A startup that made a name for itself designing AI avatar clones of celebrities is turning its attention towards brands. Patrick Kulp is an emerging tech reporter at Adweek.

Daniel Fallmann is Founder and CEO of Mindbreeze, a leader in enterprise search, applied artificial intelligence and knowledge management. When faced with a challenge, human beings are generally quick to first try to develop creative solutions. We tend to pick the most logical explanation we can find, ignoring all contradictory or unprovable hypotheses in the process. However, this irrational pattern of thinking could eventually sabotage our efforts to create an actual intelligent machine. A cognitive bias known as rationalization is one such phenomenon that is tricky or even dangerous for AI.

One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency, even in complex environments, and its flexibility, even in changing environments. Efficiency is especially impressive because directly computing an optimal plan is intractable, even for modestly complex tasks, and yet people successfully solve myriad everyday problems despite limited cognitive resources. Standard accounts in psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence have suggested this is because people have a mental representation of a task and then use heuristics to plan in that representation. However, this approach generally assumes that mental representations are fixed. Here, we propose that mental representations can be controlled and that this provides opportunities to adaptively simplify problems so they can be more easily reasoned about -- a process we refer to as construal. We construct a formal model of this process and, in a series of large, pre-registered behavioral experiments, show both that construal is subject to online cognitive control and that people form value-guided construals that optimally balance the complexity of a representation and its utility for planning and acting. These results demonstrate how strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.

Have you used the customer service app with your bank the past year, or received an unexpected email with an offer you were actually interested in? Maybe it was a well-timed mortgage re-fi or even some savings at a favorite store. There's an enduring and unfortunate misperception that AI serves only to replace human workers and irritate human clients. But what if we don't have to be locked in a zero-sum game with the growing legion of digital intelligence? An increasing number of banks and insurers are finding that it's almost impossible to meet the rising customer expectations and needs that digital services and apps have unleashed.

It is virtually impossible to tease apart human capabilities from human cultural and other background knowledge, so this is necessary to provide an objective point of comparison against humans. Furthermore, a comprehensive understanding of human background knowledge, sufficient to not only recall but apply that knowledge, tests the cognitive capabilities essential to the human kind of understanding. I have recommended that human respondents be drawn from broad populations to ensure that this cultural knowledge is least-common-denominator rather than esoteric. The graders might be able to tell that they are scoring a non-human subject system. Difficulties with the Turing Test have demonstrated that this is probably not an issue. It is a relatively easy task to fool humans into thinking they are interacting with a human, even without human-level cognitive capabilities. Mimicking human interaction styles, though again not necessarily a goal of the subject system, should not be difficult for a system with cognition that is comparable to that of humans. Nevertheless, the reason the protocol attempts to disguise which respondents are human or non-human is not because this contributes to the evaluation, but merely to avoid implicit bias in scoring. All the test questions are raster images - does this mean the system has to do handwriting recognition?

Round-the-clock monitoring of human behavior and emotions is required in many healthcare applications which is very expensive but can be automated using machine learning (ML) and sensor technologies. Unfortunately, the lack of infrastructure for collection and sharing of such data is a bottleneck for ML research applied to healthcare. Our goal is to circumvent this bottleneck by simulating a human body in virtual environment. This will allow generation of potentially infinite amounts of shareable data from an individual as a function of his actions, interactions and emotions in a care facility or at home, with no risk of confidentiality breach or privacy invasion. In this paper, we develop for the first time a system consisting of computational models for synchronously synthesizing skeletal motion, electrocardiogram, blood pressure, respiration, and skin conductance signals as a function of an open-ended set of actions and emotions. Our experimental evaluations, involving user studies, benchmark datasets and comparison to findings in the literature, show that our models can generate skeletal motion and physiological signals with high fidelity. The proposed framework is modular and allows the flexibility to experiment with different models. In addition to facilitating ML research for round-the-clock monitoring at a reduced cost, the proposed framework will allow reusability of code and data, and may be used as a training tool for ML practitioners and healthcare professionals.

Would you like to be more rational? Who doesn't want to behave and think more reasonably? Good news: New research, from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, suggests mindfulness, or at least an aspect of it, can help. By "mindfulness"--a feature of Buddhism for thousands of years, and a subject of scientific investigation for a few decades--most people mean a mental state you can be in. If you find yourself bringing past or possible future events into your imagination, let those drift off, and attend again to your present sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Being mindful for a few seconds is easy.

Typically the presenters at a CES press conference don't get a lot of attention. Wearing a pink hooded sweatshirt with the phrase "Stay punk forever," Reah Keem was among presenters highlighting some of the offerings from LG, ranging from appliances to personal technology. LG describes her as a "virtual composer and DJ made even more human through deep learning technology." Keem was there to introduce the LG CLOi robot, which can disinfect high-traffic areas using ultraviolet light. You can watch Reah make her debut during LG's press conference Monday morning, at roughly the 22-minute mark.

CES has gone all-digital for the first time this year. Unsurprisingly, some companies are using the format change to experiment with their live-streamed press conferences. LG, for instance, used an entirely virtual human called Reah Keem to promote some of its products today. Sporting a hoodie with the slogan "stay punk forever," she explained that travel was an important part of her life, and how desperate she was to roam around the world and perform once again. Keep used those wishes to transition into the LG CLOi UV-C Robot, an already-announced machine that uses ultraviolet light to disinfect public and generally popular areas.

Machine learning has the potential to aid in mitigating the human effects of climate change. Previous applications of machine learning to tackle the human effects in climate change include approaches like informing individuals of their carbon footprint and strategies to reduce it. For these methods to be the most effective they must consider relevant social-psychological factors for each individual. Of social-psychological factors at play in climate change, affect has been previously identified as a key element in perceptions and willingness to engage in mitigative behaviours. In this work, we propose an investigation into how affect could be incorporated to enhance machine learning based interventions for climate change. We propose using affective agent-based modelling for climate change as well as the use of a simulated climate change social dilemma to explore the potential benefits of affective machine learning interventions. Behavioural and informational interventions can be a powerful tool in helping humans adopt mitigative behaviours. We expect that utilizing affective ML can make interventions an even more powerful tool and help mitigative behaviours become widely adopted.