I take it you have a familiarity with the subject. If a layman with a science degree would like to start following the developments in the field, would you suggest any journals/conferences as a starting point?
Neural Information Processing Systems is basically one of two top-tier conferences in machine learning, and the one that has more cognitive-science findings published in it, to my knowledge.
The reason nobody publicizes "AI" is because, from the perspective of a learning researcher or cognitive scientist, there basically is no such thing: there exists a large variety of cognitive tasks that can be modeled and pieced together in various ways, with varying degrees of accuracy when applied to real data-sets or compared to human performance.
