Our children have the right to be AI-educated so they can thrive intellectually, emotionally, and morally alongside AI. In the next decade or so, for most children, AI will be their co-workers, drivers, insurance agents, customer service reps, bank tellers, receptionists, radiologists, in short, a natural part of their lives. That's why I am proud of our collaboration with Cloudera in making A Fresh Squeeze on DATA -- A picture book about problem-solving with DATA that encourages children worldwide to transform from passive spectators of technology disruption to active participants of positive change in their local communities and the world. We owe it to our children to help them understand and utilize the powerful tools of AI and thoughtfully weigh its moral and social implications early on. And this is what A Fresh Squeeze on DATA is all about.

This past year has seen almost all students turn to technology more than ever before as part of their education. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is becoming more engrained in education for today's students. As a result, understanding coding or programming is more important than ever. While many first learn to code with block coding where different'blocks' of code are stacked together like building blocks, text coding is the next step. According to many in Computer Science education as well as people in the industry, Python is one of the most important languages for beginners to learn since it is applicable to so many different areas.

Today's robots are more intelligent than ever, learning to respond to their environment and perform a range of tasks autonomously, without human intervention. As such, robots are now entirely commonplace in sectors like manufacturing; the International Federation of Robotics estimated that 1.7 million new robots would be installed in factories around the world by 2020. Then we have the rise of collaborative robots, or cobots, which are explicitly designed to work alongside humans as helpful robotic colleagues. In this way, the future of many industries may mean humans and robots working seamlessly side by side. It's no wonder, then, that robotics is considered a major, transformative technology trend – one that, along with rising automation, will no doubt shape the future of work.

In this article, we investigate the possibility of cross-language communication using a synergy of words and pictures on mobile devices. On the one hand, communicating with only pictures is in itself a very powerful strategy, but is limited in expressiveness. On the other hand, words can express everything you could wish to say, but they are cumbersome to work with on mobile devices and need to be translated in order for their meaning to be understood. Automatic translations can contain errors that pervert the communication process, and this may undermine the users' confidence when expressing themselves across language barriers. Our idea is to create a user interface for cross-language communication that uses pictures as the primary mode of input, and words to express the detailed meaning.

To learn more about opportunities in applied AI, join us at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, September 26-27, 2016 in New York. One of the truisms of modern AI is that the next big step is to move from supervised to unsupervised learning. In the last few years, we've made tremendous progress in supervised learning: photo classification, speech recognition, even playing Go (which represents a partial, but only partial, transition to unsupervised learning). Unsupervised learning is still an unsolved problem. As Yann LeCun says, "We need to solve the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true AI."

In this article, we investigate the possibility of cross-language communication using a synergy of words and pictures on mobile devices. Communicating with only pictures is in itself a very powerful strategy, but is limited in expressiveness. On the other hand, words can express everything you could wish to say, but they are cumbersome to work with on mobile devices, and need to be translated in order for their meaning to be understood. Automatic translations can contain errors that pervert the communication process, and this may undermine the users’ confidence when expressing themselves across language barriers. Our idea is to create a user interface for cross-language communication that uses pictures as the primary mode of input, and words to express the detailed meaning. This interface creates a visual process of communication that occurs on two heterogeneous channels that can support each other. We implemented this user interface as application on the Apple iPad tablet, and performed a set of experiments to determine its usefulness as a translation aid for travellers.

This paper presents our work in developing a commonsense knowledge source based on semantic concepts about objects, activities and their relationships in a child’s daily life. This commonsense ontology is then used by our automatic story generator to output children's stories of the fable form from a given input picture. The generated story is a narration of the events of a basic plot that flows from negative to positive (rule violation to value acquisition), using themes that are familiar to children. The paper ends with descriptions of further investigations that are underway to extend the system, including using a formal upper ontology to represent storytelling knowledge, and the generation of stories from a given set of sequential scenes.