http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27497495/robot-empathy-will-add-ability-learn-from-ibms
Robot with empathy will add ability
to learn from IBM's 'Watson'
By Yuri Kageyama
IBM Watson is going to Japan via IBM's new alliance with Japanese
telecommunication giant SoftBank, on Tuesday, February 10, 2015. IBM is
teaching Watson to speak, and think, in Japanese, one of most
difficult languages for a computer to navigate because of its reliance
on the complex diagrammatical alphabet known as kanji. IBM and
SoftBank will explore new ways to deliver Watson's cognitive and
natural language capabilities, including through mobile, tablet, and robots.
Pictured at IBM Research - Tokyo is IBM Researcher Risa Nishiyama with
SoftBank's Pepper robot using Watson in a demonstration
environment. (Feature Photo Service) (PRNewsFoto/IBM)
TOKYO -- Japanese mobile carrier Softbank said Tuesday it will
incorporate artificial intelligence technology from IBM into its
empathetic robot Pepper that will be available to Japanese
consumers around midyear.
The AI engine "Watson" is already used in health care, travel and insurance
services in English, but an adaptation was needed to make it work and
think in Japanese, said Steve Gold, Vice President, IBM Watson Group.
Unlike other cognitive technology that responds rather mechanically,
Watson can learn over time like a human brain, and understands the
concept of probability, which makes it sophisticated and more human-like
for applications, according to IBM.
FILE - In this June 6, 2014 file photo, humanoid robot Pepper is on display
at SoftBank mobile shop in Tokyo. Japanese mobile carrier Softbank said
Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 it will incorporate artificial intelligence technology
from IBM into its empathetic robot Pepper that goes on sale in Japan this
month. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara, File) ( Koji Sasahara )
"It depends on the context of the conversation as to what the
right answer would be," as opposed to how a computer would generally
try to answer correctly, Gold told The Associated Press. "The world is
seldom absolute."
Software developers who have made reservations for Pepper robots will get
them sometime this month for $1,700, according to Softbank Chief
Executive Masayoshi Son.
Consumers won't be able to get Pepper until between June and August, he
said. Details of the sales plan were undecided, Son said. No decision has
been made on overseas sales.
Softbank had said earlier that sales to Japanese consumers would begin
this month as well. He did not elaborate on the reason for the delay, but he
said giving it first to the developers will mean more fun
applications will be available when consumers get the robot,
implying it wasn't quite ready as a product.
Pepper has a stunned face a bit like C3PO in "Star Wars" and moves around
on wheels. In early demonstrations it was a bit mechanical in its responses.
Gold said Watson will change that and make the robot a smarter, more
charming companion.
For example, two plus two is four in arithmetic but in another context it
could refer to a car design, Gold said. Watson is designed to figure out
context and know which answer is more likely.
A call center using Watson will get the caller to the right solution
more quickly and make for a less frustrating consumer
experience, he said.
…
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150205/us--anthem-hack-a8b630345b.html
Hackers access records for millions of Anthem customers
Feb 5, 11:23 AM (ET)
By TOM MURPHY
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Hackers broke into a health insurance
database storing information for about 80 million people in
an attack bound to stoke fears many Americans have
about the privacy of their most sensitive information.
Anthem, the nation's second-largest health insurer, said it has yet
to find any evidence that medical information like insurance
claims or test results was targeted or taken in a "very
sophisticated" cyberattack that it discovered last week. It also
said credit card information wasn't compromised, either.
The hackers did gain access to names, birthdates, email
address, employment details, Social Security numbers,
incomes and street addresses of people who are currently
covered or have had coverage in the past.
An Anthem spokeswoman said Thursday the insurer was
working with federal investigators to figure out who was behind
the attack. They had not pinned down the exact number of
people affected.
Anthem Inc., which recently changed its name from WellPoint,
runs Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in more than a dozen states,
including California, New York and Ohio. It covers more than 37
million people.
Cybersecurity experts say these hackers may not be done with
the insurer, and health records are becoming more attractive to
them, as previous targets like the retailers Target and Home
Depot shore up their defenses.
"To me, this is the next wave of where were going to see
more and more attacks," said Mark Bower, a vice president
with the cybersecurity firm Voltage Security. "Cybercrime is a
business. The attackers will simply move to the next low-hanging
fruit."
