Catriona Campbell, A UK-based AI expert, argues we could soon be raising AI-based virtual children inside the metaverse dubbed "Tamagotchi children."

Virtual children that play with you, cuddle you, and even look like you will be commonplace in 50 years, and could help to combat overpopulation, an artificial intelligence expert has claimed. These computer-generated offspring will only exist in the immersive digital world known as the'metaverse', which is accessed using virtual reality technology such as a headset to make a user feel as if they're face-to-face with the child. They will cost next to nothing to bring up, as they will require minimal resources, according to Catriona Campbell, one of the UK's leading authorities on AI and emerging technologies. In her new book, AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence, she argues that concerns about overpopulation will prompt society to embrace digital children. She describes them as the'Tamagotchi generation' -- a reference to the handheld digital pets that became wildly popular among Western youngsters in the late 1990s and the 2000s.

A multivariate Hawkes process is a class of marked point processes: A sample consists of a finite set of events of unbounded random size; each event has a real-valued time and a discrete-valued label (mark). It is self-excitatory: Each event causes an increase in the rate of other events (of either the same or a different label) in the (near) future. Prior work has developed methods for parameter estimation from complete samples. However, just as unobserved variables can increase the modeling power of other probabilistic models, allowing unobserved events can increase the modeling power of point processes. In this paper we develop a method to sample over the posterior distribution of unobserved events in a multivariate Hawkes process. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, and its utility in improving predictive power and identifying latent structure in real-world data.