Mark your calendars: The original "Ghost in the Shell" movie will be hitting theaters for a limited run in February. Lionsgate and Funimation have announced that Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime film will return to the big screen for a two-day engagement. The original Japanese version (with English subtitles) will be shown Feb. 7, while those who prefer the English-dubbed film will have to wait until Feb. 8. "'Ghost in the Shell' is truly a seminal work in anime cinema and it helped firmly establish a market for the genre with U.S. movie audiences," said Gen Fukunaga, Funimation founder and chief executive in a press release. "We're excited to be partnering with Lionsgate to bring the original'Ghost in the Shell' movie back to U.S. theaters." Based on the manga series by Masamune Shirow, "Ghost in the Shell" is set in a fictional Japanese city in a future where the line between techonlogy and biology is blurred.

The Government passed an "assault on freedom" while people were afraid and distracted, according to campaigners. Campaign group Liberty is requesting a High Court judicial review of the wide-ranging new spying tactics in the Investigatory Powers Act. That law was passed at the end of last year and gives spies – and a range of other organisations including the Food Standards Agency – the power to see anyone's entire internet history, alongside other unprecedented rules. The Liberty challenge will focus on bulk powers, which let intelligence agencies collect up huge amount of data in case it needs to be used in future, meaning that people not under investigation have their information watched. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

We've all got bills to pay, fiscal responsibilities to meet, retirements to save for -- and we need help. As tens of thousands of chatbots proliferate across Slack, Facebook, and other platforms, you hear naysayers claim that bots might be useful someday but that today they're little more than a gimmick. It's hard to feel that way after you learn about a handful of chatbots that have saved people more than $10 million. Next time you hear someone make that argument, point them to this list, because perhaps nothing is more useful than putting (or keeping) money in your pocket. After its first month, about 100,000 people have interacted with PennyCat, according to maker Leo Kangin.

From one direction comes intense competitive pressure to innovate or to at least follow very, very quickly. From the precisely opposite direction comes the potentially existential threat of an app very publicly flopping or - even worse - being very publicly revealed to jeopardize the customer's well-being. Either way, you lose brand value in a social marketplace where brand is your primary currency. Auto-da-fé The car industry offers an excellent case in point. One day, carmakers are climbing all over each other to position themselves as au courant with Apple CarPlay and Google Auto.

A company in Japan is laying off 34 workers and replacing them with an Artificial Intelligence system. The insurance company invested in the AI that will calculate payouts for its policyholders. The company, Fukoku Mutual Life, estimates productivity will boost 30 percent. They expect to save 140m yen (1 million pounds) each year. Thus, they'll earn a return on their investment in roughly two years, even with maintenance expenses.

Human-robot relationships are a running theme in pop culture, from the cylons of Battlestar Galactica to Spike Jonze's film Her and last year's hit show Westworld. But that kind of scenario might not be science fiction much longer. Romance between humans and machines is already nearing the realm of the possible. This year, the California company Abyss Creations plans to start selling a new generation of high-tech sex robots -- dolls that can actually speak and respond to touch. And according to artificial intelligence expert Dr. David Levy, in a few generations, we won't just be having sex with robots, we'll be marrying them.

Investors haven't been happy with IBM (NYSE:IBM) lately. Since Ginni Rometty started as CEO in January of 2012, IBM has had 18 consecutive quarters of year-over-year declining revenue -- essentially every quarter of her tenure. The stock has lost nearly 10% compared with a gain of 78% for the S&P 500 over the last five years. For IBM shareholders, Ginni Rometty's four-year reign as chief executive officer hasn't been anything to go to Disneyland about. But her company has become a leader in one corporate category: board members willing to shovel incentive pay at a CEO turning in a mediocre performance.

Uber is offering a helping hand to some of the same city leaders it sometimes antagonizes with the aggressive way it runs its popular ride-hailing service. The assistance will come in the form of a free website, called'Movement,' expected to be available to the public in mid-February. Uber announced the new website on the eve of a transportation-planning conference in Washington. The website draws upon data Uber gathers from its ride-hailing service showing average travel times on specific routes at any day or time. Although anyone can use the website, Uber says it believes its main audience will be city officials dealing with congestion in their streets and transit systems.

LG is planning to improve the Smart Doctor, Quick Help, and LG Electronics Remote Consulting apps with machine learning features and other solutions powered by advanced artificial intelligence technologies, the South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer announced on Monday. The company's decision to ennoble its set of mobile tools comes as a part of a more general strategy to implement machine learning technology into after sales smartphone services. In addition to artificial intelligence, the Seoul-based tech giant is also looking into ennobling its services with big data analytics and similar solutions. The update process is expected to start during the first quarter of the year with the company currently focusing on providing remote after sales services via its selection of apps. While the Quick Help app is still only available in South Korea, LG promised to bring it to North America later this year.

Big Data engines are powering a lot of service businesses right now. Data is collected from users from wearable technologies, web behaviors, purchase behavior as well as several arbitrary data points we'd never think of. The demand for faster and bigger engines to crunch and serve up the data to services is growing exponentially. You see a LOT of correlation between "Cloud" and "Big Data" but on Big Data and "Hybrid," where hybrid hosting is the sanest approach to the Big Data Infrastructure problem. Speaker Bio Emil Sayegh is an early pioneer of cloud computing and is recognized as one of the industry's only true veterans.