To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris.
Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered.
When I moved to Mumbai I had no acting background and so was unable to make a breakthrough for years.
The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people's ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I'm seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.
AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.
Many researchers are exploring other forms of AI, some of which have proved useful in limited contexts; there may well be a breakthrough that makes higher levels of intelligence possible, but there is still no clear path yet to this goal.
The discovery of HIV in 1983 and the proof that it was the cause of AIDS in 1984 were the first major scientific breakthroughs that provided a specific target for blood-screening tests and opened the doorway to the development of antiretroviral medications.
Ultimately, auto designers need to overcome market challenges with innovative design solutions. The automotive industry is at a turning point with environmental and economic conditions on one side and breakthrough technology on the other, so it will be fascinating to see how these design leaders envision the future.