Wait, are they planning to track data and sell targeted ads, or to literally sell web history? The headline implies the latter but I can't see in the article where it says that.
Classic non-ML AI research these days sometimes tends to be baked into the background of systems where deep learning is the star-- e.g., all of the search techniques used in AlphaGo are interesting in their own right, but aren't really where the innovation is there.
There are researchers actively looking at more holistic AI systems that aren't just the core learning part (often called cognitive architectures). For instance, take a look at Soar:
http://soar.eecs.umich.edu/
It under active development, and has been since the 80s. Soar is very much a spiritual successor to GOFAI (or maybe still is GOFAI), but does incorporate statistical machine learning-- much of the recent work has been around integrating reinforcement learning with symbolic decision-making.
ACT-R is another cognitive architecture under active development, but is more used for cognitive modeling (i.e. psychology research): http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/
You can find other related systems by searching for "cognitive architecture", but it is unfortunately a field that attracts a lot of proposals/'designs' for things that never get properly implemented (the above being two notable exceptions).
Your techtimes link doesn't have anything about Arab countries (or Clinton for that matter), the only fact in there is that Google and others were invited to an NSA talk about "security" in 2011.
> Is this the attitude toward privacy and data isolation at Alphabet/Google?
It is a Twitter remark by an ex-Googler who had nothing to do with Abacus and never worked at Verily. That is, some combination of snark and wild-ass speculation.
This is cool. This person did something similar on a bike:
http://rideallofsf.tumblr.com/
(go back a page or so, the project finished a while ago and it has since devolved into Strava drawings)
s/want to consume/are willing and able to work around government censorship to consume/
Google explicitly decided not to play ball in mainland China years ago. It will be interesting to see the reaction if this goes through-- both exposing ranking algorithms and pulling out of France seem pretty improbable.
I'm pretty sure this isn't a thing, at least as far as Google is concerned. At least, I work there and live in SF and have never heard of it.
Pay is higher in the Bay Area due to high cost of living, like for most companies, but I've never heard of a housing-specific "stipend" or anything like that.
Interesting, but the connection to symbols from Japan seems a bit dubious (or at least not very recent). The term "cross out", and hence the use of an "x" to indicate negating something, seems to have been in common use in English since at least the 1920s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cross+out
No, the strawman constructed to represent these people espouses libertarian ideals and refuses to participate or share. Actual shuttle riders require the shuttle (to the degree that they really "require" it) because it drives them to work. There isn't much more to it than that.
If Caltrain or BART made the same trip and was even a tiny bit faster or more reliable most would switch in a heartbeat.
That is a pretty huge distinction..