The future has arrived in Bakersfield, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it. For nearly three hours, the conversation was nonstop at the home of Audrey and Ken Mattlin, who happen to live with several robots. There's ElliQ, who resembles a table lamp and speaks mainly to Audrey, 84, whom the robot refers to by a nickname. As in, "How did you sleep, Jelly Bean?" Goo-goo-eyed Astro looks like a short-handled vacuum cleaner with an electronic tablet for a face. He scoots around the house on wheels and follows people on command.

All of the names, characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. Information regarding permission, write to: Entropy Publications, LLC, San Francisco, CA, query@entropypublishing.com. It was Billy's idea to rip off the liquor store. He heard brotherabe on his cell say the place was ripe. Heart of the hood, where this kinda crap happens all the time. And Lucky Liquors is run by this old chink. Gook's at the mart from opening til closing cuz he too damn cheap to hire help from the Projects. Serves him right getting tagged every couple of months. Slide convincing Ty to do the deed. Bluds since Sunshine Daycare, they bled enough and shredded enough to earn respect as the cracka/nigga posse not to jack. Lunchroom Thursday, Billy goes on spouting about taking what they deserve for being dissed since they was kids. From jacking construction sites at seven, to ripping music, movies and apps off the net and selling it on Craigslist at eleven, Tyron is always angling for money. To Ty, it buys respect. He be flipping off his hammered old man and dick-head brother on the way outta town, and his mom too, if she'd stuck around. "One strike gets us a sled and elevates us the rest a high school, blud. Then we outta here, down to Hollywood, man, do some rappin, some actin, be whoever we wanta be, Ty. And even if we get caught, but we won't, the most we'd get is maybe a short stint in juvie since we ain't got no rap sheets. And if we don't get caught, and we won't, I heard Chris say the gets around five large." Tyron stares at Audrey, the hoodrat who brought him out, across the lunchroom, now slumming with the cracka slanger, Baker. "Five grand would get us some respectable treads," Ty says. "We be legally stylin by the weekend if we did the deed this week." "Late afternoon, tomorra," Tyron says. Hoodies and caps, keep our mugs down, away from cameras, and we golden." "We ain't gonna just glide in there and ask for cash, blud. And copin a gun's gonna take time, and it ain't gonna be cheap," Billy feels a need to reality check him. "We don't need no gun. No shit Tyron hated guns. Took his old man out in a drive-by in their driveway when he was nine and his dad's brains landed all over him.

This conversation with the composer Philip Glass and me discusses an exciting project in partnership with OpenAi, in which we trained a neural net on a corpus of Glass' work. He offers commentary on the music created by "his AI", as well as insights on composition and creating art. We then talk about the different limitations and capacities of humans and Artificial Intelligence–if and how neural nets can help us create art, appreciate art, and find the same things humans find meaningful. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, this call took place over video conference in December 2020. Art and tech are both captivating to me because they frame the elevation and the limitations of being human. Art is also closely intertwined with technological advancements, as movement shifting art seems predicated on tech. For example, the photography of Martin Munkacsi from the 1920s and 1930s revolutionized the art, as he is often credited for being the first photographer to explore dynamic and candid styles. The emergence and ability of these new forms of creation coincided with the technological advancements at the time that enabled flash and faster shutters–candid and spontaneous movement shots wouldn't have been technically possible to make with the cameras that existed before. The advancements in machine learning today, likewise, excite me for the possibilities and new forms in art and creation. The goal of this project is to explore the capacities of artificial intelligence as a new medium (or instrument or tool?) for art, and to create a collaborative music composition with Philip Glass and "his AI." More details about the project can be found below. Philip: Nice to see you.

Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However, current techniques still lag for conversing with humans on a personal level and fully relating to them. The University of Michigan's submission to the Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 3, Audrey, is an open-domain conversational chat-bot that aims to engage customers on these levels through interest driven conversations guided by customers' personalities and emotions. Audrey is built from socially-aware models such as Emotion Detection and a Personal Understanding Module to grasp a deeper understanding of users' interests and desires. Our architecture interacts with customers using a hybrid approach balanced between knowledge-driven response generators and context-driven neural response generators to cater to all three levels of conversations. During the semi-finals period, we achieved an average cumulative rating of 3.25 on a 1-5 Likert scale.

The market for AI (artificial intelligence) technologies is going to expand tremendously in the next decade. Grand View Research says the global AI market will reach $733.7 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 42.2%. One of the many sectors that will increasingly look to leverage AI technologies between now and 2027 (and beyond) is first response. In fact, in some cases, the first-response industry is already engaged in piloting AI technologies for use on the front lines. What AI-related innovations are to come, and how will they make first responders' jobs easier?

In an experiment, the AUDREY system improved communication between paramedics in the field and emergency room physicians at Kingston General Hospital. Hastings-Quinte Paramedic Chief Doug Socha tells Quinte News in the experiment AUDREY was used for a simulated male complaining of chest pains, analyzing video to assist in search and rescue operations, and linking to CCTV cameras to help detect people in a disaster situation. Socha says the Audrey system has also been shown to be quicker than a drone at finding a lost person. "Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) is excited to bring first responders together with technology like AUDREY to improve decision-making on the front line in our communities," said Gerry Doucette, from DRDC CSS. "Artificial intelligence and other advanced decision supports are positioned to improve patient outcomes for paramedic calls for service."

WASHINGTON--A new initiative kicks off today to evaluate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and situational awareness technologies during critical incidents. The effort is a joint partnership between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and Canada's Department of National Defence science and technology organization, Defence Research and Development Canada Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS) to ensure both American and Canadian next generation first responders are better connected, protected and fully aware during critical incidents. Over the next two years, the two countries will collaborate on new research and development projects, hold joint workshops and field experiments and share best practices and lessons learned to ensure the safety and effectiveness of first responders and the public. "Canadian and American responders have very similar requirements," said John Merrill, DHS S&T's Director of Next Generation First Responder Apex Program. "By jointly determining research and development priorities between the two countries, we can reach our goal faster and more efficiently, eliminating duplication of effort and optimizing funding."

Since Apple developed Siri there have been great strides made in the science of voice recognition. Will we soon be throwing away our mice and keyboards and simply talking to our computers? Or will the problems I have with Alexa continue to haunt voice recognition? My wife and I are like all married couples at breakfast. We do not speak to each other.

For anyone who's ever seen an early episode of Star Trek, recall Captain Kirk speaking to the "computer," even using that keyword to summon the computing power of the Starship Enterprise to answer a complex question requiring an expeditious answer. Ever since Gene Roddenberry introduced his sci-fi interpretation of the future, we've been chasing that dream, for as early as 1952, Bell Labs scientists introduced "Audrey," a system that recognized spoken numeric digits. Fast-forward from the days of Star Trek and Audrey, and researchers have turned the science fiction of a seamless voice interface into reality. Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Google's voice assistant are all manifestations of decades worth of research. Thanks to this tech confluence, today's voice systems can understand the context of an entire conversation, even the personality of whom they are conversing with.

A toddler meanders unsteadily through the living room, pausing by a sleek black cylinder in the corner. "Alexa," he says in a high-pitched voice. The cylinder acknowledges the request, despite the muffled pronunciation, and the music starts. Alexa, a cloud-based speech recognition software from Amazon and the brain of its black cylindrical loudspeaker Echo, has been a big hit around the world – except for the younger ones, who take it for granted. Children will grow up alongside it, just as Alexa will evolve, as the AI powering it learns to answer more and more questions, and – perhaps – one day even converses freely with people.