The recent successes of AI have captured the wildest imagination of both the scientific communities and the general public. Robotics and AI amplify human potentials, increase productivity and are moving from simple reasoning towards human-like cognitive abilities. Current AI technologies are used in a set area of applications, ranging from healthcare, manufacturing, transport, energy, to financial services, banking, advertising, management consulting and government agencies. The global AI market is around 260 billion USD in 2016 and it is estimated to exceed 3 trillion by 2024. To understand the impact of AI, it is important to draw lessons from it's past successes and failures and this white paper provides a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of AI, its current status and future directions.

Passengers have been carried across London by the first self-driving train on a mainline railway in the UK. Govia Thameslink Railway promised that it would not spell the beginning of the end for drivers, who remain responsible for safety and can take control of the train at any time. Automated operation using a new digital signalling system will allow many more trains to pass through the congested tracks between St Pancras and Blackfriars in central London, giving space for an additional 60,000 passengers to commute at peak hours daily. After almost 18 months of testing, the first commuter train in automatic operation was Monday's 9.46am Thameslink service from Peterborough to Horsham. Shortly after 11.08am, the driver, Howard Weir, pressed the yellow button in the cab that allowed the train's computer to do the driving between St Pancras and Blackfriars.

Generally, computers slow down as they age. Their processors struggle to handle newer software. Apple even deliberately slows its iPhones as their batteries degrade. But Google researchers have published details of a project that could let a laptop or smartphone learn to do things better and faster over time. The researchers tackled a common problem in computing, called prefetching.

Siri and Alexa are clearly far from perfect, but there is hope that steady progress in machine learning will turn them into articulate helpers before long. A new test, however, may help show that a fundamentally different approach is required for AI systems to actually master language. Developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a nonprofit based in Seattle, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) will pose elementary-school-level multiple-choice science questions. Each question will require some understanding of how the world works. The project is described in a related research paper (pdf).

Machine Learning (ML) is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of modern research and application. The purpose of this review is to provide an introduction to the core concepts and tools of machine learning in a manner easily understood and intuitive to physicists. The review begins by covering fundamental concepts in ML and modern statistics such as the bias-variance tradeoff, overfitting, regularization, and generalization before moving on to more advanced topics in both supervised and unsupervised learning. Topics covered in the review include ensemble models, deep learning and neural networks, clustering and data visualization, energy-based models (including MaxEnt models and Restricted Boltzmann Machines), and variational methods. Throughout, we emphasize the many natural connections between ML and statistical physics. A notable aspect of the review is the use of Python notebooks to introduce modern ML/statistical packages to readers using physics-inspired datasets (the Ising Model and Monte-Carlo simulations of supersymmetric decays of proton-proton collisions). We conclude with an extended outlook discussing possible uses of machine learning for furthering our understanding of the physical world as well as open problems in ML where physicists maybe able to contribute. (Notebooks are available at https://physics.bu.edu/~pankajm/MLnotebooks.html )

The prevalence of online media has attracted researchers from various domains to explore human behavior and make interesting predictions. In this research, we leverage heterogeneous social media data collected from various online platforms to predict Taiwan's 2016 presidential election. In contrast to most existing research, we take a "signal" view of heterogeneous information and adopt the Kalman filter to fuse multiple signals into daily vote predictions for the candidates. We also consider events that influenced the election in a quantitative manner based on the so-called event study model that originated in the field of financial research. We obtained the following interesting findings. First, public opinions in online media dominate traditional polls in Taiwan election prediction in terms of both predictive power and timeliness. But offline polls can still function on alleviating the sample bias of online opinions. Second, although online signals converge as election day approaches, the simple Facebook "Like" is consistently the strongest indicator of the election result. Third, most influential events have a strong connection to cross-strait relations, and the Chou Tzu-yu flag incident followed by the apology video one day before the election increased the vote share of Tsai Ing-Wen by 3.66%. This research justifies the predictive power of online media in politics and the advantages of information fusion. The combined use of the Kalman filter and the event study method contributes to the data-driven political analytics paradigm for both prediction and attribution purposes.

At the THINK 2018 conference, IBM announced Watson Assistant, a new addition to its cognitive computing platform. This service enables developers to build digital assistants that can interact through conversational user experience. Watson Assistant is not entirely new to developers familiar with IBM Cloud. It's an enhancement to an existing service called Conversation. In its improved version, the API supports newer conversational flow combined with natural language understanding.

Two hundred students, industry professionals, and academic leaders convened at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the second annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference on March 5. The conference grew from 150 participants last year, and highlighted local strength in academics and health care. "The WiDS conference highlighted female leadership in data science in the Boston area," said Caroline Uhler, a member of the WiDS steering committee who is an IDSS core faculty member and assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. "This event is particularly important to encourage more female scientists in related areas to join this emerging area that has such broad societal impact." Regina Barzilay, Delta Electronics Professor of EECS, gave the first presentation on how data science and machine learning approaches are improving cancer research. Barzilay said her experiences as a breast cancer survivor motivates her work.

For this year's report, I took a stab at learning all the CSS/JS that I've always wanted to know, and then went after the task of making a fully responsive report. I've succeeded in doing so, and so this PDF version isn't as good as the real thing. In the next few days I will be sharing a link to the real digital experience. But for now -- enjoy this static version of the report which has a few parts that couldn't render to static form. Because ... this year's report is truly computationally designed and therefore needs to be expressed appropriately (smile). Expect a video version on my new YouTube channel "John Maeda is Learning." What can I do about it? As the marginal return on computing power (a la Moore's law) diminishes and technology is less of a differentiating factor, the value of design has entered the foreground. Five (20%) of the top cumulative-funded VC- backed ventures that have raised additional capital since 2013 are noted to have designer co-founders.

According to a recent Teradata study, 80% of IT and business decision-makers have already implemented some form of artificial intelligence (AI) in their business. The study also found that companies have a desire to increase AI spending. Forty-two percent of respondents to the Teradata study said they thought there was more room for AI implementation across the business, and 30% said their organizations weren't investing enough in AI. Forrester recently released their 2018 Predictions and also found that firms have an interest investing in AI. Fifty-one percent of their 2017 respondents said their firms were investing in AI, up from 40% in 2016, and 70% of respondents said their firms will have implemented AI within the next 12 months.