Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The plans will see the seabound city-state, complete with a handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more, built in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. Now, a series of computer generated graphics reveal how it might look once complete, with a design that blends futuristic technology with Polynesian traditions. Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Floating islands would feature aquaculture farms, healthcare, medical research facilities, and sustainable energy powerhouses.

We've been hearing a lot of talk about chatbots lately. Some of these conversations are about the ways that companies are having success with chatbots, but others are about brands that have failed to implement them properly. A chatbot is a piece of software that can simulate human conversation. A human types or speaks a request, and the AI chatbot processes the language and provides the appropriate response. Depending on the programming, the functionality can vary significantly.

The tech giant Microsoft is deploying artificial intelligence to the task of protecting our planet. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, announced on Dec. 11 that the company would be investing $50 million in their AI for Earth program over the next five years in order to "monitor, model, and manage the Earth's natural systems." This investment is part of Microsoft's expansion of its environmental policies, which center around the concept of democratizing AI so that both scientists and business owners can easily utilize the technology to analyze climate data and provide information to help us take strategic action. Smith suggested in the announcement that AI could soon be used to collect and analyze data about energy consumption and weather patterns to conserve power and reduce needless water usage in agriculture. "AI can be trained to classify raw data from sensors on the ground, in the sky, or in space into categories that both humans and computers understand," Smith said in the announcement.

He enrolled in the NYC Data Science Academy 17-week remote bootcamp program, taking place from January to April 2017. This post is based on his third class project focusing on web scraping in Python. The original article can be found here. Clean technology continues to undergo significant advancements spanning technology, sustainability, financial, and policy issues. Given the field's large scope, there is no shortage of news outlets covering the action.

Learning-based representations have become the defacto means to address computer vision tasks. Despite their massive adoption, the amount of work aiming at understanding the internal representations learned by these models is rather limited. Existing methods aimed at model interpretation either require exhaustive manual inspection of visualizations, or link internal network activations with external "possibly useful" annotated concepts. We propose an intermediate scheme in which, given a pretrained model, we automatically identify internal features relevant for the set of classes considered by the model, without requiring additional annotations. We interpret the model through average visualizations of these features. Then, at test time, we explain the network prediction by accompanying the predicted class label with supporting heatmap visualizations derived from the identified relevant features. In addition, we propose a method to address the artifacts introduced by strided operations in deconvnet-based visualizations. Our evaluation on the MNIST, ILSVRC 12 and Fashion 144k datasets quantitatively shows that the proposed method is able to identify relevant internal features for the classes of interest while improving the quality of the produced visualizations.

We encounter stories and predictions about how artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change a variety of industries on an almost day-to-day basis. In fact, it has become such an important topic that late last year the Council for Society and Technology wrote a letter to the Prime Minister advising how the UK could take advantage of opportunities created by the increasing convergence of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. As more and more industries, including healthcare and financial services, adopt AI technology, we'll continue to see increased benefits on our society as a whole. Conversations about AI tend to have a sci-fi vibe: robot personal assistants, self-driving cars, you name it. But the real, day-to-day business value of AI is much less futuristic, starting with the hundreds and thousands of contracts that keep business deals up and running every day.

Last month The Lawyer published the first-ever Offshore Litigation Survey, which revealed the cases on which the top firms have been active as well as firms' bench strengths. As part of the survey we also asked offshore firms about their technology-related innovations and how they project manage their litigation matters. Offshore firms have introduced a number of products for general efficiency purposes and have taken a variety of investment approaches. Bedell Cristin has brought in INTAP technology for time recording, while Appleby operates an internal portal that houses high-level information from a variety of data sources and presents them in an intelligent format in a single point of view. Advances in technology over the past year "have resulted in significant improvements around litigation processes and within the teams that support those functions", says the firm. Conyers Dill & Pearman and Harneys both use Relativity for document management and disclosure purposes, while Conyers is piloting litigation-specific file management software.

Google is deepening its push into artificial intelligence (AI) by opening a research centre in China, even though its search services remain blocked in the country. Google said the facility would be the first its kind in Asia and would aim to employ local talent. Silicon Valley is focusing heavily on the future applications for AI. China has also indicated strong support for AI development and for catching up with the US. Research into artificial intelligence has the potential to improve a range of technologies, from self-driving cars and automated factories to translation products and facial recognition software.

I read with interest recent reports about China wanting to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to its classrooms to boost its education system. This brings us to the debate over whether artificial intelligence, that is, robots, will replace human teachers in the future. I believe that is unlikely. Of course, AI could help lighten the workload of classroom teachers, in areas like analysing students' past performance and optimising lessons accordingly; marking their tests and quizzes, and correcting their homework and assignments. Robot teachers could also deliver preprogrammed lessons and provide answers to frequently asked questions.

Sexual harassment accusations have hit another corner of the tech industry, with allegations involving prominent artificial intelligence researchers, including one at Google, a leader in the field. Data scientist Kristian Lum wrote in a blog this week that a man she called "S" grabbed her inappropriately at an industry conference in 2010 and said he took advantage of another woman she didn't identify on separate occasions. Two people who were told about the conduct from two alleged victims told Bloomberg the man is Steven Scott, a senior researcher at Google. Lum also wrote that a well-respected academic touched her inappropriately on the leg at the same conference and later sent her innuendo-laced messages. The man was later identified as Bradley Carlin, an expert in biostatistics, by people familiar with the alleged conduct. The allegations were widely discussed on social media, drawing supportive comments and similar stories from researchers in academia and leading tech companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research director, called Lum's post a "powerful and important report."