Thoughts about character-based word embedding and vocabularies in NLP:character:word:embedding:vocabulary: Goal In this summary we compare the two standard methods of single character embedding and full word embedding. Motivation In order to teach a computer to understand words in order to perform natural language tasks, we have to map characters or words to a vector space the computer naturally acts on. Steps The mapping of character, words or even complete sentences into a vector space is usually called embedding. Given some text, there are two distinct methods to compute word embeddings manageable by a computer. Children learning to read to start by recognizing individual characters before they are able to understand the meaning of words.

If the Facebook (FB) of the future suggest some similarities to Skynet, the self-aware artificial intelligence villain in "The Terminator" movies, it's not hard to see why. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week provided a glimpse of where he sees the social-media giant in a decade, and it involves a novel combination of drones, lasers, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. In other words, it's not the Facebook of Zuckerberg's formative years at Harvard, which he dropped out of 11 years ago to focus on building a social network for college students. To some, it may seem like a vision from a science-fiction movie. Facebook is getting into the business of chat bots, computer programs designed to simulate a conversation.

Mike Finley is a co-founder of AnswerRocket in charge of natural language processing and machine learning. Big innovations come in unexpected bursts. We grow accustomed to life and work as we know it, until something apparently simple brings about bold change. For example, we used phones for 100 years, but making them mobile transformed the world; we had the Internet for decades before the Web browser put digital education, entertainment and shopping in the hands of billions; and we documented our lives with physical pictures, paper records, CD-ROMs and thumb drives until Jeff Bezos brought us "the cloud." When individual creativity is enhanced by technical ingenuity, new behaviors and capabilities emerge.

"In machine learning, is more data always better than better algorithms?" No. There are times when more data helps, there are times when it doesn't. Probably one of the most famous quotes defending the power of data is that of Google's Research Director Peter Norvig claiming that "We don't have better algorithms. We just have more data.". This quote is usually linked to the article on "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data", co-authored by Norvig himself (you should probably be able to find the pdf on the web although the original is behind the IEEE paywall).

The problem of building an autonomous robot has traditionally been viewed as one of integration: connecting together modular components, each one designed to handle some portion of the perception and decision making process. For example, a vision system might be connected to a planner that might in turn provide commands to a low-level controller that drives the robot's motors. In this talk, I will discuss how ideas from deep learning can allow us to build robotic control mechanisms that combine both perception and control into a single system. This system can then be trained end-to-end on the task at hand. I will show how this end-to-end approach actually simplifies the perception and control problems, by allowing the perception and control mechanisms to adapt to one another and to the task.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) wants contractors to mine your social media posts to develop new ways for the US government to infer what you're really thinking and feeling -- and to predict what you'll do next. Pentagon documents released over the last few months identify ongoing classified research in this area that the federal government plans to expand, by investing millions more dollars. The unclassified documents, which call on external scientists, institutions and companies to submit proposals for research projects, not only catalogue how far US military capabilities have come, but also reveal the Pentagon's goals: building the US intelligence community's capacity to forecast population behavior at home and abroad, especially groups involved in political activism. They throw light on the extent to which the Pentagon's classified pre-crime R&D has advanced, and how the US military intends to deploy it in operations around the world. A new Funding Opportunity Announcement document issued by the DoD's Office of Naval Research (ONR) calls for research proposals on how mining social media can provide insight on people's real thoughts, emotions and beliefs, and thereby facilitate predictions of behavior.

Junior Austin Imperial and Senior Alex Hodge play with companion robot PARO at the School of Informatics & Computing's Intelligent Systems Open House event Friday afternoon at Georgian Room in the Indiana Memorial Union. The open house featured students presenting their research, live demonstrations, and the introduction of different types of robots in computing.

High-quality, low-cost online courses could be used to shift schools away from being "exam factories" and help students keep pace with the threat of automation, according to a new report by the Institute of Directors. The report argues that the internet allows schools to be more flexible and adapt learning towards "a future in which more and more work is taken over by robots or computers". Related: Welcome to the robot-based workforce: will your job become automated too? "The cost savings, convenience and flexibility that online learning offers has the potential to revolutionise education provision, but only if businesses and the education sector work together to capitalise on the potential of computer-based teaching applications to support employees in their pursuit of lifelong learning," the report said. Last year the CBI's director general also called for GCSEs to be scrapped and A-levels to be augmented by vocational courses. The report also calls for new tax incentives to encourage people to return to education, and to make it easier for employers to invest in their staff.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks you suffer from app overload, and last week he unveiled his solution: chatbots. Over the next few years, they may boost the bottom line of Facebook Inc. and other Internet companies while changing the way you use your smartphone. But first, they'll need to get a lot smarter. Chatbots--or bots, for short--are stripped-down software agents that understand what you type or say and respond by answering questions or executing tasks. Apple's Siri is a bot, and so is Amazon's Alexa.

Recent research has identified independent predictors of dementia to include age at diagnosis, transient ischemic attack and stroke status, and years of education, with vascular factors playing a greater role in disease pathogenesis than previously thought. The findings were presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). In the abstract, the researchers wrote that dementia encompasses a broad set of neurologic diseases, producing progressive declines in memory and/or thinking faculties, sometimes alongside personality and emotional disturbances. "Worldwide, approximately 35.6 million people have dementia, and this number is only expected to grow due to an aging population," they wrote. "Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to predict who will develop dementia, let alone what type. This makes it difficult to mobilize various preventive strategies supported by mounting evidence."