Author Wynton Hall alleges Google Gemini flagged Republican senators' rhetoric as hate speech while identifying no Democratic violations, raising questions about AI bias.

In 2003, Ken Hall was art director for Realtime Words, the large video game developer that made APB, which later became APB Reloaded, a highly popular free-to-play video game. At the time, free-to-play games, where players get most of the game for free but must pay to unlock the rest of the game or improve their performance, were still in their infancy. The strategy was aimed at hooking the casual gamer, but Hall had a rude awakening, perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein might have felt when his company received data showing gamers in South Korea were playing as much as 35 hours a week, and that was on top of their day jobs. He thought, what kind of monster have we created? "We were inadvertently creating compulsive gameplay loops," Hall says.

Review applies to the kindle edition. While the information in the book is good, the formatting of the kindle addition is terrible. If the Kindle edition is updated, I'll update my review.

Before the bomb threats, GamerGate, or the violent emails and tweets, Anita Sarkeesian had a provocative idea. The feminist cultural critic, who'd taken on the likes of LEGO and Dollhouse-era Joss Whedon in her low-key Feminist Frequency web series, decided to go after misogyny in video games. Her life would never be the same. SEE ALSO: The tricky art of marketing women's empowerment in the era of Trump Sarkeesian's biting criticism put gamers on the defensive -- and many of them resented her blunt observations about chauvinism in the games they cherished. Though she wasn't the first or only person to openly confront the problem, her message and medium ignited controversy.

Patents are widely regarded as a proxy for inventive output which is valuable and can be commercialized by various means. Individual patent information such as technology field, classification, claims, application jurisdictions are increasingly available as released by different venues. This work has relied on a long-standing hypothesis that the citation received by a patent is a proxy for knowledge flows or impacts of the patent thus is directly related to patent value. This paper does not fall into the line of intensive existing work that test or apply this hypothesis, rather we aim to address the limitation of using so-far received citations for patent valuation. By devising a point process based patent citation type aware (self-citation and non-self-citation) prediction model which incorporates the various information of a patent, we open up the possibility for performing predictive patent valuation which can be especially useful for newly granted patents with emerging technology. Study on real-world data corroborates the efficacy of our approach. Our initiative may also have policy implications for technology markets, patent systems and all other stakeholders. The code and curated data will be available to the research community.

A company founded in 1984 to produce high-end audio systems is now on the vanguard of the self-driving vehicle frontier with key financial backing from Ford and Baidu, China's largest search engine provider. Velodyne, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company, just received 150 million from Ford and Baidu to continue development and production of Lidar, or the 3D light-powered radar that helps self-driving cars see where they are going. With a presence on three continents, Velodyne is now regularly mentioned in research reports that cite leading companies in the niche field of lidar. Lidar emits short pulses of laser light so that software in the self-driving vehicle can create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of what's around it. In addition to cars, the systems also have growing potential for agricultural equipment, mining vehicles and military vehicles.

There's little that comes off as "natural" in "Natural Selection," a stiffly heavy-handed, drawn-out, faith-based drama about a Christ-like teen struggling to find his true path. Arriving in a new town, soft-spoken Tyler (Mason Dye) and his alcoholic mother ("Bluebloods" regular Amy Carlson) have chosen the proverbial fresh start, but there are telling signs that it won't be a smooth transition. Tyler is immediately targeted by the bullies at his new high school, which, curiously, doesn't appear to have a single character of color among the student body, while his mom is finding it difficult to extricate herself from the throes of depression in the wake of her husband's suicide. He's taken under the manipulative wing of the troubled Indrid (Ryan Munzert), an outsider with a dark soul (how else to explain his non-creationist views?) who chastises Tyler for having too much faith in people. You know from the repeated close-ups of all those guns mounted in the display cabinet at Indrid's home that his profound disenchantment with the universe isn't going to end well, but first-time writer-director Chad Scheifele forcefully prolongs the inevitable.

Since Pearl's seminal work on providing a formal language for causality, the subject has garnered a lot of interest among philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence alike. One of the most debated topics in this context regards the notion of actual causation, which concerns itself with specific - as opposed to general - causal claims. The search for a proper formal definition of actual causation has evolved into a controversial debate, that is pervaded with ambiguities and confusion. The goal of our research is twofold. First, we wish to provide a clear way to compare competing definitions. Second, we also want to improve upon these definitions so they can be applied to a more diverse range of instances, including non-deterministic ones. To achieve these goals we will provide a general, abstract definition of actual causation, formulated in the context of the expressive language of CP-logic (Causal Probabilistic logic). We will then show that three recent definitions by Ned Hall (originally formulated for structural models) and a definition of our own (formulated for CP-logic directly) can be viewed and directly compared as instantiations of this abstract definition, which allows them to deal with a broader range of examples.

We study propagation algorithms for the conjunction of two AllDifferent constraints. Solutions of an AllDifferent constraint can be seen as perfect matchings on the variable/value bipartite graph. Therefore, we investigate the problem of finding simultaneous bipartite matchings. We present an extension of the famous Hall theorem which characterizes when simultaneous bipartite matchings exists. Unfortunately, finding such matchings is NP-hard in general. However, we prove a surprising result that finding a simultaneous matching on a convex bipartite graph takes just polynomial time. Based on this theoretical result, we provide the first polynomial time bound consistency algorithm for the conjunction of two AllDifferent constraints. We identify a pathological problem on which this propagator is exponentially faster compared to existing propagators. Our experiments show that this new propagator can offer significant benefits over existing methods.