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532666/googles-brain-inspired-software-describes-what-itsees-in-complex-images/
Google’s Brain-Inspired Software
Describes What It Sees in Complex Images
Experimental Google software that can describe a complex scene could lead to
better image search or apps to help the visually impaired.

By Tom Simonite on November 18, 2014
Why It Matters
Computers are usually far worse than humans at interpreting complex
information, but new techniques are making them better.
Experimental software from Google can accurately describe scenes in photos, like
the two on the left. But it still makes mistakes, as seen with the two photos on
the right.
Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to
accurately describe scenes shown in photos—a significant advance in the field of
computer vision. When shown a photo of a game of ultimate Frisbee, for
example, the software responded with the description “A group of young
people playing a game of frisbee.” The software can even count, giving
answers such as “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.”
Previously, most efforts to create software that understands images have
focused on the easier task of identifying single objects.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/534871/our-fear-of-artificial-intelligence/
Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
A true AI might ruin the world—but that assumes it’s possible at all.

By Paul Ford on February 11, 2015
Computers are entrusted with control of complex systems.
Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His
father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he said, “but I was counting on the singularity.”
My friend worked in technology; he’d seen the changes that faster microprocessors
and networks had wrought. It wasn’t that much of a step for him to believe that
before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that
of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. A benevolent
superintelligence might analyze the human genetic code at great speed and
unlock the secret to eternal youth. At the very least, it might know how to fix
your back.
But what if it wasn’t so benevolent? Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who directs the
Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, describes the following
scenario in his book Superintelligence, which has prompted a great deal of debate
about the future of artificial intelligence. Imagine a machine that we might call a
“paper-clip maximizer”—that is, a machine programmed to make as many paper
clips as possible. Now imagine that this machine somehow became incredibly
intelligent. Given its goals, it might then decide to create new, more efficient
paper-clip-manufacturing machines—until, King Midas style, it had
converted essentially everything to paper clips.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534851/ibm-says-watson-can-help-declutter-your-in-box/
IBM Says Watson Can Help Declutter Your
In-Box
IBM’s new messaging software uses algorithms to learn how to organize
your e-mail better .

By Andrew Rosenblum on February 5, 2015
Why It Matters
Many people spend a significant portion of their work day fighting e-mail
overload.
IBM’s new e-mail service, Verse, tries to understand which people matter to
you most. ** would contend that is not a static prioritization **
Over 100 billion work e-mails are exchanged each day, but research suggests that
only around a quarter of those are actually essential. IBM hopes to lighten that
load. Later this month the company will open up a trial of a new online e-mail
service called Verse, which uses algorithms to work out which messages and
people are most important to you.+
After Verse is launched as a product sometime this spring, IBM plans to add a
personal assistant powered by the Watson software that beat two human
Jeopardy! champions in 2011. The finished version of the service will be free
for personal or small-business use, but larger companies will have to pay,
depending on data usage and the number of users.+
Gmail and some other systems also scan the content of e-mails to help you manage
your messages. But while Gmail is most focused on separating “human” e-mail
from automated messages sent by companies, Verse takes on the harder task of
understanding which messages from other people are most important or
urgent.+
…
http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/the-workplace-of-2040-mind-control-holograms-andbiohacking-are-the-future-of-business/story-fnkgbb6w-1227209479412
The workplace of 2040: Mind
control, holograms and biohacking
are the future of business
At Work



by: FRANK CHUNG
From: news.com.au
1 day agoFebruary 05, 2015 5:02PM
The future of work? Source: Supplied
WHAT will the workplace look like in 2040? Imagine remote working via hologram,
commuting by jetpack, even controlling your office with your mind.
MYOB has released its ‘Future of Business: Australia 2040’ report, which examines the possible
impact of emerging technologies on business and work over the next 25 years.
While all manner of business interactions will continue to be “formalised, automated and
digitised”, the biggest effect will be on what we currently call ‘the workplace’, according to
MYOB chief technology officer Simon Raik-Allen.
Driven by the rising cost of energy and transport, the focus of 2040 will be the ‘suburban
village’. “You will live, work, eat and learn primarily within walking distance of your house,” he
writes.
…
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/02/02/new-techniques-to-track-terror-threats-on-social-media/
New techniques emerge to track terror
threats on social media
By Christopher Snyder
Published February 02, 2015
Is social media a gateway for terrorist propaganda?
Terrorists have long used the Internet for their own personal gain,
including recruitment, propaganda, and fundraising.
A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security says terror groups
are increasingly using social media to gain a wider online following,
share operational and tactical information, and link to their extremist
websites.
Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland spoke to cybersecurity
expert Johan Bollen about terror tactics used by groups like ISIS and Al
Qaeda.
“This is a considerable threat, a lot of people are not fully appreciating the
scale of the social media environment … the recruitment and
communication efforts taking place on social media is on a scale that
is both baffling and scary at the same time,” said Bollen, an associate
professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University.
…
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/232122-darpa-official-cyberattacks-against-us-militarydramatically-increasing
DARPA cyber 60 min talk
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/us/politics/obama-administration-plans-to-open-center-to-fightcyberattacks.html?ref=technology
Obama Administration Plans to
Open Center to Fight Cyberattacks
By DAVID E. SANGERFEB. 11, 2015
President Obama’s homeland security adviser said Tuesday that the administration was
planning to open a new center that would quickly assess and deter cyberattacks on the
United States.
The adviser, Lisa Monaco, who provides threat assessments to Mr. Obama every morning, said
the world was at a “transformational moment” regarding cyberthreats.
“Annual reports of data breaches have increased roughly fivefold since 2009,” Ms. Monaco said.
That was the year that Mr. Obama first began to publicly press for greater cybersecurity
initiatives — while secretly authorizing the largest state-sponsored use of a cyberweapon
against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.
A cyberthreat office has long been discussed, but planning became more urgent after the attack
on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November, which Mr. Obama and the F.B.I. later said was the
work of North Korea. The attack exposed weaknesses in the government’s ability to come up
with a consensus on an attack’s origin and how to respond to it.
Presidential aides had expressed similar frustrations during the lengthy investigations into
attacks on JPMorgan Chase — no single culprit has been reliably identified — and in a
number of other hacking cases, including some on the unclassified White House and State
Department email systems.
The new center would essentially put greater control of assessments into the hands of the
director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr. While there are a number of federal
cybercenters in operation, the Department of Homeland Security, which has primary
responsibility for the defense of American domestic networks, has often been at odds with the
National Security Agency, the military’s United States Cyber Command and other branches of
the government responsible for assessing or reacting to cyberattacks.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532666/googles-brain-inspired-software-describeswhat-it-sees-in-complex-images/
Google’s Brain-Inspired Software Describes What It Sees in Complex Images
Experimental Google software that can describe a complex scene could lead to better image
search or apps to help the visually impaired.
By Tom Simonite on November 18, 2014
Why It Matters
Computers are usually far worse than humans at interpreting complex information, but new
techniques are making them better.
http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/google.aix519_0.png
Experimental software from Google can accurately describe scenes in photos, like the two on the
left. But it still makes mistakes, as seen with the two photos on the right.
Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately
describe scenes shown in photos—a significant advance in the field of computer vision. When
shown a photo of a game of ultimate Frisbee, for example, the software responded with the
description “A group of young people playing a game of frisbee.” The software can even count,
giving answers such as “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.”
Previously, most efforts to create software that understands images have focused on the easier
task of identifying single objects.
“It’s very exciting,” says Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google. “I’m sure there are going
to be some potential applications coming out of this.”
…
And the work at Stanford on the same driver problem:
Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions
Andrej Karpathy Li Fei-Fei
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/
Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions
Abstract
We present a model that generates free-form natural language descriptions of image regions. Our
model leverages datasets of images and their sentence descriptions to learn about the inter-modal
correspondences between text and visual data. Our approach is based on a novel combination of
Convolutional Neural Networks over image regions, bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks
over sentences, and a structured objective that aligns the two modalities through a multimodal
embedding. We then describe a Recurrent Neural Network architecture that uses the inferred
alignments to learn to generate novel descriptions of image regions. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our alignment model with ranking experiments on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and
COCO datasets, where we substantially improve on the state of the art. We then show that the
sentences created by our generative model outperform retrieval baselines on the three
aforementioned datasets and a new dataset of region-level annotations.
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/guitar.png
"man in black shirt is playing guitar."
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/worker.png
"construction worker in orange safety vest is working on road."
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/legos.png
"two young girls are playing with lego toy."
All of this discussion leads us to revisit the work of Tononi on Integrated Information Theory,
for example the news story from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21consciousness.html?_r=1&ref=science
September 20, 2010
Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits v2
By CARL ZIMMER
One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared
him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a
distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his
life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally
had a chance to become his own experiment.
