British blogger Pete North was arrested by Yorkshire police for posting a meme saying 'F--- Hamas' on social media, accused of stirring up racial hatred.

In spoken dialog systems, dialog state tracking refers to the task of correctly inferring the user's goal at a given turn, given all of the dialog history up to that turn. The Dialog State Tracking Challenge is a research community challenge task that has run for three rounds. The challenge has given rise to a host of new methods for dialog state tracking and also to deeper understanding about the problem itself, including methods for evaluation. In the core of a conversation system is a key component called a dialog state tracker, which estimates the user's goal given all of the dialog history so far. For example, in a tourist information system, the dialog state might indicate the type of business the user is searching for (pub, restaurant, coffee shop), the desired price range, and the type of food served.

A computer program that uses AI planning techniques is now the world champion computer program in the game of Contract Bridge. As reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post, this program--a new version of Great Game Products' The classical approach used in AI programs for games of strategy is to do a game tree search using the well-known minimax formula (eq. 1) The minimax computation is basically a bruteforce search: If implemented as formulated here, it would examine every node in the game tree. In practical implementations of minimax game tree searching, a number of techniques are used to improve the efficiency of this computation: putting a bound on the depth of the search, using alpha-beta pruning, doing transposition-table lookup, and so on. However, even with enhancements such as these, minimax computations often involve examining huge numbers of nodes in the game tree. Because a Bridge hand is typically played in just a few minutes, there is not enough time for a game tree search to search enough of this tree to make good decisions.

The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea's border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air. What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion -- perhaps a drone flight over the two countries' highly secured border -- turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday. After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons -- likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state's ideological adversaries in the South. Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That's because of the North's continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.