It is not every day that young Saudis wander down the street dressed as the Hulk or Doctor Doom. But for three days over the weekend, some 20,000 Saudis decked out in costumes and face paint queued to get into the kingdom's first-ever Comic Con, where robots, video games and giant anime figures filled a tent in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The global comics expo was held under the auspices of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, which has hosted a series of festivals, comedy shows and concerts this year. Saudi Arabia is trying to boost its entertainment sector as part of an economic and social reform drive aimed at creating jobs and weaning the country off its dependence on oil. "The level of entertainment has risen so much from previous years. There used to be no public places like this for families, there was no gender mixing, there was no entertainment, there were no shows," said Modah Al-Bakheet, a Jeddah resident.

"This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

Say you're a giant company that's heard about a fancy "new" technology called artificial intelligence and you're interested in adding some cutting-edge data crunching muscle to your business. Contrary to what the artificial intelligence-hype cycle might suggest, just adding popular buzzwords like "machine learning" to your vernacular isn't as easy as hooking a smartphone to a laptop. At the Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference this week put on by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, several founders behind artificial intelligence startups that have been acquired by industry heavyweights like Salesforce.com (crm), Uber, and Amazon (amzn) shared lessons they've learned since joining the big-time corporate world. Richard Socher, the founder of the A.I. startup MetaMind that was swallowed by Salesforce in April, explained on a panel what he's learned since joining the cloud software giant and becoming its chief scientist. Socher said he was pleased with the research that his small team worked on with two types of A.I. techniques called computer vision, in which software can learn to recognize images in pictures, and natural language processing, in which software learns to recognize text.

Magic Leap, the augmented reality startup that has raised $1.4 billion in funding but has yet to release a product, has made an acquisition to expand its work in computer vision and deep learning, and to build out its operations into Europe. The company has acquired the 3D division of Dacuda, a computer vision startup based out of Zurich. One of Dacuda's focuses had been developing algorithms for consumer-grade cameras (and not just cameras, but any device with a camera function) to capture 2D and 3D imaging in real-time, "making 3D content as easy as taking a video." Dacuda has confirmed the acquisition with a short announcement on its site. It notes that the whole 3D team has moved to Magic Leap and that Dacuda's founder, Alexander Ilic, is now leading Magic Leap Switzerland.

"Could a robot do your job?" and "Do you believe in the death and rebirth of things?" are among the deep questions being posed to visitors at the Vitra Design Museum's latest exhibition. The Hello, Robot exhibition – the first at the German design museum to focus on robotics – explores the relationship between humans and the intelligent machines that increasingly feature in our lives. Its 200-plus exhibits include Star Wars' R2D2, an automatic manifesto generator, a smart sofa and a robot-made pavilion. The exhibits are framed by 14 questions that aim to make visitors think beyond the current conversation around robots, which exhibition curator Amelie Klein describes as "ambivalent". "The exhibition looks at how we interact and relate to this new species, the robot," Klein told Dezeen at the opening of the show.

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Artificial Intelligence already had a massive impact in the past years, but where will AI be in the coming years? Here is a list of predictions. Waiting to make their moveAsia's looming labour shortage p There is an obvious solution p print-edition iconFrom the print edition Asia p Feb 11th 2017 p THE … The first FDA approval for a machine learning application to be used in a clinical setting is a big step forward for AI and machine learning in healthcare and industry as a whole. Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was similar to nuclear fusion in unfulfilled promise. ManpowerGroup, one of the world's largest jobs companies, released a report detailing how the technological revolution is going to change the … Replacing the real world with a virtual one is a neat trick.

Suppose you enter a dark room in an unknown building. You may panic about some potential monsters lurking in the dark. Or just turn on the light, to avoid painfully bumping into the furniture. The dark room is the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, there are people who believe that, as we step into the room, we may run into some evil, ultra-intelligent machines. Fear of some kind of ogre, such as a Golem or a Frankenstein's monster, is as old as human memory.

More than half of mobile collaboration providers will support chatbots in their offerings by the end of 2017, according to new analysis from Aragon Research. The company evaluated 16 major mobile collaboration providers as part of its Tech Spectrum report on the topic, and found that while'several' companies analysed already have chatbot capabilities more will follow before the year's end. "Messaging, the core of mobile collaboration, is becoming a top priority in the enterprise. But enabling collaboration via mobile is not enough – it also needs to be secure and in the near future, increasingly automated via chatbots," the company notes. The prevalence of chatbots in making enterprise tasks more efficient is growing increasingly pronounced.

Safety in AI is important, but more important is to work it out before working out the AI itself. AI Worst Case Scenario - Deadly Truth of AI: https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 The Singularity & Friendly AI: https://youtu.be/uA9mxq3gneE Why Asimov's Three Laws Don't Work: https://youtu.be/7PKx3kS7f4A This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.