Every day I receive a steady stream of pitches from companies and universities large and small touting their latest AI breakthrough. Yet once one looks past the marketing hype and hyperbole and actually tests the tool itself, the results are rarely as glowing as one might hope. In fact, for those on the front lines of applying AI to complex real-world problems, today’s...

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China not only has the world’s largest population and looks set to become the largest economy — it also wants to lead the world when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). In 2017, the Communist Party of China set 2030 as the deadline for this ambitious AI goal, and, to get there, it laid out a bevy of milestones to reach by 2020....

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No human, or team of humans, could possibly keep up with the avalanche of information produced by many of today’s physics and astronomy experiments. Some of them record terabytes of data every day — and the torrent is only increasing. The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about as much data traffic each year...

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Iyad Rahwan, the director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, argues that “machines impact our lives, and with AI, increasingly those machines have agency.” ow do new scientific disciplines get started? For Iyad Rahwan, a computational social scientist with self-described “maverick” tendencies, it happened on a sunny afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2017....

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According to the United Nation’s Economic and Social Affairs Department, one in eight of the world’s population currently lives in 33 megacities — cities with populations over 10 million — with over half living in these and less populous cities. To improve the quality of life for all inhabitants, cities are having to extend their digital infrastructures, a trend termed smart cities. The...

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The adoption of chatbots within enterprises resembles the movement of pioneers across the American frontier. Chatbot developers today are creating unique products without industrywide chatbot standards, leaving the companies that use them on their own as they forge across new digital terrain.' Depending on who you talk to, chatbot ecosystems will eventually become an open, standards-driven environment or will continue to be a winner-takes-all landscape....

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