Smart-home is an application domain which brings together home automation and ambient intelligence to ease life of dwellers and to provide support to people in loss of autonomy. The development of smarthomes is not only a cultural and technological evolution but is also recognized as one way to address the challenges created by an aging population in developed countries [42]. If home automation is concerned with sensing (sensors, actuators, middle-ware) and low-level automation (heating control, lighting control), Ambient Intelligence should provide perception and reasoning capabilities into the smart-home ecosystem. However, although the development of smart-homes is supported by a large amount of research and industrial projects, it has not reached a large public since many challenges are still to be addressed. One of the main challenges is due to the complexity of setting up the smart-home system in case of new situations (devices, house, dwellers, after an accident, etc.).

Conceptual domain models, such as taxonomies, knowledge graphs or Extended Entity Relationship (EER) diagrams are core to all information systems. The task of verifying the correctness of these models is of high interest to the knowledge and software engineering communities and attracted the first solution approaches using human computation. Yet, since these solutions are published within the boundaries of their communities, there is a lack of concerted work on this topic. As a first step to alleviate this status quo, we formalize the problem of verifying conceptual models and propose a generic approach (VeriCoM) to solve it with human computation techniques. We show how VeriCoM was applied in a software engineering use case focusing on verifying the correctness of an EER diagram against a system specification document. An evaluation of VeriCoM in a series of four workshops within one controlled experiment performed with a crowd of semi-experts lead to the identification of a set of defects with precision of 73% and a recall from a Gold Standard defect set of 63%.

While the amount of data stored in current information systems continuously grows, and the processes making use of such data become more and more complex, extracting knowledge and getting insights from these data, as well as governing both data and the associated processes, are still challenging tasks. The problem is complicated by the proliferation of data sources and services both within a single organization, and in cooperating environments. Effectively accessing, integrating and managing data in complex organizations is still one of the main issues faced by the information technology industry today. Indeed, it is not surprising that data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation phase of a project, compared with the data minining and knowledge discovery phase. Whether you call it data wrangling, data munging, or data integration, it is estimated that 50%-80% of a data scientists time is spent on collecting and organizing data for analysis. If we consider that in any complex organization, data governance is also essential for tasks other than data analytics, we can conclude that the challenge of identifying, gathering, retaining, and providing access to all relevant data for the business at an acceptable cost, is huge.

A self-taught artificial intelligence (AI) system called DeepCube has mastered solving the Rubik's Cube puzzle in just 44 hours without human intervention. The system's inventors have detailed their design in a paper titled'Solving the Rubik's Cube Without Human Knowledge'. "A generally intelligent agent must be able to teach itself how to solve problems in complex domains with minimal human supervision," write the paper's authors. "Indeed, if we're ever going to achieve a general, human-like machine intelligence, we'll have to develop systems that can learn and then apply those learnings to real-world applications." While many AI systems have been taught to play games, mastering the complexity of a Rubik's Cube posed a unique set of challenges.

We present a principled way of extending a classical AI planning formalism with systems of state constraints, which relate - sometimes determine - the values of variables in each state traversed by the plan. This extension occupies an attractive middle ground between expressivity and complexity. It enables modelling a new range of problems, as well as formulating more efficient models of classical planning problems. An example of the former is planning-based control of networked physical systems - power networks, for example - in which a local, discrete control action can have global effects on continuous quantities, such as altering flows across the entire network. At the same time, our extension remains decidable as long as the satisfiability of sets of state constraints is decidable, including in the presence of numeric state variables, and we demonstrate that effective techniques for cost-optimal planning known in the classical setting - in particular, relaxation-based admissible heuristics - can be adapted to the extended formalism. In this paper, we apply our approach to constraints in the form of linear or non-linear equations over numeric state variables, but the approach is independent of the type of state constraints, as long as there exists a procedure that decides their consistency. The planner and the constraint solver interact through a well-defined, narrow interface, in which the solver requires no specialisation to the planning context.

Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name

Specialty drugs account for just 2% of all medicines prescribed, yet they are on pace to comprise 50% of the drug spend in the next few years – ballooning to $400B in the US alone by 2020. Traditional approaches to drug utilization and cost management are simply not working. And biopharmaceutical pipelines are filled with new, high-priced, specialty drugs that continue to pressure health care budgets around the world. There is currently estimated to be up to $20billion in annual, solvable Specialty Rx inefficiencies in the US alone. By identifying which drugs are most effective for which patients (precision analytics for precision medicine) can a Decision support system (DSS) help solve the growing problem with Specialty Drug Use and Cost out of Control? This trend is unsustainable to the healthcare system.

Can machines design? Can they come up with creative solutions to problems and build tools and artifacts across a wide range of domains? Recent advances in the field of computational creativity and formal Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) provide frameworks for machines with the general ability to design. In this paper we propose to integrate a formal computational creativity framework into the G\"odel machine framework. We call the resulting framework design G\"odel machine. Such a machine could solve a variety of design problems by generating novel concepts. In addition, it could change the way these concepts are generated by modifying itself. The design G\"odel machine is able to improve its initial design program, once it has proven that a modification would increase its return on the utility function. Finally, we sketch out a specific version of the design G\"odel machine which specifically addresses the design of complex software and hardware systems. Future work aims at the development of a more formal version of the design G\"odel machine and a proof of concept implementation.

Our next interaction in the series of interviews for analytics hiring scenario in India is with Professor U Dinesh Kumar, Chairperson, Analytics Lab at IIM-B, and faculty in the Decision Sciences and Information Systems (DSIS) area at IIM Bangalore. IIM Bangalore has been a pioneer in providing analytics courses to freshers as well as working professionals to gain a strong foothold in areas like analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science, among others. Dinesh Kumar: The trend is obviously increasing with many recruiting senior management positions in analytics. Having said that, it is still behind western countries. For example, In 2016 MIT Sloan management review reported that 54 percent of Fortune 1000 companies had Chief Data Office, but the corresponding number in India is much lower.

Two algorithms, collectively called Deep Cube, typically can solve the 3-D combination puzzle within 30 moves, which is less than or equal to systems that use human knowledge, according to the research paper. Less than 5.8% of the world's population can solve the Rubik's Cube, according to the Rubik's website.