MagniLEARN, an Ed-Tech company using artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing, received second prize for innovation in Artificial Intelligence and was recognized as a promising AI Startup in the third annual China – Israel Innoweek Conference held in Beijing, China. "Combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) allowed us to turn the computer into a language-aware personal tutor for each student," said MagniLEARN CEO Howard Cooper in accepting the award. "Our difference lies in presenting personalized exercises that the student answers with free-form responses. Just like a personal tutor teaching language to a child, we understand what is correct, what is nearly correct, and provide feedback and then reinforcement as the student learns proper English. We gave the computer enough language awareness to become an intelligent and efficient language tutor for each student," he concluded.

Even though Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around as an academic and scientific discipline since the 1950s, the proponents of AI have never been as hopeful as they are in the present times. It's needless to mention that the current surge in AI research, investment, and real business applications is unprecedented. Market Intelligence firm IDC in their New IDC Spending Guide, September 19, 2018, predicted that the worldwide spending on cognitive and Artificial Intelligence systems would reach $77.6B by 2022. Similarly, Gartner projects the business value created by AI at $3.9T by 2022. While the philosophical debate on the ethical concerns around AI continues in several circles, we have seen myriad business applications of AI.

What I fear is that, every bit of progress that was made in the past decade was either hype or due to faster computation or using relu rather than sigmoid. IMO AI can be broken down to 3 parts, the algorithm for inference, knowledge representation, and computational speed. Of these 3, have we really made any progress in representation and algorithms in the past decade? Besides getting better GPU's, everything else was already discover decades ago. Are we going to have AI winter 2.0 soon?

CES 2020 will do what CES always does best -- preview future products and reveal the trends that will shape the year ahead in tech. Of course, some of the products that make headlines at CES are sneak peeks at real products, while others are more like concept cars that may never come to market. We expect to see plenty of new concepts, prototypes and experimental flights of fancy at CES 2020 -- including ideas about what your future phones and computers could look like. But CES also gives us a bigger picture of how the tectonic plates are moving in the tech industry, and the new ways technology is going to improve, encroach on and transform our lives. Over the past month, the CNET team has been diving deep on a lot of the stuff that's coming at CES 2020, so we've got a good sense of trends that will dominate this year's show.

By now, most of us have shared a few chuckles over AI-generated deepfake videos, like those in which the face of comedian and impressionist Bill Hader gradually takes on the likenesses of Tom Cruise, Seth Rogen, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as he imitates the celebrities. We've seen actor Ryan Reynolds' mug superimposed over Gene Wilder's in the 1971 classic film "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." We've even marveled over businessman Elon Musk being turned into a baby. It all can be quite humorous, but not everyone is laughing. Tech companies, researchers, and politicians alike are growing concerned that the increasing sophistication of the artificial intelligence and machine learning technology powering deepfakes will outpace our ability to discern between genuine and doctored imagery.

For the past few years, we've shared predictions each December on what we believe will be the top ten technology policy issues for the year ahead. As this year draws to a close, we are looking out a bit further. It gives us all an opportunity to reflect upon the past ten years and consider what the 2020s may bring. As we concluded in our book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, "Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up." Digital technology has gone longer with less regulation than virtually any major technology before it. This dynamic is no longer sustainable, and the tech sector will need to step up and exercise more responsibility while governments catch up by modernizing tech policies. In short, the 2020s will bring sweeping regulatory changes to the world of technology. Tech is at a crossroads, and to consider why, it helps to start with the changes in technology itself. The 2010s saw four trends intersect, collectively transforming how we work, live and learn. Continuing advances in computational power made more ambitious technical scenarios possible both for devices and servers, while cloud computing made these advances more accessible to the world. Like the invention of the personal computer itself, cloud computing was as important economically as it was technically. The cloud allows organizations of any size to tap into massive computing and storage capacity on demand, paying for the computing they need without the outlay of capital expenses. More powerful computers and cloud economics combined to create the third trend, the explosion of digital data.

Beyond streaming, expect to see artificial intelligence-infused home appliances, security cameras and cars, new gadgets that show what faster 5G cellular service can offer and, as always, the newest in robots and souped-up TVs. Speakers this week include Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and senior adviser, and Hyunsuk Kim, Samsung's head of consumer electronics. As technology increasingly infuses our lives, more traditional companies are showing up for the Las Vegas event. CES has hosted previous attempts to set out a road map for TV. At the 2015 show, satellite TV company Dish announced a cheaper, cable-like package of TV channels delivered over the internet and intended for cord-cutters .

Its impact is drastic and real: Youtube's AIdriven recommendation system would present sports videos for days if one happens to watch a live baseball game on the platform [1]; email writing becomes much faster with machine learning (ML) based auto-completion [2]; many businesses have adopted natural language processing based chatbots as part of their customer services [3]. AI has also greatly advanced human capabilities in complex decision-making processes ranging from determining how to allocate security resources to protect airports [4] to games such as poker [5] and Go [6]. All such tangible and stunning progress suggests that an "AI summer" is happening. As some put it, "AI is the new electricity" [7]. Meanwhile, in the past decade, an emerging theme in the AI research community is the so-called "AI for social good" (AI4SG): researchers aim at developing AI methods and tools to address problems at the societal level and improve the wellbeing of the society.

These are two very cool ideas! Re: continuity, I do wonder if it would be possible to write a custom generator that uses an LSTM to draw lines/curves -- something like sketch-RNN. It would be very interesting to see the results of that. Re: pre-training, I didn't want the language to be influenced by anything besides the constraints of the environment so I didn't consider this. But it is likely that the results would be very fun, especially if the generator was trained to generalize to multiple different writing systems.

We are on the brink of entering a new technological era. A time where we will move beyond the need to use text interfaces to communicate with computers and instead, we will be talking to the devices themselves. With voice apps and voice assistants, devices will be able to understand and interact with us through voice technology. That's why voice discovery is going to challenge the established way of using smartphones to do most things online. In the future, most search queries will be done through voice commands, because using your voice to interact with a computer is simply the fastest way to get things done.