Rumors about the upcoming Galaxy S8 have been swirling for months, but the latest teaser comes from Samsung themselves. The South Korean electronics company just announced the acquisition of Viv, an artificial intelligence platform from the creators of Siri. Google recently debuted its new Pixel phone with Google Assistant. Artificial intelligence that can help users with daily tasks and more. The new iPhone 7 has a smarter more advanced Siri too. Samsung is lacking in this area, but is poised to make a big entrance potentially starting with the Galaxy S8.

For better or worse, airlines have treated social media as a critical customer service tool, catering to cranky travelers who tweet their gripes. That willingness has led to a deluge of issues for customer service to address -- and created the need to automate it. In a typical week, KLM has to respond to 15,000 social conversations in a dozen different languages. There is no programmatic solution here: KLM has a 235-person social media team. But KLM is exploring ways to combine artificial intelligence and humans in providing customer service that's somewhat automated but still has a personal touch.

Base isn't the biggest player in a crowded CRM market by any means, but it's not shying away from a fight with industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This week it introduced Apollo, a stand-alone artificial intelligence piece its CEO claims is well ahead of its well-heeled competitors -- and it chose to announce this new product in the middle of Dreamforce, Salesforce's enormous customer conference. Artificial intelligence is the watchword of the day in CRM with both Salesforce and Oracle announcing AI products/features in the same week a couple of weeks ago. The bigger companies are adding smarts to more than just CRM, but Base CEO Uzi Shmilovici thinks his company's singular focus on CRM may be an advantage. Shmilovici claims for instance that his company's predictive scoring is much better than Salesforce's because he has more data.

Healthcare professionals …. please help fuel the research. I know you have a lot to share about these new developments (artificial intelligence) and hence will request your comments. A few years back, I served as a board member of a newly formed accountable care entity. This multi-hospital, multi-county accountable care entity spent significant time and effort to develop a risk stratification and care coordination model. The goal was that the model will not only provide efficient and effective care but will also be based upon evidence based medicine.

In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem. In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.

ASP has been applied fruitfully to a wide range of areas in AI and in other fields, both in academia and in industry, thanks to the expressive representation languages of ASP and the continuous improvement of ASP solvers. We present some of these ASP applications, in particular, in knowledge representation and reasoning, robotics, bioinformatics and computational biology as well as some industrial applications. We discuss the challenges addressed by ASP in these applications and emphasize the strengths of ASP as a useful AI paradigm.

Answer set programming is a declarative programming paradigm based on the answer set semantics of logic programs. This introductory article provides the mathematical background for the discussion of answer set programming in other contributions to this special issue.

This article reports on the first international Competition of Distributed and Multiagent Planners (CoDMAP). The competition focused on cooperative domain-independent planners compatible with a minimal multiagent extension of the classical planning model. The motivations for the competition were manifold: to standardize the problem description language with a common set of benchmarks, to promote development of multiagent planners both inside and outside of the multiagent research community, and to serve as a prototype for future multiagent planning competitions. The article provides an overview of cooperative multiagent planning, describes a novel variant of standardized input language for encoding mutliagent planning problems and summarizes the key points of organization, competing planners and results of the competition.

This column provides an encounter with the Artificial Intelligence research community in the state of Israel. The first section introduces this community and its special attributes. The second section provides overview on some recent research projects done in Israel.