A longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump's tweets. These organizations have always existed: they're old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They've been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades--they're practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar.

If you've ever wanted to bottle up and save that holiday feeling - a new AI-produced drink could be just the ticket. "Holiday Spirit" is claimed to be the world's very first data-distilled rum and was created using IBM Watson. The supercomputer analysed data from social media posts in order to produce a bespoke rum "that tastes like a holiday". "In just six hours Watson was able to read 15 million posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter relating to holidays - and find the predominant emotions and concepts in those posts," explained Joe Harrod, big data analyst and AI expert, who works closely with Watson. "The machine then showed that feelings like joy and excitement should be part of a perfect holiday moment. "Then Watson read 5,000 rum reviews from review sites around the web, matching emotions from the reviews with ingredients.

This is the first instalment of Generation AI, a regular column that will explore innovations being made in the vast area of artificial intelligence, in which Canada is a top global player. It was a big news item for the startup community when Microsoft announced last week the acquisition of Maluuba – a Montreal-based deep learning research lab for natural language understanding, and the doubling of its AI campus there. But the reality is, an acquisition by a major player is quickly becoming old news in the artificial intelligence (AI) world (a term that is also applied to the disciplines of deep learning and machine learning). Maluuba was founded in 2011 by Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman after they graduated from University of Waterloo. "We went through a number of accelerator programs including Velocity and Communitech when we started," Pasupalak says.

WhatsApp is rolling out a new update to iPhone users, which lets them queue up messages when they don't have an internet connection. Previously, WhatsApp for iOS would make users wait to regain web access before allowing them to hit the green send button. The app will now automatically fires off the queued messages as soon as a connection has been re-established. The feature has been available on the Android version of WhatsApp for some time, and comes in particularly handy during train and tube journeys, when signal can be particularly patchy. 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.

"The input device contains various movement sensors, also called inertial sensors," says Bernhard Kleiner of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, who leads the project. The individual micro-electromechanical systems themselves are not expensive. What the scientists have spent time developing is how these sensors interact. "We have developed special algorithms that fuse the data of individual sensors and identify a pattern of movement. That means we can detect movements in free space," summarizes Kleiner.

"As my father lost the ability to do things for himself, my mother would give him gentle prompts to keep him on track," recalled Kautz, associate professor in the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science & Engineering. "So at a stage of the disease where, according to the clinical scales, it would seem he couldn't do anything for himself, he could still perform many of the functions of life. He could shower, get dressed, and so forth because my mother would monitor him and give a prompt when needed." It's a recollection that has guided Kautz in initiating a research effort at the UW to explore ways in which computer science can compensate for diminished mental capacity. The Assisted Cognition Project is a collaborative effort by the UW, Intel Computers and Elite Care, a private company developing a state-of-the-art retirement community in the Portland area that utilizes so-called ubiquitous computing to keep tabs on residents' needs.

The Leibniz Center for Law has its roots in the former department of Computer Science & Law of the Law Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, and currently houses about 15 researchers. The Leibniz Center conducts research and provides education in the field of Artificial Intelligence and law. In the tradition of Leibniz, we focus on the development and application of techniques from Artificial Intelligence to the field of Law for the purpose of supporting legal practice, and bringing new insights to legal theory. The Leibniz Center for Law has longstanding experience on legal ontologies, automatic legal reasoning and legal knowledge-based systems, (standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information, user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of ICT in education and legal practice (e.g. It plays an important role in the development of eGovernment on both national and international level. The center provides advice on change-management issues of knowledge-intensive legal processes and the improvement of knowledge-productivity in legal organisations.

JERUSALEM/BEIJING, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- What will happen if Artificial Intelligence (AI) knows us better than we do about ourselves? Yuval Noah Harari, author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, shared his insight on how trends in science and technology may progress and influence human kind in a written interview with Xinhua. Harari is recently making quite a splash in China with the launch of the Chinese version of his equally compelling new book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in which he turns his focus on humanity's future and the quest to upgrade humans, as science, especially AI, advance rapidly nowadays. According to Harari, people have already taken the first steps on the path of integration of humans and smart machines. People are already merging with their smartphones, and in the case of China, their Wechat accounts -- the intelligent devices and apps that constantly study us, adapt to our unique personality, and shape our worldview and innermost desires.

As Silicon Valley and Motown continue to meld, it's becoming clear that the car of the future will be a self-driving, electric, and possibly shared vehicle. These technologies are already filtering into the vehicles we have today. It will be a few years still before we fully get there, but in 2017, we can see before our eyes the groundwork being laid for this future. Among the most noteworthy changes happening now is the emergence of cars as a service. Consumers are aware of Uber and Lyft, but auto manufacturers and other companies are starting to get in on this market.

This post is authored by Kristin M. Tolle, Director of Program Management for Advanced Analytics Ecosystem Development and Training at Microsoft. Cortana Intelligence, Microsoft's end-to-end platform for Advanced Analytics, offers a suite of services to solve real world customer problems. The suite has many moving parts – Data Lake, HDInsight (Hadoop), Event Hub, Machine Learning and R – just to name a few, and we realize it may be challenging for some of you to experience first-hand how all these services work together in concert. My team, which is tasked with training our partners to use these services to address their customers' needs, is keenly aware of the breadth of that knowledge surface area. In this blog post, I outline some of the best ways for you to learn about all things Big Data and Advanced Analytics from Microsoft, including many hands-on training options, and also how to stay in the loop on our future offerings.