But the kind of power generation that Edison pioneered on that September day in 1882 put us on a trajectory that has had unfortunate outcomes. He kicked into overdrive our reliance on fossil fuels for energy, allowing it to permeate all aspects of our lives--from the electricity we need to power our homes, offices and factories, to the petroleum we need to run our cars, ships and planes. This forced us down a path of high-energy consumption that has resulted in the rapid depletion of naturally occurring carbon-based fuel sources and inflicted near-irreversible damage on our planet. Edison's choice of coal as the fuel source for his power plant should not be taken as indicative of his support for fossil fuels as a source of energy. At least in the context of transportation, he believed that automobiles should run on electricity--not petrol--and even built a vehicle powered by alkaline batteries of his own invention.

He praised the efforts of the academic and administrative staff, whose efforts were instrumental to the growth and development of the university; which is not only a testament to French-Emirati relations, but is also responsible for more than 2000 graduates who have entered the local workforce. He concluded, "We have collectively taken a giant leap in the direction of progress and development and hope to march on with the design of new programs and initiatives that are fully in line with the national strategy of the UAE." Professor Chambaz commented,"This agreement is the first of many educational and research programmes at Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence and we welcome Total and Thales Group as the key stakeholders in this innovative venture. The aim of cooperating with partners from the UAE and France is to support research in the field, create knowledge, and to integrate artificial intelligence into the sustainable development initiatives of the UAE." Mr. Christophe Sassolas, President Total E&P UAE and Total Country Chair in the UAE added "By bringing the Sorbonne's best researchers and Total use cases in close vicinity with Abu Dhabi ecosystem of research institutions and industry, we are contributing to define the future of Artificial Intelligence in the energy sector. We are proud to bring this opportunity for the next generation of UAE talents!"

The second largest economy of the Arab world is quietly switching from oil to Artificial Intelligence. In a world first, the UAE on Thursday appointed a minister of Artificial Intelligence, which is also the first such acknowledgement by the Arab world that these indeed are the technologies that are going to shape economies around us. Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama, 27, will spearhead UAE's ambition to be at the forefront of the global technological revolution, which will see it planning to build homes on the planet Mars by 2117. The UAE plans to have a fully functioning city of 600,000 people on Mars. "We aspire in the coming century to develop science, technology and our youth's passion for knowledge," tweeted Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the country's vice president and prime minister, when he announced the project -- known as "Mars 2117" -- earlier this year.

We briefly describe the implementation and evaluation of a novel plan synthesis system, called AltAlt. AltAlt is designed to exploit the complementary strengths of two of the currently popular competing approaches for plan generation: (1) graphplan and (2) heuristic state search. It uses the planning graph to derive effective heuristics that are then used to guide heuristic state search. The heuristics derived from the planning graph do a better job of taking the subgoal interactions into account and, as such, are significantly more effective than existing heuristics. AltAlt was implemented on top of two state-of-the-art planning systems: (1) stan3.0, a graphplan-style planner, and (2) hsp-r, a heuristic search planner.