Last week's issue of Science was devoted to AI with interesting articles on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

If you've not come across this publication it is the weekly periodical of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and combines academic respectability and rigor with a readable and accessible style.

The Artificial Intelligence special issue is well worth seeking out - and you'll find it in many libraries, for example.

The introduction to the issue, a short item with the title Rise of the Machines is online, as is one of the four reviews. Economic reasoning and artificial intelligence by David C. Parkes and Michael P. Wellman describes the pursuit of machina economicus - a perfectly rational (and therefore mythical) economic machine, completely free from the biases that influence human decisions. The authors suggest that new rules and incentive systems are needed to guide AIs, since more and more machines are becoming players in the global financial market.

Also online you'll find the issue's Policy Forum article, Data, privacy, and the greater good authored by Eric Horvitz, who has uploaded it to a Microsoft Research site. In this article, Horovitz and and Deirdre Mulligan discuss some of the serious privacy concerns that arise with AI research - as well as opportunities to advance equality and the public good.

The final page of this pdf also has the start of another of the issues review articles: Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects by M. I. Jordan and T. M. Mitchell, who explain how "Big Data" and advanced computation have driven recent progress in machine learning. They suggest that, by designing computers that improve automatically with experience, machine learning represents one of the most transformative technologies of the 21st century -- and that society should start considering ways to maximize its benefits now.

The review article Advances in natural language processing comes from Julia Hirschberg and Christopher Manning and highlights challenges to and advances in language processing technologies, such as speech recognition and machine translation, which have made talking to one's cell phone and translating phrases on the Web commonplace activities. Although the article itself isn't online the Columbia Engineering Site and a Q & A session with the authors.

The final review article is Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines by Samuel J. Gershman, Eric J. Horvitz, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. In it the authors emphasize similarities among AI, cognitive science, and neuroscience, suggesting that a combination of the three fields could lead to an increased efficiency, known as computational rationality.

If you want to read any of these articles from the Science site the cost is $20 for a day's access. If instead you want entertainment, the Quiz from the AI issue, which challenges you to idenify characters from AI movies, is freely available online together with a related article that contains spoilers. 

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