week 5 - Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion

A Google artificial intelligence program has beaten the European champion of the board game Go.

The Chinese game is viewed as a much tougher challenge than chess for computers because there are many more ways a Go match can play out.

The tech company's DeepMind division said its software had beaten its human rival five games to nil.

One independent expert called it a breakthrough for AI with potentially far-reaching consequences.

The achievement was announced to coincide with the publication of a paper, in the scientific journal Nature, detailing the techniques used.

Earlier on Wednesday, Facebook's chief executive had said its own AI projecthad been "getting close" to beating humans at Go.

But the research he referred to indicated its software was ranked only as an "advanced amateur" and not a "professional level" player.Go is thought to date back to ancient China, several thousand years ago.

Using black-and-white stones on a grid, players gain the upper hand by surrounding their opponents pieces with their own.

The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200 moves compared with about 20 in chess.

There are more possible positions in Go than atoms in the universe, according to DeepMind's team.

It can be very difficult to determine who is winning, and many of the top human players rely on instinct.DeepMind's chief executive, Demis Hassabis, said its AlphaGo software followed a three-stage process, which began with making it analyse 30 million moves from games played by humans.

"It starts off by looking at professional games," he said."It learns what patterns generally occur - what sort are good and what sort are bad. If you like, that's the part of the program that learns the intuitive part of Go.

"It now plays different versions of itself millions and millions of times, and each time it gets incrementally better. It learns from its mistakes.

"The final step is known as the Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is really the planning stage.

"Now it has all the intuitive knowledge about which positions are good in Go, it can make long-range plans."

Tested against rival Go-playing AIs, Google's system won 499 out of 500 matches,

And last October, DeepMind invited Fan Hui, Europe's top player, to its London office for a series of games, each of which the AI won.

"Many of the best programmers in the world were asked last year how long it would take for a program to beat a top professional, and most of them were predicting 10-plus years," Mr Hassabis said.

"The reasons it was quicker than people expected was the pace of the innovation going on with the underlying algorithms and also how much more potential you can get by combining different algorithms together."

week 4 - Taiwan Earthquake: 116 confirmed dead in Tainan as search for survivors concluded

A rescue operation taking place after the Taiwan earthquake has been concluded as the remains of the last unaccounted for person was pulled from the wreckage of the Weiguan Jinlong apartment complex. In total 116 people have been confirmed dead after the powerful 6.4-magnitude earthquake, with all but two of the victims living at the 17-storey Weiguan Jinlong (Golden Dragon) building.

The earthquake struck the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan on 7 February leaving the city strewn with twisted metal, fallen bricks and concrete debris. The city had a population of 1.9 million people and on Friday 12 February, the president and president-elect attended a memorial service for the dead and missing.

Tainan City mayor William Lai announced an end to the operation on Saturday (13 February) as the remains of Hsieh Chen-yu were discovered at 3.57pm local time. In total 289 people were pulled out of the collapsed building with 173 still alive and 96 remain in hospital.

Although residents lived in the upper regions of the complex, its lower storeys were filled with arcades of shops which initially gave way under the strain of the quake before the whole of the U-shaped construction was destroyed. The last survivor was dragged out of the wreckage on Monday evening (8 February).

The Taiwanese government immediately launched an investigation into the construction of the building complex after blue cans were pictured – reportedly used as construction fillers in the beams. Reports from the city suggest that the residents living in the building, constructed in 1989, had often complained of problems like tiles falling from walls, malfunction of lifts and the building having too few reinforcing bars.

Lin Ming-hui, former chairman of the now disbanded Weiguan company, and two other former executives Chang Kui-an and Cheng Chin-kui now face charges of professional negligence resulting in death after appearing in court on Wednesday 10 February.

Hsieh, a member of the blocks management committee "might have wanted to wait until everyone else had left", Lai said, according to the Central News Agency. He added that the: "The search and rescue has come to an end".

week 3 - Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…

That’s right – for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a pictograph: 😂, officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, though you may know it by other names. There were other strong contenders from a range of fields, outlined below, but 😂 was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.

Why was this chosen?

Emojis (the plural can be either emoji or emojis) have been around since the late 1990s, but 2015 saw their use, and use of the word emoji, increase hugely.  This year Oxford University Press have partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and 😂 was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. SwiftKey identified that 😂 made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014. The wordemoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.

A brief history of emoji

An emoji is ‘a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication’; the term emoji is a loanword from Japanese, and comes from e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. The similarity to the English word emoticon has helped its memorability and rise in use, though the resemblance is actually entirely coincidental:emoticon (a facial expression composed of keyboard characters, such as ;), rather than a stylized image) comes from the English words emotion and icon.

Emojis are no longer the preserve of texting teens – instead, they have been embraced as a nuanced form of expression, and one which can cross language barriers. Even Hillary Clinton solicited feedback in the form of emojis, and 😂 has had notable use from celebrities and brands alongside everyone else – and even appeared as the caption tothe Vine which apparently kicked off the popularity of the term on fleek, which appears on our WOTY shortlist.

week 2 - Protesters Are in Agreement as Well: Pact Is Too Weak

PARIS — Several thousand climate activists from across Europe and many from farther afield gathered peacefully near the Arc de Triomphe on Saturday to protest the outcome of the COP 21 climate conference about 12 miles away.