The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and
another one to block muscle movements. Dr. Tononi suggested the anesthesiologist first tie a
band around his arm to keep out the muscle-blocking drug. The anesthesiologist could then ask
Dr. Tononi to lift his finger from time to time, so they could mark the moment he lost awareness.
…
But Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the
poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are
adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and
telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a
“consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure
blood pressure and body temperature. Perhaps then his anesthesiologist will become interested.
…
Consciousness, Dr. Tononi says, is nothing more than integrated information. Information
theorists measure the amount of information in a computer file or a cellphone call in bits, and Dr.
Tononi argues that we could, in theory, measure consciousness in bits as well. When we are wide
awake, our consciousness contains more bits than when we are asleep. ** we would suggest
there are bits of awareness and bits of consciousness – separate **
For the past decade, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues have been expanding traditional information
theory in order to analyze integrated information. It is possible, they have shown, to calculate
how much integrated information there is in a network. Dr. Tononi has dubbed this quantity phi,
and he has studied it in simple networks made up of just a few interconnected parts. How the
parts of a network are wired together has a big effect on phi. If a network is made up of isolated
parts, phi is low, because the parts cannot share information.
But simply linking all the parts in every possible way does not raise phi much. “It’s either all on,
or all off,” Dr. Tononi said. In effect, the network becomes one giant photodiode.
Networks gain the highest phi possible if their parts are organized into separate clusters, which
are then joined. “What you need are specialists who talk to each other, so they can behave as a
whole,” Dr. Tononi said. He does not think it is a coincidence that the brain’s organization obeys
this phi-raising principle.
Dr. Tononi argues that his Integrated Information Theory sidesteps a lot of the problems that
previous models of consciousness have faced. It neatly explains, for example, why epileptic
seizures cause unconsciousness. A seizure forces many neurons to turn on and off together. Their
synchrony reduces the number of possible states the brain can be in, lowering its phi.
…
http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/full/215/3/216?view=long&pmid=19098144
Biol. Bull. 215: 216-242. (December 2008)
© 2008 Marine Biological Laboratory
Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto
Giulio Tononi
Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gtononi@wisc.edu
The integrated information theory (IIT) starts from phenomenology and makes use of thought
experiments to claim that consciousness is integrated information. Specifically: (i) the quantity
of consciousness corresponds to the amount of integrated information generated by a complex of
elements; (ii) the quality of experience is specified by the set of informational relationships
generated within that complex. Integrated information ({Phi}) is defined as the amount of
information generated by a complex of elements, above and beyond the information generated by
its parts. Qualia space (Q) is a space where each axis represents a possible state of the complex,
each point is a probability distribution of its states, and arrows between points represent the
informational relationships among its elements generated by causal mechanisms (connections).
Together, the set of informational relationships within a complex constitute a shape in Q that
completely and univocally specifies a particular experience. Several observations concerning the
neural substrate of consciousness fall naturally into place within the IIT framework. Among
them are the association of consciousness with certain neural systems rather than with others; the
fact that neural processes underlying consciousness can influence or be influenced by neural
processes that remain unconscious; *** sys2 – sys1 influences *** the reduction of
consciousness during dreamless sleep and generalized seizures; and the distinct role of different
cortical architectures in affecting the quality of experience. Equating consciousness with
integrated information carries several implications for our view of nature.
and also the work of Edelman on Animal Consciousness: a synthetic approach:
Despite anecdotal evidence suggesting conscious states in a variety of non-human animals, no
systematic neuroscientific investigation of animal (*** or machine ****) consciousness has yet
been undertaken. We set forth a framework for such an investigation that incorporates integration
of data from neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and behavioral studies, uses evidence from
humans as a benchmark, and recognizes the critical role of explicit verbal report of conscious
experiences in human studies. We illustrate our framework with reference to two subphyla: one
relatively near to mammals – birds – and one quite far –cephalopod molluscs. Consistent with
the possibility of conscious states, both subphyla exhibit complex behavior and possess
sophisticated nervous systems. Their further investigation may reveal common phyletic
conditions and neural substrates underlying the emergence of animal consciousness…
A constraint on this strategy is that the capacity for accurate report of conscious contents implies
the presence of higher order consciousness, which in advanced forms may require linguisticallybased narrative capability. This is in contrast to primary consciousness, which entails the ability
to create a scene in the ‘remembered present’ [3] in the absence of language. Primary
consciousness may be a basic biological process in both humans and animals lacking true
language. …
…