff may no longer be the sole purview of human pilots. A pilot A.I. developed by a doctoral graduate from the University of Cincinnati has shown that it can not only beat other A.I.s, but also a professional fighter pilot with decades of experience. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully evaded retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene "Geno" Lee, and shot him down every time.

How Brexit may affect artists and the art market. George Lucas abandons plans for a museum in Chicago. Miami models allege that an artist asked them to do intimate things with a rope. The Chicago Tribune says good riddance. Plus, how the referendum may affect artists.

Sidewalk Labs, a top-secret urban innovation division run under Google's parent company Alphabet, wants to improve city life for city-dwellers by reinventing public parking and transportation. Its first testing grounds - Columbus, Ohio - may host subsidized ride-sharing, a service that finds free parking spots, and an artificial intelligence platform that will help meter maids fine more people, all in the Buckeye State capital. Earlier in 2016, Sidewalk Labs announced plans to buy up land in major US cities and transform the parcels into ultra-high tech municipalities. In conjunction with the US Department of Transportation, it launched the Smart City Challenge to identify a launchpad for its innovations. The Guardian revealed on Monday never-before-seen documents and proposals from the Smart City Challenge.

Sidewalk Labs, a top-secret urban innovation division run under Google's parent company Alphabet, wants to improve city life for city-dwellers by reinventing public parking and transportation. Its first testing grounds - Columbus, Ohio - may host subsidized ride-sharing, a service that finds free parking spots, and an artificial intelligence platform that will help meter maids fine more people, all in the Buckeye State capital. Earlier in 2016, Sidewalk Labs announced plans to buy up land in major US cities and transform the parcels into ultra-high tech municipalities. In conjunction with the US Department of Transportation, it launched the Smart City Challenge to identify a launchpad for its innovations. The Guardian revealed on Monday never-before-seen documents and proposals from the Smart City Challenge.

Contagions such as the spread of popular news stories, or infectious diseases, propagate in cascades over dynamic networks with unobservable topologies. However, "social signals" such as product purchase time, or blog entry timestamps are measurable, and implicitly depend on the underlying topology, making it possible to track it over time. Interestingly, network topologies often "jump" between discrete states that may account for sudden changes in the observed signals. The present paper advocates a switched dynamic structural equation model to capture the topology-dependent cascade evolution, as well as the discrete states driving the underlying topologies. Conditions under which the proposed switched model is identifiable are established. Leveraging the edge sparsity inherent to social networks, a recursive $\ell_1$-norm regularized least-squares estimator is put forth to jointly track the states and network topologies. An efficient first-order proximal-gradient algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real cascades measured over the span of one year are conducted, and test results corroborate the efficacy of the advocated approach.

It is every Top Gun's worst nightmare - an AI can can outmanoeuvre them in the air. Now researchers have tested their AI on a retired top gun - and left him stunned. Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee took on the AI in a simulator - and lost. An AI has beated Air Force pilots in simulated showdowns for the first time. Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee took on the AI in a simulator.

Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by subject-matter expert and retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee - who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise - in a high-fidelity air combat simulator. The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date." Details on ALPHA - a significant breakthrough in the application of what's called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes. The tools used to create ALPHA as well as the ALPHA project have been developed by Psibernetix, Inc., recently founded by UC College of Engineering and Applied Science 2015 doctoral graduate Nick Ernest, now president and CEO of the firm; as well as David Carroll, programming lead, Psibernetix, Inc.; with supporting technologies and research from Gene Lee; Kelly Cohen, UC aerospace professor; Tim Arnett, UC aerospace doctoral student; and Air Force Research Laboratory sponsors. ALPHA is currently viewed as a research tool for manned and unmanned teaming in a simulation environment.

The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date." Details on ALPHA – a significant breakthrough in the application of what's called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes. The tools used to create ALPHA as well as the ALPHA project have been developed by Psibernetix, Inc., recently founded by UC College of Engineering and Applied Science 2015 doctoral graduate Nick Ernest, now president and CEO of the firm; as well as David Carroll, programming lead, Psibernetix, Inc.; with supporting technologies and research from Gene Lee; Kelly Cohen, UC aerospace professor; Tim Arnett, UC aerospace doctoral student; and Air Force Research Laboratory sponsors.

If a change is needed, it is of a different kind. The process through which students may petition for loan forgiveness may need to be streamlined and made clearer. If it acts at all, the Department of Education should redefine the current process and better communicate its availability to students. The new initiative, even if that is not its intention, has the potential to go too far because those who feed off society's productive activities – because that's where the money is – will take it there. They will find ways to expand on language so vague its inevitably loose interpretation leaves public and private universities vulnerable to countless claims that are without merit.