The annual International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) is an international conference on research, applications, languages, and standards for rule technologies. RuleML is a leading conference to build bridges between academe and industry in the field of rules and its applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack. It is devoted to rule-based programming and rulebased systems including production rules systems, logic programming rule engines, and business rule engines/business rule management systems; semantic web rule languages and rule standards; rule-based event-processing languages (EPLs) and technologies; and research on inference rules, transformation rules, decision rules, production rules, and ECA rules. The Ninth International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2015) was held in Berlin, Germany, August 2-5. The symposium was organized by Adrian Paschke (general chair), Fariba Sadri (program cochair), Nick Bassiliades (program cochair), and Georg Gottlob program cochair).

MAgent is a research platform for many-agent reinforcement learning. Unlike previous research platforms that focus on reinforcement learning research with a single agent or only few agents, MAgent aims at supporting reinforcement learning research that scales up from hundreds to millions of agents. MAgent supports Linux and OS X running Python 2.7 or python 3. We make no assumptions about the structure of your agents. You can write rule-based algorithms or use deep learning frameworks. The training time of following tasks is about 1 day on a GTX1080-Ti card.

For those who may find awkward the reference to "half a decade" and not the "next decade" here is why: AI is evolving at such a staggering rate that it is simply not possible to foresee what it will represent in 10 years' time. As Maurice Conti (Chief Innovation Officer at Telefónica Alpha and former director at Autodesk) reminded on his intervention at TEDX in February 2017, in human history the "Hunter-Gatherer" age lasted for several million years, then the Agricultural age lasted several thousand years, the Industrial age has been around for a couple of centuries now, the Information age has merely a few decades and the AI age (although the concept was drawn in the 1950s) has in fact effectively started less than half a decade ago. It is very easy to mistake AI for RPA (Robotic Process Automation), so let's start by defining what sets them apart. RPA results from developing detail instructions that are translated into code which a computer interprets while actuating a robot. Therefore, RPA enables the integration with Mechatronics (robotic physical machines), to partially or fully automate human activities which are manual, repetitive and rule-based.

If ever there was an industry ripe for disruption it is surely the legal profession. Unlike many other sectors, however, it has tended to be a little reticent about embracing technology to innovate. After all, the traditional way of doing business for legal firms has been extremely profitable. The model typically involves a bunch of low-paid minions doing grunt work while a few partners earn eye-wateringly high sums. Moreover, many legal professionals look upon technology with fear and who could blame them when a forecast from Deloitte published last year predicted that more than 100,000 jobs in the sector could be automated within the next 20 years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was one of 2017's hottest industry buzzwords as many have begun turning to machines to solve problems that are simply too large for humans to calculate. Once upon a time, AI was an academic pursuit -- but now it has become more affordable and attainable to pursue on a smaller scale, opening it up to use by a variety of companies for a variety of purposes. Feedzai recently told PYMNTS that Big Data paved the way for this shift, and that by 2020, U.S. companies could be saving as much as $60 billion thanks to the help of AI and machine learning. Business management consultancy Accenture expects AI to add $8.3 trillion in economic activity for the U.S. by 2035. It's clear that this trend is building some significant momentum in the payments space and adjacent industries.

It's Christmas Day!! How many carol singers have you encountered so far this? Or how many times have you heard Michael Bublé on repeat? Whilst there's a new Christmas Number One every year, they're never particularly festive thanks to the X-Factor, and no one seems to be dedicating their time to creating a new generation of Christmas classics. What to do when humans are failing at a task? Last Christmas, Researchers from University of Toronto developed an AI system that composes and then sings a Christmas song through analysing an image that you upload.

With pressure constantly on profit margins, organisations need to strike a balance between improving cost efficiencies and customer satisfaction. This has led to a growing interest in the rapidly advancing area of robots to create a virtual workforce; transforming business processes by automating manual, rules-based, back-office administrative processes. This also has benefits for future workers – there's now a strong argument for reducing workers' pension age as a result of boosting UK productivity through artificial intelligence (AI). The re-engineering of processes through automation, known as robotic process automation (RPA), is being applied to a wide range of industries to improve speed, quality and consistency of service delivery. There's no question that RPA technology provides a number of straightforward and powerful business benefits.

President Donald Trump banned the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using a list of words, which include "transgender" and "evidence-based." Needless to say, social media users did not take lightly to the president's decision. In a meeting, led by Alison Kelly, a senior leader in the agency's Office of Financial Services, CDC policy analysts, who are tasked with preparing the 2019 budget that is expected to be released in February, were handed out a list of words that were forbidden to use in official documents for the budget. The mandate from the Trump administration banned the use of seven words – "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based," "science-based." The news of the ban was originally reported by the Washington Post, which caused immediate outrage among Twitter users.

Email marketing is in for a complete overhaul. With AI, email marketing isn't limited to rule-based triggers but has evolved into a means of more in-the-moment personalization. AI has filled in the missing gap between traditional shopping and online shopping with 1:1 personalization. Here are four of the ways AI has changed email marketing for better. You have three seconds to seize the shopper's attention.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of rules the administration announced in October that allowed businesses or non-profits to obtain exemptions on moral or religious grounds.