A vital perspective is missing from the discussions we're having about Artificial Intelligence: what does it mean for our identity?

Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it's what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world.

Neil D. Lawrence's visionary book shows why these fears may be misplaced. Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is 'atom'). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity.

By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people. Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable readers to choose the future we want.

Kernel methods are among the most popular techniques in machine learning. From a regularization theory perspective, they provide a natural choice for the hypotheses space and the regularization functional through the notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. From a probabilistic theory perspective, they are the key in the context of Gaussian processes, where the kernel function is known as the covariance function. The theory of kernel methods for single-valued functions is well established by now, and indeed there has been a considerable amount of work devoted to designing and learning kernels. More recently there has been an increasing interest in methods that deal with multiple outputs, motivated partly by frameworks like multitask learning. Applications of kernels for vector-valued functions include sensor networks, geostatistics, computer graphics and several more. Kernels for Vector-Valued Functions: A Review looks at different methods to design or learn valid kernel functions for multiple outputs, paying particular attention to the connection between probabilistic and regularization methods. Kernels for Vector-Valued Functions: A Review is aimed at researchers with an interest in the theory and application of kernels for vector-valued functions in areas such as statistics, computer science and engineering. One of its goals is to provide a unified framework and a common terminology for researchers working in machine learning and statistics.