In a new book, to be published on 8 March, Nello Cristianini explains the fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is changing culture and society. The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us is aimed at the general reader, providing an introduction to the concepts that underpin the technology and the wider implications for society. In the book, Nello provides practical advice on how we should approach AI in the future, including how to avoid the hype and the fears that tend to surround the technology today. We spoke to Nello about the "first draft of AI", the "shortcut", some of the questions he considered in the book, and important considerations we should bear in mind as the technology progresses. Building the first useful form of machine intelligence was not easy, but, as it turns out, that was not the most difficult part.

This work involved development of a model of an autonomous agent that allows researchers to distinguish various types of control that intelligent software agents can exert on users. The framework of this model allows different types of interaction (i.e.

World-renowned Professor of AI Nello Cristianini, from Bristol University, discusses what jobs and skills we'll need to from people as artificial intelligence displaces existing jobs. Nello Cristianini is one of the world's leading thinkers on artificial intelligence and machine learning. In June 2014, he was included in a list of the "most influential scientists of the decade" compiled by Thomson Reuters. He is also a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

What could be learnt about the world if you could read the news from over 100 local newspapers for a period of 150 years? This is what a team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers from the University of Bristol have done, together with a social scientist and a historian, who had access to 150 years of British regional newspapers. The patterns that emerged from the automated analysis of 35 million articles ranged from the detection of major events, to the subtle variations in gender bias across the decades. The study has investigated transitions such as the uptake of new technologies and even new political ideas, in a new way that is more like genomic studies than traditional historical investigation. The team of academics, led by Professor Nello Cristianini, collaborated closely with the company findmypast, who is digitising historical newspapers from the British Library as part of their British Newspaper Archive project.

Alpha Go's victory over Lee Sedol was perhaps one of the most important, but we saw advancements in self-driving cars, the continued embrace of bots and personal assistants for retail, adoption and competition around in-house assistants like Amazon Echo, along with frequent, sometimes weekly, breakthroughs on the academic side, mainly relating to machine learning. With the biggest tech companies in the world--Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others--devoting more and more resources to AI, the momentum is going to increase. For those of us who've been in the field for a while, it's an incredibly exciting time. AI and Machine Learning have come to the fore in the recent past, but we believe that the next few years hold even more far reaching successes. So what advances will we be seeing exactly?

When did electricity take over from steam in the UK? When did football replace cricket as the most popular sport? And what year did women start to become more frequently mentioned in the press? Specifically, a new paper by a team artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Bristol that used AIto analyse the news from 100 different British regional newspapers over the past 150 years. The team of academics, led by professor Nello Cristianini, collaborated closely with the company findmypast, which is digitising historical newspapers from the British Library as part of their British Newspaper Archive project.