Apparently, director Tim Burton would be fine if you retitled his movie "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children but Only if They're White." In an interview with the website Bustle, Burton was asked why, given the pervasive, ongoing discussion of diversity in Hollywood, the overwhelming majority of the characters (and, hence, actors) in his latest fantasy film are white. "Nowadays, people are talking about it more," Burton said. He went on to talk about how, as a kid, he would've been dismayed to see an Asian kid or a black kid on "The Brady Bunch," or more white actors in blaxploitation movies. Burton's statements are just the latest from a celebrated, veteran filmmaker unable to wrap his mind around why diversity matters.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have come to a temporary, three-week agreement on custody of their six children, a person familiar with the negotiations said Friday. The deal was voluntary and doesn't reflect any ruling from the court regarding permanent custody, legal or physical, the source said. Both Pitt and Jolie agreed to get individual counseling, the source said, and Pitt offered to submit to drug and alcohol testing, which was not required. The couple agreed that Pitt's first visit with the kids would include a therapist, but there was no requirement for a monitor during subsequent visits. Decision-making for Maddox, 15; Pax, 12; Zahara, 11; Shiloh, 10; and 8-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne will follow a structured plan agreed to by both parents.

With up to 16 NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs, P2 instances are the most powerful GPU instances available in the cloud. P2 instances allow customers to build and deploy compute-intensive applications using the CUDA parallel computing platform or the OpenCL framework without up-front capital investments. To offer the best performance for these high performance computing applications, the largest P2 instance offers 16 GPUs with a combined 192 Gigabytes (GB) of video memory, 40,000 parallel processing cores, 70 teraflops of single precision floating point performance, over 23 teraflops of double precision floating point performance, and GPUDirect technology for higher bandwidth and lower latency peer-to-peer communication between GPUs. P2 instances also feature up to 732 GB of host memory, up to 64 vCPUs using custom Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors, dedicated network capacity for I/O operation, and enhanced networking through the Amazon EC2 Elastic Network Adaptor. Two years ago, we launched G2 instances to support customers running graphics and compute-intensive applications," said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2. "Today, as customers embrace heavier GPU compute workloads such as artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and big data processing, they need even higher GPU performance than what was previously available.

Artificial Intelligence Poised to Double Annual Economic Growth Rate in 12 Developed Economies and Boost Labor Productivity by up to 40 Percent by 2035, According to New Research by Accenture NEW YORK; Sept. 28, 2016 – Research released today from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) reveals that artificial intelligence (AI) could double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine. The impact of AI technologies on business is projected to boost labor productivity by up to 40 percent by fundamentally changing the way work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business. "AI is poised to transform business in ways we've not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century," said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer, Accenture. "The combinatorial effect of AI, cloud, sophisticated analytics and other technologies is already starting to change how work is done by humans and computers, and how organizations interact with consumers in startling ways. Our research demonstrates that as AI matures, it can propel economic growth and potentially serve as a powerful remedy for stagnant productivity and labor shortages of recent decades."

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is launching a new online "chatbot" that will answer customers' questions online and help direct them to the right places. The new online tool, dubbed "Luvo," will begin helping 10% of the bank's customers online from December, according to an emailed statement sent to Business Insider. It will be a web chat tool: as you're browsing, a little chat window will likely pop up and ask if you need any help. The rollout follows a 2-month trial of the tool with the 1,200 RBS staff handling small business inquiries. These staff could direct the SMEs to Luvo to help them with things like lost pins or corporate cards.

"maybe the singularity just happened, and we didn't notice" DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT// I've always been fascinated with science fiction and the history of man's desire to gain knowledge into what defines our existence. I want to thank the amazing work of James and Lucas at Pettus Creative for their amazing VFX work in fulfilling the vision of this film and the message of bridging the world of artificial intelligence to the living being. I also wish to thank my actors for their great work with adding depth, subtleness and humanity into their roles. DIRECTOR'S BIO// Tom Choi is currently recurring on his 3rd season of MTV's Teen Wolf as Ken Yukimura. He was also nominated for Lone Hunter as Best Actor in the Mavericks Short film festival.

The "opportunities and challenges" of artificial intelligence spurred some of the biggest technology companies in the world to come together Wednesday to announce that they were creating a new organization to ensure that AI ultimately benefits people and society. The Partnership on AI is a non-profit organization bringing together Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, DeepMind/Google and IBM to advance public understanding of AI technologies and formulate best practices. A website for the organization spells out the goals, mission and tenets, and member bios are included for representatives from each of the companies. "Together, the organization's members will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology," the Partnership said in its news release. "It does not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies."

New York City has created a 5-million fund for women working in the fields of film and theater, becoming the first municipality in the U.S. to finance such an initiative. The fund, announced Thursday by the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, will provide grants to support film and theater projects by and about women. New York also will hold workshops and a film-financing conference designed to connect women with money for their projects; conduct a screenwriting competition that culminates in a series to air on New York's Channel 25; broadcast an additional block of programming on Channel 25 devoted to women; and fund research about gender in the field of film directing. "We believe we're the first municipality in the country to take on this issue," MOME Commissioner Julie Menin said. "We think by creating these economic pathways of opportunity, that is one of the best ways we can contribute."

UK-based legal AI company RAVN Systems has formally launched a new application to review documents for legal professional privilege (LPP) using its cognitive engine. The new service will be branded the'LPP Robot' and will be offered alongside RAVN's other AI capabilities. The system reduces the time taken in such reviews by over 80% and greatly reduces the level of manpower needed to conduct such a task. Accuracy levels are also improved. This is an important step as the ability to spot LPP documents is of critical importance to lawyers, especially where investigations of large company data sets are involved or when part of a wider discovery process due to litigation. It matters because LPP material represents communications between a lawyer and their client, which could also include privileged material between an inhouse lawyer and an executive in their company.

It's unavoidable: the Internet of Things will kill many jobs. Self-driving cars alone could put millions out of work. And the manufacturing sector, already reeling from decades of job losses, could see millions of more jobs replaced by machines. The convergence of IoT and cognitive computing could also threaten many prestigious jobs as computers learn to perform thinking tasks rather than solely mechanical ones. "We will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value," write venture investor William H. Davidow and technology writer Michael S. Malone in Harvard Business Review. "Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century."