Tonight, Scots will feast on haggis, neeps and tatties to celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns, the 18th century Scottish poet. Ever since his 1786 poem, 'Address to a Haggis', the savoury pudding has been memorialised as Scotland's national dish. However, according to an artificial intelligence chatbot, this cultural icon may not be what it seems. Bard, Google's free AI tool, claims the dish – made of offal, oats and spices – has its'historical roots in English culinary traditions'. It admits that haggis'plays a central role in traditional Scottish celebrations like Burns Night and Hogmanay', but it has a'complex and interconnected history'.

In a year since its release, ChatGPT has already been used to draft essays, create beer, write best man speeches and even prescribe antibiotics. Now, a kiltmaker has used the artificial intelligence (AI) tool to design a new tartan – and it's already been accepted onto the official Scottish Register. Steven Sim, 52, a former graphic designer based in Arbroath, said he was simply'blown away' by the chatbot's intelligence. The creation features prominent red, to represent the'passion that drives AI development, and gold for'the brilliance and illumination AI brings to the world'. Also included in the swish design are several hidden references to AI and science fiction, including'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

This paper describes the Tartan conversational agent built for the 2018 Alexa Prize Competition. Tartan is a non-goal-oriented socialbot focused around providing users with an engaging and fluent casual conversation. Tartan's key features include an emphasis on structured conversation based on flexible finite-state models and an approach focused on understanding and using conversational acts. To provide engaging conversations, Tartan blends script-like yet dynamic responses with data-based generative and retrieval models. Unique to Tartan is that our dialog manager is modeled as a dynamic Finite State Machine. To our knowledge, no other conversational agent implementation has followed this specific structure.

On April 9 and 10, the inaugural K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) sought to bring to light some of the prevailing issues that surround artificial intelligence, including "effects on the workforce, social justice, fairness, privacy and many other sectors of society," as the conference website states. In 2016, a $10 million donation from Pittsburgh-headquartered international law firm K&L Gates funded the establishment of the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. The conference utilized this endowment to bring together some of the most important thought leaders, academics, industry heads, and others to discuss the boundless implications that come out of technological advances. David Danks, philosophy department head and co-chair of the Steering Committee for the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics & Computational Technologies explained in a university press release that "computational technologies, particularly AI and robotics, are often developed and deployed without enough public engagement or discussion about their impacts." Because of this, the conference attempts to discuss issues that have a public stake, with the collective good in mind.

Carl Doersch, a doctoral student studying machine learning, and his colleagues have developed new graphical software capable of identifying stylistic features of cities. The team, composed of researchers from both Carnegie Mellon and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, has published its work in the computer graphics journal ACM Transactions on Graphics. The process of finding related patterns between images is known as visual data mining. Project collaborator Alexei Efros, an associate professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon, pointed out that the science is still relatively new. "The field of visual data mining is still in its infancy, but I believe it holds a lot of promise," he said in a university press release.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and Carnegie Mellon University held the first part of the two-part joint Carnegie Colloquium on Digital Governance and Security in Washington D.C. on Oct. 31. The first part of the colloquium was titled "The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Military Operations and Privacy," and the second part, titled "The Future of the Internet: Governance and Conflict," will be held this year in Pittsburgh on Dec. 2. CEIP is a series of foreign policy-based research centers located in Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States, with headquarters in Washington D.C., that collects itself under the phrase, "The Global Think Tank." It was established in 1960 by Andrew Carnegie and, according to a report by the University of Pennsylvania, is the third most influential think tank in the world. The colloquium, held for the benefit of both Carnegie Mellon and the CEIP, aimed to allow for communication between the academics at Carnegie Mellon and the foreign policy and ethics experts from all the CEIP stations across the world to discuss the implication of artificial intelligence on foreign policy and the challenges posed by it. The second part of the colloquium will focus on cyber-security norms and internet governance. "Designing safe software systems and attempting to create the learning abilities of the human brain are natural progressions towards the two of the modern world's most pressing concerns -- cyber security and privacy," said President Subra Suresh, in the welcome address.

When it comes to gaming, Carnegie Mellon students are usually the ones beating the computer. But this time, the computer beat the students. Carnegie Mellon University computer science students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, recently made an artificial intelligence (AI) agent in the video game Doom that outplays computer-generated agents and human gamers. They accomplished this by applying deep-learning techniques that taught their agent, Arnold, to manipulate the game's 3-D design. "The work is purely a result of our passion for artificial intelligence and video games," Chaplot said.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences welcomes Carnegie Mellon's Tom Mitchell On Wednesday, April 20, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) announced its 2016 member class, which included Tom Mitchell, a member of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department. Mitchell has been with Carnegie Mellon since 1986 and was named Fredkin University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Mitchell also served for 10 years as the founding head of the Machine Learning Department. His research focuses on learning algorithms, with particular interest in analyzing MRIs to model brain cognition. In addition to his new membership in the AAAS, he has also been elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and served for two years as President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

At the IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security in New York City this month, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the machine learning start-up PatternEx, presented a paper about their new security system that combines machine learning approaches and input from human security experts. This system, called AI2 (named by merging "artificial intelligence" and "analyst intuition"), has an 85 percent success rate in identifying threats and a false positive rate of 4.4 percent over a raw data set of 3.6 billion log lines. According to the paper, the three major challenges faced by the security industry are a lack of labelled examples to model learning models on, constant evolution of attacker's methods, and limited reliance on security analysts to determine each threat's risk factor. In fact, stand-alone analyst-driven approaches are limited in their effectiveness because of the fact that attackers learn the behavior used by such systems to predict possible threats, and then work their way around that learned behavior in order to bypass security systems. Furthermore, only machine learning-based approaches can be inefficient based on the fact that they raise a need for human investigation every time they come across an anomaly.

CMU sophomore Ian Asenjo wins Critical Language Scholarship from State Dept. This week, Ian Asenjo, a sophomore global studies major with an additional major in ethics, history, and public policy, was awarded the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department, which will give him the opportunity to spend his summer in Chandigarh, India studying Punjabi. This cultural and linguistic immersion program is intended to encourage students to study languages that are drastically different from English. Many American language learners do not choose to master these languages due to the drastic differences, and we do not have enough native speakers. With supply low, demand is high for speakers of these critical languages, such as Arabic, Swahili, Urdu, Turkish, and Punjabi.