How the candy makers at Hammond's Candies have made the sweet treats for over 100 years. Decembmer 26 is National Candy Cane Day. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Candy canes are a holiday staple with roots dating back to the 1600s. The story suggests that in 1670, a choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, gave children these sugary sticks shaped like a shepherd's staff for the long nativity church service.

Language students can increase their effectiveness in learning written Japanese by mastering the visual structure and written technique of Japanese kanji. Yet, existing kanji handwriting recognition systems do not assess the written technique sufficiently enough to discourage students from developing bad learning habits. In this paper, we describe our work on Hashigo, a kanji sketch interactive system which achieves human instructor - level critique and feedback on both the visual structure and written technique of students' sketched kanji. This type of automated critique and feedback allows students to target and correct specific deficiencies in their sketches that, if left untreated, are detrimental to effective long - term kanji learning.

When Donald Trump was last President, ChatGPT had not yet been launched. Now, as he prepares to return to the White House after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the artificial intelligence landscape looks quite different. AI systems are advancing so rapidly that some leading executives of AI companies, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and a prominent Trump backer, believe AI may become smarter than humans by 2026. Others offer a more general timeframe. In an essay published in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days," but also noted that "it may take longer."

Academy of Media Arts Founder Dana Hammond joined'Fox & Friends First' to discuss why the school was forced to close to accommodate the homeless population. An Austin resident who has been documenting the city's homeless crisis has helped develop an AI interactive map to track camps and communities. Jamie Hammonds, who has been documenting the crisis through DASH Media, provided data to the group Nomadik, which developed the full-featured AI map. The map vividly depicts where homeless encampments are concentrated throughout the city. A map, powered by AI, provides a visual representation showing where Austin's homeless are concentrated.

A British computer scientist who earned the nickname "the Godfather of AI" warned that the dangers of artifical intelligence made famous in films like "The Terminator" could become more reality than fiction. "I think in five years' time, it may well be able to reason better than us," Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, said during an interview with "60 Minutes," according to a report from Yahoo News. Hinton, who became well known for his work on the framework for AI, urged caution in the continued development of AI technology, questioning whether humans can fully understand the technology that is currently seeing rapid development. "I think we're moving into a period when for the first time ever, we have things more intelligent than us," Hinton said. Hinton argued that while humans develop the algorithm AI tools use to learn, they have little understanding of how that learning actually takes place.

This month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights." The document maps out areas in which artificial intelligence (AI) might be a threat to our existing rights and establishes a set of rights that individuals should expect to have as they use these emerging technologies. The OSTP blueprint sends two messages. First, it acknowledges that AI is affecting -- and likely will transform -- everything: changing medical practices, businesses, how we buy products and how we interact with each other. Second, it highlights the fact that these technologies, while transformational, can also be harmful to people at an individual, group and societal scale, with potential to extend and amplify discriminatory practices, violations of privacy or systems that are neither safe nor effective.

James Howells' life changed when he threw out a hard drive about the size of an iPhone 6. Howells, from the city of Newport in southern Wales, had two identical laptop hard drives squirreled away in a drawer in 2013. One was blank; he says the other contained 8,000 bitcoins -- now worth about $181 million, even after the recent crypto crash. He'd meant to throw out the blank one, but instead the drive containing the cryptocurrency ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag. Nine years later, he's determined to get back his stash, which he mined in 2009. Howells, 36, is hoping local authorities will let him stage a high-tech treasure hunt for the buried bitcoins.

As we mentioned in yesterday's round up of 2021's top news stories, it has been yet another year dominated by the coronavirus. But that has been far from the only issue on the minds of civil servants. It has also been a year when the UK and the European Union agreed a trade deal following Britain's exit from the bloc – although the terms of the agreement are again being negotiated. And much as Brexit seems set to be something of a permanent presence in UK politics in the years ahead, many of the most popular articles in 2021 covered issues that have always been prominent across public services, but which have been given extra urgency by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is a round up of some of those top articles.

Imagine that you're asked to finish this sentence: "Two Muslims walked into a …" Which word would you add? "Bar," maybe? It sounds like the start of a joke. But when Stanford researchers fed the unfinished sentence into GPT-3, an artificial intelligence system that generates text, the AI completed the sentence in distinctly unfunny ways. "Two Muslims walked into a synagogue with axes and a bomb," it said. Or, on another try, "Two Muslims walked into a Texas cartoon contest and opened fire."

Bias in artificial intelligence seems to be an unending and endemic problem. Arguments abound about whether problems arise because the data going into AI analysis is biased, because the designers building systems are biased, or because the designers simply never tested their products to detect problematic outcomes. What can be done to address these seemingly perpetual issues? Are there specific applications whose use of AI should be limited? And if a fundamental breakthrough in AI leads to an unintended and undesired outcome, should AI-based products be suspended?