Text-based games offer a challenging test bed to evaluate virtual agents at language understanding, multi-step problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning. However, speed is a major limitation of current text-based games, capping at 300 steps per second, mainly due to the use of legacy tooling. In this work we present TextWorldExpress, a high-performance simulator that includes implementations of three common text game benchmarks that increases simulation throughput by approximately three orders of magnitude, reaching over one million steps per second on common desktop hardware. This significantly reduces experiment runtime, enabling billion-step-scale experiments in about one day.

Artificial-intelligence capabilities, like conversational AI software, can speed up the early back-and-forth emails, texts and other communications with applicants and quickly get strong candidates in front of recruiters. Other AI-enabled tools are being used to accelerate the employee onboarding process, getting new hires oriented, trained and set up with computers, business apps and corporate email accounts. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Trucking company U.S. Xpress Enterprises Inc. uses conversational AI software to handle most of the early stages of the hiring process, including text exchanges with job applicants, said Amanda Thompson, the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based business's chief people officer. When job seekers submit an application via a mobile device, the AI tool automatically replies with a series of preliminary questions, she said.

WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Community is sponsoring a $500,000 prize competition to explore artificial intelligence approaches that would transform the process by which analysts currently support policymakers and warfighters through the research and generation of written products. The Office of the Director of Science and Technology within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence--in partnership with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence--is launching its first challenge contest, "Xpress," to explore AI-based opportunities for generating analytic products that surpass those crafted by traditional, highly-trained IC analysts. Leveraging private-sector momentum in this area will help ensure that the IC continues to employ cutting-edge methodologies and tools to quickly warn and inform policymakers in an ever more demanding and complex global environment. "Given the pace and breadth of international activity, the IC's analytic community is increasingly challenged to provide policymakers and warfighters with timely information and analysis on a growing number of targets and issues," said Dr. David Isaacson, DS&T program manager for the challenge. "Xpress serves a critical role in exploring the potential for'machine analytics' to enhance existing IC support to our nation's decision makers, ultimately paving the way for analytic production to occur on a timeline and scale that IC analysts and their customers can scarcely imagine today."