Judea Pearl, chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, has written his first book intended for a general audience, "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect." The book, which was written with co-author Dana Mackenzie, explores causality -- the study of cause and effect -- from its origins to its applications at the leading edges of science. Pearl, a UCLA faculty member since 1970, received the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize" in computing, for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty. His new book will be published on May 15. That same day, Pearl will deliver a talk at the Charles E. Young Research Library as part of the UCLA Library Writer Series.

CIOs are struggling to accelerate deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). A recent Gartner survey of global CIOs found that only 4% of respondents had deployed AI. However, the survey also found that one-fifth of the CIOs are already piloting or planning to pilot AI in the short term. Such ambition puts these leaders in a challenging position. AI efforts are already stressing staff, skills, and the readiness of in-house and third-party AI products and services. Without effective strategic plans for AI, organizations risk wasting money, falling short in performance and falling behind their business rivals.

The search for planets beyond our solar system will be taken up by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a new NASA spacecraft scheduled to launch in the first half of the year that will focus on finding exoplanets around bright stars and those close to Earth. Its predecessor -- NASA's Kepler missions -- discovered more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets, including two recently spotted with artificial intelligence. Researchers plan to use machine learning to scour more data from Kepler in search of planets that may have been overlooked. Last year, a small number of young patients were treated for cancer with gene-edited cells, and the first gene editing was done directly in the body of a patient with the metabolic disease Hunter's syndrome. "Every single study will look at what they did and will [try to] follow suit," says Fyodor Urnov, associate director of Altius Institute of Biomedical Sciences.

Fully autonomous cars are expected to dramatically increase driving safety when they eventually hit the roads, but it could cause new hazards for other road users. And to be successful, people have to actually want them on the roads. "We are now considering how society in general is going to interact with these vehicles," Shutko said. "I think it will help with overall acceptance of them." Details: Ford teamed up with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute for the study.

The bottom line: Other scientists at the conference said back-propagation still has a core role in AI's future. But Hinton said that, to push materially ahead, entirely new methods will probably have to be invented. "Max Planck said, 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said." How it works: In back propagation, labels or "weights" are used to represent a photo or voice within a brain-like neural layer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) got a lot of press in 2016, not least because of the victory of Google's AI program over Lee Sedol, the world's best Go player. That triumph of machine over human elicited numerous responses, some enthusiastic and some anxious, all sharing the assumption that the goal of artificial intelligence is to achieve "human-level intelligence" or, as some predict, "superintelligence." "I don't care so much whether what we are building is real intelligence," says Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. "We know how to build real intelligence--my wife and I did it twice, although she did a lot more of the work. We don't need to duplicate humans. That's why I focus on having tools to help us rather than duplicate what we already know how to do. We want humans and machines to partner and do something that they cannot do on their own."

John McCarthy, the inventor of programming language Lisp and a pioneer in "artificial intelligence" technology, died Monday night. Mashable reports that McCarthy was also one of the first people to propose "selling computing power through a utility business model," in 1961. Tributes to McCarthy poured in Tuesday, some from posters on Usenet, where McCarthy was an active presence, or from technology writers like Steven Levy, who wrote on Twitter: "Broke news to Siri that John McCarthy... died. She took it well but we humans will miss him." McCarthy's Web site also has a wide following.

Mr Gregory was a pioneer of human psychology, and made significant advances in the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Born in London in 1923, he was the son of astronomer Christopher Gregory. Mr Gregory spent five years in the RAF during the Second World War, after being called up at the age of 18. After exhibiting obvious academic talent the RAF offered Mr Gregory a scholarship to study philosophy and experimental psychology at Downing College, Cambridge and after proving himself a successful scientist and inventor he moved to Edinburgh, where he took up a post as professor of bionics. There he co-founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, the first of its kind in the UK.

In January, the British-American computer scientist Stuart Russell drafted and became the first signatory of an open letter calling for researchers to look beyond the goal of merely making artificial intelligence more powerful. "We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial," the letter states. "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do." Thousands of people have since signed the letter, including leading artificial intelligence researchers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other industry hubs along with top computer scientists, physicists and philosophers around the world. By the end of March, about 300 research groups had applied to pursue new research into "keeping artificial intelligence beneficial" with funds contributed by the letter's 37th signatory, the inventor-entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Marvin Minsky has long been one of the great human intelligences working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). A professor at MIT, where he has worked since 1957 and cofounded the AI laboratory in 1959, Minsky is also an inventor, philosopher, and author. In recent years, Minsky has focused his formidable talents on trying to impart the human capacity for commonsense reasoning to machines. In this interview, conducted on November 3, 2010 by "Smartest Machine on Earth" producer Michael Bicks, hear Minsky's take on why it's important to recreate human intelligence, what a five-year-old can do that even the smartest machine cannot, and whether someone will ever invent a computer that laughs at Seinfeld. Marvin Minsky says that when it comes to designing a smart machine, "you mustn't look for a magic bullet"--that is, just a single way to solve all problems.