Overview: Science&Technology

every Chinese ... ”Citizen Score” will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. ... individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts... algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friend…

The Information reported that ... artificial intelligence-powered chatbots could successfully complete only 30 percent of requests without human assistance.... a dilemma ... lies in the nature of bots themselves and when they are truly useful... Bots are great for the occasional, simple question: “I know what I want, give me the answer as quickly…

An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies, usually managed by different departments. Reframing it as central to your organisation’s innovation strategy helps sidestep turf wars. 

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

More than two dozen governments... have a team of behavioral scientists tasked with ... “nudge” their citizens toward what they deem to be higher levels of well-being... “nudges” are value neutral... both achieve altruistic ends or more malicious ones... our environment (and the government) is always exerting some influence on our behavior, so we’…

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

two potential progressions from natural language processing to artificial intelligence. For the symbolic path, we need to build world models based on deep and organized representations. Success on this path requires that the models we build be comprehensive and flexible. For the sub-symbolic path, we need to train large neural networks in an envir…

an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles... foster “a seamless interaction” between human and machine... Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with ... the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms... alert reporters via Slack of any anomalies it finds in…

Chinese researchers usually speak English so they have the benefit of access to all the work disseminated in English. The English-speaking community, on the other hand, is much less likely to have access to work within the Chinese AI community... Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation ... when Google and Microsoft did so...…

idea is that the human agents only handle requests too complex for a bot. But the enterprise software companies building automated responses and those that manage live chat services for workers are jostling over how to do the so-called “handoff,” or the step in which a customer gets routed from a bot to a human

how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself... What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence... Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, …

leading researchers are finding that they can make software that can learn to... design machine-learning software.

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…

artificial neural network... takes in a given type of data... and finds patterns in them... Nobody knows quite how they work. And that means no one can predict when they might fail... If there hadn’t been an interpretable model, Malioutov cautions, “you could accidentally kill people.”.. European Union recently proposed to establish a “right to ex…

the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers ... discussed their rapidly accelerating field and the role it will play in the fate of humanity... Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI ... most new jobs are either at the very low end of the p…

The Feynman Machine is both an accurate description of how the brain really works, and a blueprint for Machine Intelligence... I won’t dwell too much on why I believe the Deep Learning boom of today is not the panacea it has been hyped up to appear... The central idea of the Feynman Machine is that regions of the brain form a network of NDSs whic…

finely-grained user segmentation could do wonders for bots. The experience becomes tailored to each user, therefore much more personal — and much more effective... how can IBM’s AI service help?

Convergence is occurring not just across the technology and future scenario curves, but also the various aspects of social change... the social dimension is impacted or squeezed by the curves, while at the same time, social change has a reciprocal effect

model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

voice based AI assistants ... are naturally extremely open ended... not really that good at anything... the best services ... focus on solving one problem with a compelling solution and then expand

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

still ... publishing "dutiful, incremental pieces," ... designed to fill a daily print edition... dominated by long strings of text... a series of goals for areas including visual journalism, reader engagement, newsroom training and diversity... new content management system... build stories with visual elements and examine what the final produ…

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …