We have a PhD level or Advanced courses thread in the sidebar but it's three year old now. There were two other 7-8 month old threads (1, 2) but they don't have many quality responses either. So, can we have a new one here? To reiterate - CS231n, CS229, ones from Udemy etc are not advanced. Advanced ML/DL/RL, attempts at building theory of DL, optimization theory, advanced applications etc are some examples of what I believe should belong here, much like the original sidebar post.

Uber didn't necessarily get into self-driving cars to make friends. It launched its program in Pittsburgh by gutting the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, after all. But in the three years since--as the company has struggled with wayward leadership, a broken corporate culture, and this spring's fatal crash, which killed an Arizona woman--Uber has learned that the buddy system may not be so bad. As this new technology moves slowly toward commercialization, its creators are grappling with how a robo-car business should work, exactly. It's a murky world in which exploration feels safer, somehow, with a partner by your side.

The question comes from an old joke about a Boston politician talking to voters in his district. "Will you vote for me? I gave your father a job at city hall, I found jobs for your wife, your sons, and your daughter. Last year I directed a million dollars worth of business to your company. And I got the city to repair your street."

Semantic web technologies (Hitzler, Krötzsch, and Rudolph 2010) are meant to deal with these issues, and indeed since the advent of linked data (Bizer, Heath, and Berners-Lee 2009) a few years ago, they have become central to mainstream semantic web research and development. We can easily understand linked data as being a part of the greater big data landscape, as many of the challenges are the same (Hitzler and Janowicz 2013). The linking component of linked data, however, puts an additional focus on the integration and conflation of data across multiple sources. This issue of AI Magazine is a followup from that meeting and contains significantly extended, enhanced, and updated contributions. We summarize the articles in the following paragraphs.

This special issue of AI Magazine brings seven articles presenting extended versions of papers from IAAI 2013. These articles were selected for their description of AI technologies that are either in practical use or close to it. Five of the articles describe deployed application case studies. These articles present fielded AI applications that distinguish themselves for their innovative use of AI technology. One article describes an emerging application.

The articles in this special issue of AI Magazine include those that propose specific tests and those that look at the challenges inherent in building robust, valid, and reliable tests for advancing the state of the art in AI. To people outside the field, the test -- which hinges on the ability of machines to fool people into thinking that they (the machines) are people -- is practically synonymous with the quest to create machine intelligence. Within the field, the test is widely recognized as a pioneering landmark, but also is now seen as a distraction, designed over half a century ago, and too crude to really measure intelligence. Intelligence is, after all, a multidimensional variable, and no one test could possibly ever be definitive truly to measure it. Moreover, the original test, at least in its standard implementations, has turned out to be highly gameable, arguably an exercise in deception rather than a true measure of anything especially correlated with intelligence.

AAAI-15 and IAAI-15 Are Almost Here! The Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15) and the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-15) will be held January 25-30 at the Hyatt Regency Austin in Austin, Texas, USA. Austin is home to one of the largest and oldest communities of AI researchers in the world, with more than a dozen AIrelated labs at the University of Texas at Austin. Included here are a few highlights, but for the full program, links, and schedule information, please visit aaai.org/aaai15. AAAI will feature a host of robotics exhibitions, demonstrations, and invited talks.

A series of special events celebrating the Alan M. Turing Centenary, including the 2012 Inaugural AAAI Turing Lecture by Christos Papadimitriou (University of California, Berkeley) and a special performance of "Hello Hi There" will be featured at AAAI-12 in Toronto. The Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) and the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12) will be held in Toronto, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel, July 22-23, 2012. The AAAI technical program will consist of the main technical track and four special tracks on AI and the Web, Cognitive Robotics (new!), Computational Sustainability and AI, and Robotics (new!), as well as a Best Paper Track, highlighting significant AI results presented at our sister conferences in the past two years. The program will also feature the keynote Presidential Address "Revisiting the Dream," by Henry Kautz, a joint IAAI / AAAI invited talk by Tom Gruber, and other invited talks by Regina Barzilay (CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ross King (Aberystwyth University), Josh Tenenbaum (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT), Sebastian Thrun (Google / Stanford University), and Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University). The third iteration of the AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances on AI will be collocated with AAAI (details follow), and the AAAI program will also include 12 half-day tutorials, 10 workshops, the AAAI Robotics Program, AAAI Poker Competition, the Video Competition, Student Abstract Posters, the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and more!

Researchers from all areas of AI are encouraged to submit proposals to demonstrate their systems. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their innovation, relevance, scientific contribution, presentation, and usability, as well as potential logistical constraints. For complete information about the program and how to submit, please see aaai.org/Conferences/ AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008!

AAAI is delighted to announce the continuation of its cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and utilize the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print, and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to, or result in, commercial distribution. Participation in this experimental program is included in your normal AAAI membership dues. If you are a current regular member and have not received your reader key and instructions for accessing the online AI Journal, please contact membership03@aaai.org for more information.