OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, to join the company's scaling team, WIRED has learned. The news came via an internal Slack message sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on Tuesday. Lau is joined by Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from xAI, and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju also previously worked at Robinhood. At xAI, Ruddarraju worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs.

Autonomous driving systems face the formidable challenge of navigating intricate and dynamic environments with uncertainty. This study presents a unified prediction and planning framework that concurrently models short-term aleatoric uncertainty (SAU), long-term aleatoric uncertainty (LAU), and epistemic uncertainty (EU) to predict and establish a robust foundation for planning in dynamic contexts. The framework uses Gaussian mixture models and deep ensemble methods, to concurrently capture and assess SAU, LAU, and EU, where traditional methods do not integrate these uncertainties simultaneously. Additionally, uncertainty-aware planning is introduced, considering various uncertainties. The study's contributions include comparisons of uncertainty estimations, risk modeling, and planning methods in comparison to existing approaches. The proposed methods were rigorously evaluated using the CommonRoad benchmark and settings with limited perception. These experiments illuminated the advantages and roles of different uncertainty factors in autonomous driving processes. In addition, comparative assessments of various uncertainty modeling strategies underscore the benefits of modeling multiple types of uncertainties, thus enhancing planning accuracy and reliability. The proposed framework facilitates the development of methods for UAP and surpasses existing uncertainty-aware risk models, particularly when considering diverse traffic scenarios. Project page: https://swb19.github.io/UAP/.

For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention. He's annoyed that its proponents tout it as the dominant theory in the press.

A new study led by Northwestern University researchers used machine learning--a branch of artificial intelligence--to identify speech patterns in children with autism that were consistent between English and Cantonese, suggesting that features of speech might be a useful tool for diagnosing the condition. Undertaken with collaborators in Hong Kong, the study yielded insights that could help scientists distinguish between genetic and environmental factors shaping the communication abilities of people with autism, potentially helping them learn more about the origin of the condition and develop new therapies. Children with autism often talk more slowly than typically developing children, and exhibit other differences in pitch, intonation and rhythm. But those differences (called "prosodic differences'" by researchers) have been surprisingly difficult to characterize in a consistent, objective way, and their origins have remained unclear for decades. However, a team of researchers led by Northwestern scientists Molly Losh and Joseph C.Y. Lau, along with Hong Kong-based collaborator Patrick Wong and his team, successfully used supervised machine learning to identify speech differences associated with autism. The data used to train the algorithm were recordings of English- and Cantonese-speaking young people with and without autism telling their own version of the story depicted in a wordless children's picture book called "Frog, Where Are You?" The results were published in the journal PLOS One on June 8, 2022.

As people make efforts to stay apart from each other physically, video games are filling the socializing gap. As people make efforts to stay apart from each other physically, video games are filling the socializing gap. Some people look at the weeks ahead and wonder how they will keep themselves from going stir crazy. Across the U.S., new restrictions have limited in-person gatherings in an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus infection, as concern grows from watching its effects on the hard-hit populations of China and Italy, where thousands have died. But other Americans already have a plan to help combat social isolation: video games.

A woman uses her smartphone near a booth for the Chinese Internet company Tencent at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. The company is now preparing to take a firm lead in AI practices. Yet in the midst of uproar and angst, China tech company, Tencent has decided to draw a firm line in the sand and took the opportunity while at the recent Cannes Lions Festival to outline a strategic approach that just may be a huge game-changer in corporate standards around AI practices now and in the future. Delivered onstage by Seng Yee Lau (known as S.Y.), Tencent's Senior Executive Vice President and Chairman, Tencent offered a bold strategy around Tech for Good that, if the company can fully execute, will continue to make it one-t0-watch as a massive global player in the technology space. While the company may have missed its most recent earnings target when it reported figures last month, Tencent still reported adjusted earnings of 32 cents per share on revenue of a whopping $12.69 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago.

Hotel bars are great places for people watching, seldom places for engaging conversation. I recently found myself sitting atop a tall stool in a city far from home, deep in conversation with a woman, like me, traveling for work. She, a hospitality professional in town to train a new cohort of hotel associates; me, in town for a tech conference. So, naturally, our conversation landed on the intersection of our specialities--the increasing use of technology in the hospitality industry. "I don't think the hospitality industry will become overtaken by technology--people want a human touch when they're traveling," I said confidently, and perhaps naively, to my newfound friend. She explained that, while in some places that's true (the closer to the water the more personal the experience needs to be, I learned), hotels are becoming more heavily outfitted with tech.

In addition to penning 37 plays, William Shakespeare was a prolific composer of sonnets -- crafting 154 of them during his life. Now, more than 400 years after his death, the Bard's words are influencing a new generation of poets. It's just that these writers do so with silicon imaginations and digital quills. A consortium of researchers from the University of Toronto, the University of Melbourne and IBM's Australia division have managed to teach a neural network to craft sonnets just as the Bard did in the 16th century, using his own words to teach the machine. They published their results at the 2018 ACL conference, and you can play around with the network itself over at GitHub.

Programming by demonstration systems have long attempted to make it possible for people to program computers without writing code. However, while these systems have resulted in many publications in AI venues, none of the technologies have yet achieved widespread adoption. Usability remains a critical barrier to their success. On the basis of lessons learned from three different programming by demonstration systems, we present a set of guidelines to consider when designing usable AIbased systems. If PBD were successful, the vast population of nonprogrammer computer users would be able to take control of their computing experience and create programs to automate routine tasks, develop applications for their specific needs, and manipulate information in service of their goals.

OZY and Giant Spoon are excited to partner on special live coverage from CES 2017 -- where the most forward-looking technology and media come together. Rather than cover just the latest gadgets, though, we're taking you deeper with key takeaways, little-known rising stars, unconventional trends and, yes, the coolest sh*t from the convention. Apparently, though, his affection is pre-programmed. Robots may be unfeeling servants, but they don't have to be cold and unblinking, says Lau. Which is why she's got her little one here and a fleet of other "unruly robot children" under her wing. Casual and calm during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Lau doesn't seem the type to play God.