Bookmark this page by right-clicking here and choosing "Add to Favorites" The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is requesting information on research related to the investigation and characterization of fundamental limits of machine learning with supportive theoretical foundations. Although the main focus is on machine learning, extensions and implications for human-machine systems are also of interest. The notion of fundamental limits here means that the conclusion about achievable performance limits should hold independent of specific learning methods or algorithms.

One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback," he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment. Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. "Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback," wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students. Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.

The Go challenge is finally over. And it seems that humanity lost; however, we did score one victory, so that's something. Lee Sedol, the 18 time world champion of Go, beat Google's artificial intelligence program this past Sunday, but the AI program snatched the ultimate victory. The Go-playing AI AlphaGo just beat the world-class player for a fourth time, winning the five-game series 4-1 overall. However, the final win was a little tenuous for a time. As Tweets from DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis, who live Tweeted the event, reveal.

Robots have transformed the lives of tradesmen and laborers, but lawyers, architects, and doctors tend to believe that their careers are safe from the advances of artificial intelligence. This belief is entirely wrong, according to the upcoming book, Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts. The authors, Richard Susskind, UK government advisor and visiting professor at Oxford Internet Institute, and his son Daniel Susskind, lecturer at Oxford University, have conducted a hundred interviews and drawn on economic and sociological theory to reach their challenging conclusion: AI will dramatically transform the middle-class working landscape. In the near-term, the Susskinds argue, artificial intelligence will simply accelerate the efficiency of professions. But then robots will start to take over more work, and humans will find the roles of "doctor" or "lawyer" replaced with such less glamorous-sounding titles as "empathizer," "knowledge engineer," or "system provider."

The German transport ministry says General Motors' Opel division has been asked to appear before a commission looking into diesel emissions controls after an environmental group claimed two of its models are able to reduce pollution controls. The environmental group, DUH, says it has tested Opel's Zafira and Astra models and claims they reduce pollution controls at some speeds and temperatures. DUH wants them taken off the road. Opel says DUH's tests weren't objective or scientifically grounded, saying "our software was never designed to cheat or deceive." Apparently referring to the computer expert who examined the software for DUH, the company said that "the isolated conclusions of a hacker do not reflect the complex interdependencies of a modern exhaust after-treatment system."

In this talk Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Principal Scientist at Google, will begin by taking a close look at what has been achieved in machine intelligence (especially deep learning) over the past decade, with examples of current techniques and applications from the Machine Intelligence on Devices group at Google and from the community. This includes not only classification and semantic understanding of natural stimuli, but also language, gameplay, and even art. From here Blaise will zoom out and consider some broader questions about human progress, labour and identity in an era of "technological reproducibility". Blaise Agüera y Arcas is Principal Scientist at Google where he leads a team focusing on Machine Intelligence for mobile devices - including both basic research and new products. His group works extensively with deep neural nets for machine perception, distributed learning, and agents, as well as collaborating with academic institutions on connectomics research.

In the past year, we've seen tremendous progress in AI. We've seen AlphaGo defeat a top-level Go professional, a feat even AI experts thought was years away. We've seen computer-assisted self-driving cars. We've seen computers produce imitation Rembrandts by analyzing existing works of art. Bots now participate in conversations and carry out repetitive tasks within enterprise communications platforms.

A year ago the Raptors were victims of an unexpected 4-0 sweep in the first round of the NBA playoffs at the hands of the lower-ranked Washington Wizards. They're now tied with the Miami Heat 2-2 in a grueling best-of-seven series, which will see the eventual winners play LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals. Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Raptors, announced in February that it would use cognitive analysis provided by IBM's Watson technology platform, noting that Watson would be used mostly for talent acquisition. Is cognitive technology one of the factors behind the improved performance? It's difficult to answer that question because the Raptors consider the IBM agreement to be a competitive advantage, and are therefore mum on this subject.

Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans. Huawei is best known as one of the world's largest producers of broadband network equipment and smartphones. But Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line, told the CES Asia conference in Shanghai that the company used science-fiction movies such as "The Matrix" to envision future trends and new business ideas. "Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem . . . 25 years from now," he said. "In the future, you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world."

As medical marijuana becomes both more socially acceptable and available, a growing number of people are looking to learn more about its benefits – but the search for reliable and timely information is not always easy. Decades of misinformation about cannabis has made searching the web for answers a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Further, because new research and new cannabis products are being released at an ever-increasing rate, individuals find themselves having to scroll through numerous sites to find exactly what they're looking for. To help address these problems, Vancouver-based Lift Cannabis Co. has developed the world's first cannabis-specific chatbot. Elevator (www.elevator.ai) is a text-based artificial intelligence (AI) app that enables individuals to ask questions and get instant answers.