David Axe for the Daily Beast reports The U.S. Marine Corps is around six years away from putting a laser cannon on its trucks, according to one top general. The goal: to outfit ground forces with a weapon that can shoot down enemy aircraft faster and more precisely--and at lower cost--than today's guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Over twenty years ago, I worked for company called The Carnegie Group, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratories. That company is long gone. Today, a think-tank goes by the same name. While extant, the erstwhile Carnegie Group worked on some of the most cutting edge AI products of its time. It was funded by a consortium of firms such as Caterpillar and USWEST (now Qwest Corp.) and its sole aim was to look for the application of AI technologies in businesses.

Over twenty years ago, I worked for company called The Carnegie Group, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratories. That company is long gone. Today, a think-tank goes by the same name. While extant, the erstwhile Carnegie Group worked on some of the most cutting edge AI products of its time. It was funded by a consortium of firms such as Caterpillar and USWEST (now Qwest Corp.) and its sole aim was to look for the application of AI technologies in businesses.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

One of the most intriguing public discussions to emerge over the past year is humanity's wrestling match with the threat and promise of artificial intelligence. AI has long lurked in our collective consciousness -- negatively so, if we're to take Hollywood movie plots as our guide -- but its recent andvery real advances are driving critical conversations about the future not only of our economy, but of humanity's very existence. In May 2014, the world received a wakeup call from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Together with three respected AI researchers, the world's most renowned scientist warned that the commercially-driven creation of intelligent machines could be "potentially our worst mistake in history." Comparing the impact of AI on humanity to the arrival of "a superior alien species," Hawking and his co-authors found humanity's current state of preparedness deeply wanting.

The Drum shines a light on how the GroupM media investment unit is leveraging its relationship with AppNexus to harness machine learning, and better improve the performance of its media traders, and usher in the age of'programmable marketing'. Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – for many of those involved in the advertising industry such terms are nothing more than buzz phrases used by panelists on the conference circuit, with little real application to contemporary media practice. However, while the more cynical in the industry may dismiss the above phrases as merely the domain of science fiction, the impact of such technologies (be it positive, or negative) will be felt a lot sooner than such cynics think. The latest issue of The Drum magazine, guest edited by IBM's AI system Watson demonstrated that, while not without its problems, the technology is within the grasp of the contemporary marketer. Meanwhile, at the cutting edge of the media industry's use of AI, is the ad tech sector (or'programmatic advertisers').

The ROCSAFE Project (Remotely Operated CBRNe Scene Assessment & Forensic Examination) has recently been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. Led by Dr Michael Madden in NUI Galway, it will make advances in autonomous robotics, probabilistic reasoning, intelligent decision support, and miniaturised sensors, all of which will work together to gather forensic evidence in the event of a chemical, biological, radiation/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) incident. ROCSAFE's overall goal is to fundamentally change how CBRNe events are assessed, and ensure the safety of crime scene investigators, by reducing the need for them to enter dangerous scenes to gather evidence. There are 13 partners in total involved in the project across Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, along with a further group of advisory board members. There is more information at http://www.nuigalway.ie/remoteforensics/.

In 2001, when Jamie was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a cancer that starts inside the bone marrow, the disease had few effective cures. Fourteen years later, thanks to advances in cancer treatment, she is able to manage the disease and live a full life. Jamie is profiled in the PhRMA.org Yet many patients and their doctors wait for years before promising treatments become available. All too often, unforeseen side effects send researchers back to the drawing board, just when they thought they were close to bringing a new medication to market.

I just noticed that Justin Domke has a blog -- He's one of the strongest researchers in the field of graphical models. I first came across his dissertation when looking for a way to improve loopy-Belief Propagation based training. His thesis gives one such idea -- instead of maximizing the fit of an intractable model, and using BP as intermediate step, maximize the fit of BP marginals directly. This makes sense since approximate (BP-based) marginals are what you ultimately use. If you run BP for k steps, then likelihood of the BP-approximated model is tractable to minimize -- calculation of gradient is very similar to k steps of loopy BP.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Why do humans perceive their environment the way they do? These are all questions that artificial intelligence will, over time, help scientists answer about the human experience. And Richard Sutton, a professor of computer sciences at the University of Alberta, has been a significant contributor to the discussion around the limits and promise of artificial intelligence. He is a respected voice on "reinforcement learning," or the fundamental process that allows AI software to respond to (and ultimately learn from) its environment.