The automation of art: A legal conundrum

A study in Frontiers in Digital Humanities shows how the rise of automated art opens new creative avenues, coupled with new problems for copyright protection.

Open science and peer review

06 Mar 2017

160-million Papers and Counting: The World’s Information Deluge

Academic output has exploded over the last 100 years but how can the most relevant research be found? — by Melissa Cochrane In 2009, it’s estimated there were at least 50 million research publications floating around the coves of the internet. If you printed all of them out and put them side by side, you could go all the way around the earth. Based on the recent data, however, it appears the number of publications are at least 3 times larger than previously thought, at around 160 million, and the growth rate has increased to 0.8% per month, doubling in just over 7 years. It’s clear that the scientific world is booming with information, but how do researchers find out who, what and where is relevant to their specific fields? How on earth can we navigate all this? Kicked off two years ago, Microsoft Academic is a research project inside Microsoft Research. At its core is an artificial intelligence agent that reads all academic publications on the web to learn and automatically create a massive knowledge base, going far beyond a simple keyword-matching search to provide an overall benchmark and the context of what you’re looking for. A goal of […]

Robotics and AI

11 Jun 2015

Open Access may help enlighten society on the social value of robotics and AI

There is some debate about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) between those who believe that it would enable our digital technology to address concrete societal problems, and those who want to limit it based on ignorance and fear.