Grappling with the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence is one of the first things science fiction ever did as a genre. Yet most sci-fi books, movies, and games explore those ideas from the perspective of a person, whether we're taking down SHODAN in System Shock or chatting with Cortana in Halo. That's something the developers of Per Aspera, Tlön Industries, wanted to change. From their offices in Buenos Aires the team of about 12 people have spent the last few years trying to figure out what it would be like to inhabit the mind of a newly awakened—a newborn—Artificial Consciousness.The result is Per Aspera, a strategic city-builder that has players working to terraform Mars as the artificial consciousness AMI. You're a genderless superintelligence capable of incredible things, but you're also effectively a child with no conception of society or social interaction.

We propose a novel end-to-end Aspect-based Rating Prediction model (AspeRa) that estimates user rating based on review texts for the items and at the same time discovers coherent aspects of reviews that can be used to explain predictions or profile users. The AspeRa model uses max-margin losses for joint item and user embedding learning and a dual-headed architecture; it significantly outperforms recently proposed state-of-the-art models such as DeepCoNN, HFT, NARRE, and TransRev on two real world data sets of user reviews. With qualitative examination of the aspects and quantitative evaluation of rating prediction models based on these aspects, we show how aspect embeddings can be used in a recommender system.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.--You knew it was coming, right? When you walk around with more computing power in your pocket than it took to launch a Saturn V rocket to the moon, you get the hint that computers are increasingly doing work that we either don't like doing or never could do before. For example, take logging raw video and creating data files to let news organizations search for just the right clip when we need it. Bingo… the AI system logged it and made it available on the server. AI is also the tool behind giving viewers a better experience when they visit a station's web page.