The demonstration was an official exception to a ban on public gatheringsacross France after the Paris terrorist attacks in November.

Even as the delegates at the official conference center reached a landmark accord and applauded their achievement, the crowds on the street made clear their belief that it would take much more than the measures in the deal to halt global climate change.

“We don’t like the COP 21,” said Joseph Purugganan, who came from the Philippines to participate in the demonstration with other activists from a coalition called Focus on the Global South.

“The message here is that the real solution will come from the people,” he said. “After 20 years of COPs, look at where we are.”

He added that slowing the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, the goal set in the agreement, was not enough. In the Philippines, there have been record typhoons, and fishermen in Southeast Asia are being driven from their homes by rising oceans, he said.

Stuart Basden, 33, who came from Toronto, sounded even more disappointed. “We knew that it would be a failure,” he said. “They just decided in which decade we will become extinct.”

In contrast to an earlier protest during the conference, a banned one at the Place de la République on Nov. 29 that turned violent and resulted in arrests, the mood at the Arc de Triomphe was cheerful, even festive. Almost everyone carried a red tulip, and many waved flags or carried banners, or had more creative props.

A group of Danes dressed as polar bears took off their headgear periodically to get some air and see the events around them, while a group from Peru waved flags, one of which said “Nuclear Power, Non Gracias.”

At two locations, the Arc de Triomphe and the Champ de Mars, the climate demonstrators unfolded and carried two 100-meter red ribbons — red to symbolize that the climate situation is an emergency, and to communicate their skepticism toward the agreement. The Arc de Triomphe demonstration was organized by 350.org, a United States-based climate change nonprofit. The one at the Champs de Mars was organized by a coalition of 16 environmental groups, including the French chapters of Friends of the Earth and Attac. Many participants said that the event and even the conference had energized many climate change activists, regardless of its outcome.

There was also an unofficial demonstration earlier Saturday in which about 3,000 climate activists in Paris managed to use geo-localization technology to spell out the words “Climate Justice Peace” on a virtual map.

“The climate movement is growing, and climate policies now have a huge mainstream support,” said Daniel Smith, 29, who bicycled from London to join the demonstration.

Standing next to his bike, which had a globe strapped to the back, he added, “And now it’s not green anymore, it’s red.”

A group of climate activists from the Netherlands had come by bus. One, Willemyn Kadyk, 19, a college student and aspiring environmental lawyer, said that while many might not care much about demonstrations, such events were an important counterpoint to the official conference.

“People might think it’s not worth it to come, but if everybody thinks that way, nothing changes,” she said. “Groups will make this change.”

Many French activists were there, as well, including Corine Lefort, an elementary school principal who came from Marseille with her husband. They carried a banner that read “Save the Climate.”

“This is to put pressure on those officials responsible that things need to change more quickly,” she said. “It’s urgent. This is a real crime against humanity.”

She added that on the Mediterranean coast there were already villages where people living close to the water had deserted their homes because the sea had risen.

“This is not something for the future,” she said. “The future is already here.”

week 1 - State-of-art opera house opens in central Taiwan

TAIPEI -- Central Taiwan's first opera house opened Sunday with a grand ceremony to inaugurate what Culture Minister Lung Ying-tai called "the pride of Taichung."

Designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the eye-catchingly modern National Taichung Theater boasts a 2,014-seat grand theater, a 800-seat theater and a 200-seat black box.

The architecturally complex theater was an engineering challenge constructed entirely without beams or columns and relying instead on 58 curved wall units. It is believed to be the first theater in the world to employ such a construction technique.

While the outside walls appear to be smooth surfaces thanks to the installation of glass windows, the basic structure itself is a series of tubular voids connected together.

Called a "sound cave" by Ito, the state-of-the-art opera house took nearly 5 years to complete at a cost of NT$4.36 billion (US$141 million).

President Ma Ying-jeou, who attended the inauguration ceremony, expressed hope that the theater will help his administration reach its goal of "rejuvenating the country through culture."

He gave credit to Taichung Mayor Jason Hu, who is up for reelection next week, for turning the daunting architectural challenge into a reality.

Culture Minister Lung, meanwhile, thanked the workers who helped construct the building along with city government employees.

A series of performances by prominent local groups will take place at the opera house starting this month to celebrate its inauguration.

The series begins Sunday with a production of "Cat Man" by Taiwanese opera troupe Ming Hwa Yuan Arts and Cultural Group.

Paper Windmill Theatre will then perform its production of "Don Quixote" Nov. 27 and Nov. 28, which will be followed by a concert by Taiwanese violinist Hu Nai-yuan and the Taiwan Connection Chamber Orchestra on Dec. 7.

Ju Percussion Group will then give a performance on Dec. 13.

The National Taichung Theater is part of the government's efforts to strengthen support for and improve the quality and international competitiveness of Taiwan's performing arts.

It is being touted as a leg of the "golden triangle" for the performing arts in Taiwan, alongside Taipei's National Theater and Concert Hall and Kaohsiung's Wei-Wu-Ying Center for the Arts, the latter of which is set to be completed next year.

The Ministry of Culture will take over the operation of the National Taichung Theater starting in January next year.

1.       employ 採用

2.      inauguration ceremony 就職典禮

3.      rejuvenate 復原