The great gathering of genre fans in the city that never sleeps is officially over. New York Comic-Con has closed its doors after a weekend of surprise comic book cameos, never-before-seen TV premieres and geeky celebrations. But the pictures of the cosplay at NYCC will live on forever, because the East Coast convention goers gave great costume this year. Here's a collection of a few of our favorite costumes, should you dare to be inspired this Halloween season. Jessica Jones in the scarcely cosplayed version of her (now retired) alter superhero character Jewel, Luke Cage in Power Man attire, and Marvel's brand new Iron Man character Riri Williams.

Artificial intelligence is learning to take on an increasing number of sophisticated tasks. Google Deepmind's AI is now able to imitate human speech, and just this past August IBM's Watson successfully diagnosed a rare case of leukemia. Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. In the US alone, nearly eight percent of the population suffers from depression (that's about one in every 13 American adults), and yet about 45 percent of this population does not seek professional care due to the costs. There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who's within your insurance network to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with.

"I've been waiting for you," Sophia tells 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose. They're mid-interview, and Rose reacts with surprise. "But it makes a good pickup line." Sophia managed to get a laugh out of Charlie Rose. Rose interviewed the human-like machine for this week's two-part 60 Minutes piece on artificial intelligence, or A.I.

Will we ever learn to love our robot future? With rapid advances in this technology – sex robots, companion bots and more are said to be around the corner – it seems a reasonable question to ask, especially given almost every fictional account of that future is still a dark "us and them" tale. With the reboot of sci-fi yarns such as Westworld and Humans on television, androids – the class of robots designed to be utterly human-like – are once again capturing our imaginations. It was in 1970 that professor Masahiro Mori from the Tokyo Institute of Technology predicted that as we try to make robots more human, we would reach a point where we were disturbed and repulsed by them as they became almost, but not quite, human. He labelled this effect the "uncanny valley" – hypothesising that when technology improved and robots became truly human-like, then we would once again feel comfortable with them.

Last week, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Building a robot that can do battle Pacific Rim-style is harder than it looks. MegaBots -- the US half of a proposed mecha duel -- is scrapping its Mk.II machine after deeming it completely "unsafe for hand-to-hand combat." In "almost" every test, the team discovered that the human operator (buried inside, a little like Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion) would have been seriously injured or killed. Now, the crew is working on the Mk.III -- a new robot with a safer cockpit, improved controls and modular arms. I like the cigar in particular.)

Singapore-based Nugit promises analysts 50-80% less time spent "extracting, cleaning and combining" data when using its artificial intelligence-enhanced reports The Singapore-based Nugit (a play on "nuggets," of data) announced on Thursday that it raised 5.2 million from Sequoia India, with the goal of doubling its staff and expanding its client base in the near future for a market that will be worth over 185 billion in 2017. This is their first public round of financing, though they raised an undisclosed seed round in March 2015. Nugit's core services center around its work in "natural language generation" (NLG), an artificial intelligence process first developed in the 1990s to automate weather forecasts. NLG works differently from other types of machine learning linguistics because, "NLG systems start with a set of ideas locked in data and turn them into into language that, in turn, communicates them." The goal of this interactive information access is to draw out trends and patterns for reports quickly and clearly, using preprogrammed conditional prompts to review large data sets. Marketing and advertising companies, for instance, want to collect data that can compare data on campaign spending, sales, and reach.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programmes aims to create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that get to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into the new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.