I read a lot of articles this year and decided to document my top news highlights, so I would remember 2014 via some mental line-intercept sampling. Last year was interesting for not just on AI folks but the Computer Science community overall. I list what seems promising, what helped getting the general masses interested in CS (not just coding) and all the surprises we did not foresee.

I’ll link to articles on each topic that I enjoyed reading. The list is not collected based on importance, buzz or chronology; nor is it ordered by those parameters. Finally, I’ll discuss which of these news events got most media buzz.

1/ Deep Learning

— The NewYorker pondered in 2013 if deep learning was the AI revolution or an impending hype-mess? We don’t have the answer to that… yet. What we know is its very cool. We also know its over-hyped. We definitely know its not a silver bullet. Be inquisitive but cautious when you hear “My startup does deep learning for X” or “deep learning on the cloud” .

2/ Turing Test passed? Not really !

— tl;dr the Turing Test wasn’t beaten. Taking a step back, we apparently are still figuring out if the Turing test is a necessary and sufficient condition to identify a thinking machine.

3/ “Chief, I need you” — Cortana

— Flowing nicely along from the Turing Test, ahem. There are many rich AI characters in the gaming world. They are of course, fiction. Now all that’s changed with Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant, borrowed from the Halo game series.

I tried Cortana for three weeks on a Nokia Lumia and found it extremely useful. For conversations, it seemed smarter than Google Now or Siri. As a virtual assistant to the phone, its similar in performance to Siri. For fact-searching though, Google Now is unbeatable. But Cortana beat that octopus, so yeah.

4/ Algorithmic Accountability

— Another year when more people outside CS reminded us of the importance of making algorithms accountable than folks within it. Let us take a moment to re-think biases in algorithm construction and consider the graceful balancing of unknown run conditions. Amen. I totally expect to see conferences on algorithmic accountability in the future (J-schools are already doing this, CS community not so much). Meanwhile, research institutes are actively exploring data accountability.

P.S: I really want to write in-depth about this topic in 2015. My belief is that just raising awareness about ‘algorithms must be accountable’ isn’t going to budge algorithm designers. Instead, it will propel reduction of the common users’ trust in algorithms — which isn’t very useful in the machine age.

5/ The Imitation Game

— The Turing movie is out. Who better to star in it the Sherlock Holmes himself? Many folks disliked how Turing was portrayed as a tortured genius. Well, the director has the cut. So relax and enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch as he lays the foundations of Artificial Intelligence (even if the Pols broke Enigma?).

And if you are really interested, peruse through Turing’s extremely readable paper (called the Imitation Game) which begins with the line: I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”

6/ War of the Languages

— Who will win? Google has Go. Apple brought Swift. Facebook has Hack. Umm.. wait who’s using Lisp ?

7/ “AI is demon” or not debacle

— Again, the simple answer is its too early to tell. Machines, biological or silicon-based, have the potential to exponentially transform the world around them. Good thing there is a new academic lab researching AI ethics, that plans to span its study across a 100 years. Meaning a lot of smart people think singularity is not going to happen in this century.

8/ Microsoft Research Silicon Valley closes

— Kinda shocking and worrying. Especially with last year’s antics at University of Florida nearly eliminating their CS dept. , in order to .. wait for it.. increase athletic budget! Luckily there was enough uproar to overturn that decision.

9/ Breakthrough in Computer Vision

— Machines have always found it hard to describe a photo in simple natural language. Until now. Google researchers demonstrated a system which can describe pictures in coherent words which allows for a natural description of the images. A coherent sentence is worth a thousand images.

10/ Hour of Code

— In 28 US states, computer science doesn’t count towards high school graduation math or science requirements. This should change. Hour of Code is back. Perhaps the next message should be that its not all about knowing to code, but also to inculcate computational thinking.

11/ A faster entropy-coder

I love encoding. You know all that gzip magic utilizes something called Huffman Coding right, which is essentially an entropy coder. Recently, researchers have found a faster way to do it.. not quite pied-piper but real:

Check it out: http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/finite-state-entropy-new-breed-of.html

12/ Leslie Lamport wins Turing Award

He’s human after all. And now he’s won the highest award in the computer sciences. Here’s a great MSR piece on it: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/lamport-031814.aspx

13/ Google raises Turing Award prize

Good Old Google. Doing what’s best for Computer Science.

14* Media attention measured by Google Trends

I compared some of the above CS news events on Google trends. Each news event sprouts from a different industry, e.g., the entertainment industry vs. non-profits vs. academia. Using Google Trends I wanted to observe which ones got most buzz in media (based on news headlines).