To remain livable and economically competitive, rapidly growing cities need to embrace high-tech solutions to solve their many practical problems. However, how willing are citizens to sacrifice their privacy for the benefits of smart cities, and can government regulations keep up with new tech? This places a significant burden on vital infrastructure, such as transport, housing, energy supply, health care and waste management. Livability in the megacities of tomorrow will largely be determined by the smart solutions being developed today. The term "smart city" is popular among policymakers worldwide.

To train an inference network jointly with a deep generative topic model, making it both scalable to big corpora and fast in out-of-sample prediction, we develop Weibull hybrid autoencoding inference (WHAI) for deep latent Dirichlet allocation, which infers posterior samples via a hybrid of stochastic-gradient MCMC and autoencoding variational Bayes. The generative network of WHAI has a hierarchy of gamma distributions, while the inference network of WHAI is a Weibull upward-downward variational autoencoder, which integrates a deterministic-upward deep neural network, and a stochastic-downward deep generative model based on a hierarchy of Weibull distributions. The Weibull distribution can be used to well approximate a gamma distribution with an analytic Kullback-Leibler divergence, and has a simple reparameterization via the uniform noise, which help efficiently compute the gradients of the evidence lower bound with respect to the parameters of the inference network. The effectiveness and efficiency of WHAI are illustrated with experiments on big corpora.

NEW YORK, NY – Duff & Phelps, the premiere global valuation and corporate finance advisor, has selected eBrevia's award-winning artificial intelligence technology to deploy throughout the enterprise for faster contract review. Duff & Phelps has already been using the software for large-scale contract review projects to augment its professionals' expertise and bring increased value to clients more quickly. The firm will continue to leverage the software for a variety of use cases as it advises clients on a range of strategic and complex business challenges. Duff & Phelps has been increasing its presence in the contract management space from two perspectives: legal management consulting and post-acquisition integration. As a legal management consultant, Duff & Phelps advises clients on selection and implementation of contract lifecycle management systems.

Check out the machine learning sessions at the Strata Data Conference in London, May 21-24, 2018. Hurry--early price ends April 6. The problem of fairness comes up in any discussion of data ethics. We've seen analyses of products like COMPASS, we've seen the maps that show where Amazon first offered same-day delivery, and we've seen how job listings shown to women are skewed toward lower-paying jobs. We also know that "fair" is a difficult concept for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the data used to train machine learning models.

The revelation that the New Orleans Police Department quietly used a Silicon Valley company to predict crime raises dilemmas similar to those emerging from artificial intelligence in other spheres, like consumer behavior, medicine and employment. But what's uniquely shocking about the story of New Orleans's partnership with the national security company Palantir is that it has remained largely unreported before now. As an article in The Verge details, James Carville, the well-known Democratic strategist and Bill Clinton adviser, did actually mention the partnership on a radio program back in 2014. He knew about it for a simple reason: It was his idea (at least according to Carville). By his account, Palantir was looking for "pro bono" opportunities, which is often code for a corporate dry run for untested technology.

Should the future of our society hinge on a secret? A new report suggests that, in order to ensure the safety of a society increasingly reliant upon artificial intelligence, we need to make sure that it's kept in the hands of a select few. Ultimately, though, that decision could do more harm than good. In the report, 20 researchers from several future-focused organizations, including OpenAI, Endgame, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, and the Center for a New American Security, express the fear that, in the wrong hands, AI could cause the downfall of society. In fact, the report outlines several scenarios -- like smarter phishing scams, malware epidemics, and robot assassins -- that haven't happened yet, but don't seem too far from the realm of possibility.

Trouble is brewing among the students of the Girls Domestic Science School, a well-known private institution at Hitotsubashi, Kanda, which enjoys a good reputation in educational circles and has contributed greatly to the advancement of female education, the courses including sewing, embroidery and foreign-style cooking. The school recently received a monetary donation amounting to ¥13,000 from Mr. Kamesaburo Yamashita, the well-known "narikin" of Kobe, who has amassed a big fortune though the sale of steamers. Several days ago the girls school referred to had a visit from an aged lady, who was alleged to have been sent by Mr. Yamashita, the patron of the school, on the mission of selecting a prospective bride for the son or nephew of the narikin. The old lady was treated by the school faculty with marked respect, and as though she came with the object of inspection, the true purpose of her visit being hidden as far as possible. Madame Haruko Hatoyama, the widow of the late Dr. Hatoyama, ex-minister of justice and dean of Waseda who is the superintendent of the teaching staff of the school, ordered the class to stop the lesson and gave the visitor the privilege of leisurely examining the personal beauty of the girl students of the graduating class of a certain course.

A recurring theme when I talk with banking leaders about the management of compliance records, contracts and other critical documents is that it is both essential and expensive work. Bank attorneys, paralegals and loan officers spend thousands of hours poring over countless pages of regulatory compliance filings, loan agreements and other records to determine whether they comply with laws, terms and conditions. Banks spend an estimated $70 billion annually on regulatory compliance and governance software, a figure expected to grow to nearly $120 billion by 2020. What can be done to rein in the cost of regulatory compliance? By unleashing artificial intelligence (AI), banks may be able to save an estimated 30% of compliance costs while accelerating throughput up to three times.

A while back, I was reading an article posted on Facebook, about Clovis people found alive and well living in Florida, with a picture featuring tribesmen (see below.) The quality of the picture was poor, and the URL was very suspicious: baynews9.com.ddwg.clonezone.link, as to make it appear that it was from Baynews9.com. It turned out that the picture (and thus the whole story) was fake: these people are real people living in Peru, see here for a Youtube video about them. My question is how to detect that a story is fake? The picture might have metadata embedded in it, allowing the data scientist to find the real source, unless it is a screenshot.

We are all of us at one level or another beset with information management problems. These problems might be considered information governance issues or technology problems. But for every one of us who is inventing good practices on the leading edge, 20 more are struggling to get a good grip on our information. Some organizations still worry about their employees understanding what information constitutes a record, some have moved onto more flexible governance structures allowing them to focus on business problems. The split between on premises infrastructure and the cloud keeps some up at night, while others worry about the proliferation of applications and systems. Still others are frustrated by the constant complaints from colleagues that they cannot find anything on the intranet and others are needled by their legal department with e-discovery questions.