In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh--spoken by less than one per cent of the country--set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity. After reformers launched Rumantsch Grischun, a standardized version of Romansh's various dialects, traditionalists denounced it as a "bastard," a "castrated" tongue, an act of "linguistic murder." Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters--the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that "professor" was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid's wife served, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi. Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland's least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major "idioms," not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid's authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: " ." Translation: "I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem." Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn't grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the "Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun," a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion.

Synthetically created Cross-Lingual Summarisation (CLS) datasets are prone to include document-summary pairs where the reference summary is unfaithful to the corresponding document as it contains content not supported by the document (i.e., hallucinated content). This low data quality misleads model learning and obscures evaluation results. Automatic ways to assess hallucinations and improve training have been proposed for monolingual summarisation, predominantly in English. For CLS, we propose to use off-the-shelf cross-lingual Natural Language Inference (X-NLI) to evaluate faithfulness of reference and model generated summaries. Then, we study training approaches that are aware of faithfulness issues in the training data and propose an approach that uses unlikelihood loss to teach a model about unfaithful summary sequences. Our results show that it is possible to train CLS models that yield more faithful summaries while maintaining comparable or better informativess.

Artificial intelligence systems are often criticized for built-in biases. Commercial facial-recognition software, for instance, may fail when attempting to classify women and people of color. In an effort to help make AI fairer in a variety of ways, Facebook (FB) is rolling out a new data set for AI researchers that includes a diverse group of paid actors who were explicitly asked to provide their own ages and genders. Facebook hopes researchers will use the open-source data set, which it announced Thursday, to help judge whether AI systems work well for people of different ages, genders, skin tones, and in different types of lighting. Facebook also released the data set internally for use within Facebook itself; the company said in a blog post that it is "encouraging" teams to use it.

We have actual people being affected by these algorithms. We see things in the news such as algorithms that predict recidivism -- whether someone will re-commit a particular crime -- and set a bail amount or pass that information on to a judge who decides whether or not to set bail. The algorithms used to make these predictions end up relying on correlations with socioeconomic status, or race, or gender. So someone who might have a very similar background to you but differs across race or gender might have a very different outcome because of what the algorithm predicts. Do you think people are generally aware of the degree to which these algorithms are already part of everyday life?

Artificial intelligence technology is advancing very rapidly and is going to fundamentally change how we get our healthcare, with virtual doctors and AI-powered diagnostics on the horizon, Canton said. Read more: 3 things we learned from Facebook's AI chief about the future of artificial intelligence "We came out of the AI winter," he said, referring to a period when AI tech fell out of favor within the industry. Canton attributes today's AI renaissance to advances in how computers can learn -- such as reinforced machine learning -- and the abundance of data now available for machines to learn from. Innovations like 3D-printed organs will also have a big impact on healthcare by boosting lifespans, he said. The AI sector is set to grow financially in the coming years too.

You will be able to interact with John Madden's bronze bust at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. During his enshrinement speech at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006, iconic Oakland Raiders coach, NFL analyst, pitchman and video game namesake John Madden, remarked that all the bronze busts commemorating Hall members in Canton, Ohio, secretly talk to each other after dark. Now, through a combination of conversational artificial intelligence, augmented reality, 3D animation and facial motion capture, fans attending the Super Bowl Experience in Atlanta next week, or who later visit the Hall in Canton, will be able to "converse" with an interactive version of Madden's bronze bust. You'll launch an app and hold an iOS or Android phone or tablet in front of Madden's actual bust, and ask your question – "Hey coach, what was it like after Super Bowl XI getting carried off the field?" or "What was it like to coach against Vince Lombardi?" The Raiders enjoyed their heyday under coach John Madden, who led the team to a 112-39-7 record from 1969-78.

Artificial intelligence- will it help or hinder humans? I have written about artificial intelligence several times, for example in Future Friday: Artificial Intelligence and the HR world and Future Friday: The future of work definitely involves Artificial Intelligence. So why am I writing about it again? The answer to that question is found in the more widespread coverage that AI is receiving. It is being written about on a wider basis and many people still fear they may lose their job as a result of AI.

The global refugee crisis has been going on for quite a while now. According to the United Nations, an incredible 65 million people have been displaced from their home globally. Per day, more than 28,000 people are forced to flee their surroundings. A recently published study aims to streamline and answer the pressing question – where should the authorities place the refugees to optimize their skills? Currently, the process is done manually and in a lot of cases, at random.

World-renowned global futurist Dr. James Canton envisions hotel experiences that include supersonic travel and DNA-driven spa treatments, so what can we expect in the next decade? Canton, a former Apple Computer executive, author and social scientist, worked in conjunction with Hotels.com, to present the Hotels of the Future Study at a recent conference in San Francisco. In the study he describes hotels with everything from RoboButlers and virtual reality entertainment to hotel restaurants based on gourmet genomics and the emergence of neurotechnology to make sleep more refreshing. Canton, who has advised three White House Administrations and over 100 companies, believes these megatrends will shape the future of the hotel experience and that the RoboButler is the change we will most likely see first. Although, he also notes that plans are already underway for a supersonic hyperloop route from Los Angeles to New York City.

World-renowned global futurist Dr. James Canton envisions hotel experiences that include supersonic travel and DNA-driven spa treatments, so what can we expect in the next decade? Canton, a former Apple Computer executive, author and social scientist, worked in conjunction with Hotels.com, to present the Hotels of the Future Study at a recent conference in San Francisco. In the study he describes hotels with everything from RoboButlers and virtual reality entertainment to hotel restaurants based on gourmet genomics and the emergence of neurotechnology to make sleep more refreshing. Canton, who has advised three White House Administrations and over 100 companies, believes these megatrends will shape the future of the hotel experience and that the RoboButler is the change we will most likely see first. Although, he also notes that plans are already underway for a supersonic hyperloop route from Los Angeles to New York City.