With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult even to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature provides us with many different mechanisms for intelligent behavior, most of which we have yet to replicate. One of such underinvestigated aspects of intelligence is embodiment and the role it plays in intelligent behavior. In this work, we focus on how the simple and fixed behavior of constituent parts of a simulated physical body can result in an emergent behavior that can be classified as cognitive by an outside observer. Specifically, we show how simulated voxels with fixed behaviors can be combined to create a robot such that, when presented with an image of an MNIST digit zero, it moves towards the left; and when it is presented with an image of an MNIST digit one, it moves towards the right. Such robots possess what we refer to as ``morphological cognition'' -- the ability to perform cognitive behavior as a result of morphological processes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a high-level mental faculty such as image classification performed by a robot without any neural circuitry. We hope that this work serves as a proof-of-concept and fosters further research into different models of intelligence.

Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes their design process unintuitive and in need of automated design. Despite the great interest, evolved virtual soft robots lack the complexity, and co-optimization of morphology and control remains a challenging problem. Prior work identifies and investigates a major issue with the co-optimization process -- fragile co-adaptation of brain and body resulting in premature convergence of morphology. In this work, we expand the investigation of this phenomenon by comparing learnable controllers with proprioceptive observations and fixed controllers without any observations, whereas in the latter case, we only have the optimization of the morphology. Our experiments in two morphology spaces and two environments that vary in complexity show, concrete examples of the existence of high-performing regions in the morphology space that are not able to be discovered during the co-optimization of the morphology and control, yet exist and are easily findable when optimizing morphologies alone. Thus this work clearly demonstrates and characterizes the challenges of optimizing morphology during co-optimization. Based on these results, we propose a new body-centric framework to think about the co-optimization problem which helps us understand the issue from a search perspective. We hope the insights we share with this work attract more attention to the problem and help us to enable efficient brain-body co-optimization.

He has a proven track record as a legislator with extensive knowledge of the public and commercial sectors. He has a track record of success, and he has a reputation for getting things done. He is a proven leader. It doesn't matter if you support his policies or not; he has changed the political environment.

Textual knowledge bases such as Wikipedia require considerable effort to keep up to date and consistent. While automated writing assistants could potentially ease this burden, the problem of suggesting edits grounded in external knowledge has been under-explored. In this paper, we introduce the novel generation task of *faithfully reflecting updated information in text* (FRUIT) where the goal is to update an existing article given new evidence. We release the FRUIT-WIKI dataset, a collection of over 170K distantly supervised data produced from pairs of Wikipedia snapshots, along with our data generation pipeline and a gold evaluation set of 914 instances whose edits are guaranteed to be supported by the evidence. We provide benchmark results for popular generation systems as well as EDIT5 -- a T5-based approach tailored to editing we introduce that establishes the state of the art. Our analysis shows that developing models that can update articles faithfully requires new capabilities for neural generation models, and opens doors to many new applications.

The press gushing over Dr. Fauci's leaked emails, Chris Mathews' accuser getting hate mail and journalist Andy Ngo saying he was beaten up by Antifa last week round out today's top media headlines Despite the fact that Democrats control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, Politico's highly-read newsletters have dedicated more digital ink to former President Trump and GOP infighting on Capitol Hill. Politico Playbook, which describes itself as "The unofficial guide to official Washington," headlined 12 out of its 31 newsletters published in the month of May fixated on various Republican drama from the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo, from House leadership to Trump's potential legal woes. One newsletter additionally focused on the disgruntled staffers who formally worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. However, only 11 of the Playbook's newsletters were focused on the Biden agenda. The GOP obsession is even more severe in Politico's "Huddle" newsletter, which offers a "play-by-play preview of the day's congressional news."

In his latest novel, Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan reimagines what 1980s Britain might have looked like if certain iconic events had swung a different way: Argentina winning the Falklands war; Margaret Thatcher battling Tony Benn for power. And then there's the catalyst for the book – what might have happened if Alan Turing had achieved a major breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence. As with most visions of AI's future – or hypothetical past – the author speculates a dystopia in which sentient, anthropomorphous robots are embedded into our everyday lives. The pros and cons of AI are debated at an ethical and moral level; with less credence given to the practicality or the technological constraints. Whilst undoubtedly a necessity for a science fiction novel, in the real world, this lack of practical consideration for AI and the related constraints has been responsible for a huge amount of hyperbole in the enterprise technology market; especially in relation to CRM.

Artificial intelligence and energy production might not be so unrelated, according to a faculty member at the University of Wyoming. At the Wyoming Energy Summit on Wednesday, Nick Cheney -- a visiting assistant professor in UW's computer science department -- discussed some of the ways in which autonomous machines using artificial intelligence might change the energy sector in years to come. "I'm not a futurist," Cheney said. "I don't believe, despite working in AI, that artificial intelligence is a thing that will immediately save us all or doom us all. It comes with its own potential risks and benefits.

Artificial intelligence and energy production might not be so unrelated, according to a faculty member at the University of Wyoming. At the Wyoming Energy Summit on Wednesday, Nick Cheney -- a visiting assistant professor in UW's computer science department -- discussed some of the ways in which autonomous machines using artificial intelligence might change the energy sector in years to come. "I'm not a futurist," Cheney said. "I don't believe, despite working in AI, that artificial intelligence is a thing that will immediately save us all or doom us all. It comes with its own potential risks and benefits.

In a recent Deloitte Center for Controllership poll of more than 1,700 finance, accounting and other professionals, 52.8 percent say their organizations plan digital controllership improvements--leveraging process automation, analytics and other technologies for financial and accounting processes--in the year ahead. Using finance and accounting robotic process automation (RPA) to increase efficiency and internal controls is the top priority for such efforts (34.7 percent). "Finance and accounting process automation can really run the gamut. Simpler, enhanced finance automation can address common, industry agnostic accounting issues. RPA can build momentum by performing repetitive, manual financial and accounting processes. And, cognitive computing can be configured to adapt to non-routine, industry and organizationally specific needs," said Kyle Cheney, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP.

In The One Percent Doctrine, veteran journalist Ron Suskind described how former Vice President Dick Cheney, when told that a unlikely but dire threat had merely a one percent chance of happening, argued that, in terms of response, it should be treated as a certainty. The idea has a certain logic to it. Clearly, if the potential impact of an event is consequential enough, then it needs to be addressed whether it is likely to happen or not. After all, unlikely things happen all the time. However, nobody's resources are unlimited.