ARLINGTON, Va.--With support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an artificial intelligence software program named Quixote to teach robots to read stories, learn acceptable behavior and understand successful ways to conduct themselves in diverse social situations. "For years, researchers have debated how to teach robots to act in ways that are appropriate, non-intrusive and trustworthy," said Marc Steinberg, an ONR program manager who oversees the research. "One important question is how to explain complex concepts such as policies, values or ethics to robots. Humans are really good at using narrative stories to make sense of the world and communicate to other people. This could one day be an effective way to interact with robots."

I'm relieved Volition is making something other than Saints Row V. Which is not to say they'll never make one--or that it's not secretly in development right now. But if it is, it's being developed alongside the all-new Agents of Mayhem, which Volition revealed right before E3. It's set in the Saints Row universe, but trades the town of Steelport for Seoul, South Korea and the Saints themselves for a group of superheroes known as the Multi-national AgencY for Hunting Evil Masterminds or M.A.Y.H.E.M. And yes, they lifted the "Y" from the end of "Agency." But after playing a demo of the game recently, I'm a bit worried--worried that maybe Saints Row isn't quite as enjoyable without the Saints.

We have constructed this page in order to sketch how AI is linked to various other disciplines, in both the sciences and humanities. We have done this not only in the hope of helping students and others who are just starting to study AI but also of facilitating further interactions between the AI community and other communities. The set of links is not exhaustive, nor is the explanation given for each individual link. In particular, we do not include all disciplines that do or could use AI tools and/or contribute tools to AI. We concentrate rather on disciplines where there is profound interaction in terms of research ideas.

In the future, a new generation of autonomous robots is set to complete tasks autonomously, even if something unforeseeable happens. With the support of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, information technology experts in Graz are working to advance the development of artificial intelligence and equip robots with common sense. Something that children learn through play and that adults are able to do on the basis of past experience, such as responding to unexpected situations, remains one of the great challenges in robotics. Autonomous systems are expected to complete tasks given to them without external input. The deployment of such intelligent robots would be particularly important in critical situations – such as environmental disasters or industrial accidents.

In the future, a new generation of autonomous robots is set to complete tasks autonomously, even if something unforeseeable happens. With the support of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, information technology experts in Graz are working to advance the development of artificial intelligence and equip robots with common sense. Something that children learn through play and that adults are able to do on the basis of past experience, such as responding to unexpected situations, remains one of the great challenges in robotics. Autonomous systems are expected to complete tasks given to them without external input. The deployment of such intelligent robots would be particularly important in critical situations – such as environmental disasters or industrial accidents.

Versu is a text-based simulationist interactive drama. Because it uses autonomous agents, the drama is highly replayable: you can play the same story from multiple perspectives, or assign different characters to the various roles. The architecture relies on the notion of a social practice to achieve coordination between the independent autonomous agents. A social practice describes a recurring social situation, and is a successor to the Schankian script. Social practices are implemented as reactive joint plans, providing affordances to the agents who participate in them.

We consider a group of Bayesian agents who try to estimate a state of the world $\theta$ through interaction on a social network. Each agent $v$ initially receives a private measurement of $\theta$: a number $S_v$ picked from a Gaussian distribution with mean $\theta$ and standard deviation one. Then, in each discrete time iteration, each reveals its estimate of $\theta$ to its neighbors, and, observing its neighbors' actions, updates its belief using Bayes' Law. This process aggregates information efficiently, in the sense that all the agents converge to the belief that they would have, had they access to all the private measurements. We show that this process is computationally efficient, so that each agent's calculation can be easily carried out. We also show that on any graph the process converges after at most $2N \cdot D$ steps, where $N$ is the number of agents and $D$ is the diameter of the network. Finally, we show that on trees and on distance transitive-graphs the process converges after $D$ steps, and that it preserves privacy, so that agents learn very little about the private signal of most other agents, despite the efficient aggregation of information. Our results extend those in an unpublished manuscript of the first and last authors.

Google is worried about artificial intelligence. No, not that it will become sentient and take over the world, but that, say, a helpful house robot might accidentally skewer its owner with a knife. The company's latest AI research paper delves into this issue under the title "Concrete Problems In AI Safety." Really, though, that's just a fancy way of saying "How Are We Going To Stop These Terror-Bots Killing Us All In Our Sleep." To answer this brain-tickler, Google's computer scientists have landed on five "practical research problems" -- key issues that programmers will need to consider before they start creating the next Johnny Five.

Google is worried about artificial intelligence. No, not that it will become sentient and take over the world, but that, say, a helpful house robot might accidentally skewer its owner with a knife. The company's latest AI research paper delves into this issue under the title "Concrete Problems In AI Safety." Really, though, that's just a fancy way of saying "How Are We Going To Stop These Terror-Bots Killing Us All In Our Sleep." To answer this brain-tickler, Google's researchers have landed on five "practical research problems" -- key issues that programmers will need to consider before they start creating the next Johnny Five.

Swarm intelligence has made some impressive predictions on horse racing this season, by correctly placing the top four Kentucky Derby finishers last month. This might affect bookies but what about horses? If an "artificial" intelligence can benefit betting, can it help keep a horse healthy and performing well? A French startup called Arionea thinks so. The company is betting big that artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionize the racetrack -- with the help of a new device dubbed the Equimetre.