Back in October 2014, Taylor Swift opened an account on Line, the messaging app that is massively popular in Asia. The account currently doesn't do much. If you communicate with it, you can hear a funny voice message from Swift, for instance. Paul McCartney has one, too. Burberry and Selfridges also have accounts on WeChat and Line.

Artificial Intelligence has been prominent in tech news recently, and was a hot topic at SXSW. The technology has massive potential for use in customer communication, yet will it ever be able to completely replace the need for a human element? Facebook has already launched itself into the AI arena by introducing chatbots to its messenger app. Facebook Messenger users will now be able to chat to select partners and check on the status of their orders, receiving replies from AI, rather than an actual customer service agent. The question is, is this a feasible solution for the majority of brands at the moment?

In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," says Rus, who also directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether."

Mark Hamill is a lot busier this time around in Star Wars Episode VIII. The actor, who reprised his role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, took a break after a long day of filming the franchise's eighth installment at London's Pinewood Studios to talk about his return to video games. Hamill is part of an all-star cast that spent time with game designer Chris Roberts (creator of Wing Commander) to bring full performance-capture acting to the characters in Squadron 42. The upcoming PC action game is part of the massive crowdfunded Star Citizen universe. Hamill talks about his second stint with Roberts, and how much technology has advanced in the PC gaming space, in this exclusive interview.

As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don't throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Traditional neural networks can't do this, and it seems like a major shortcoming. For example, imagine you want to classify what kind of event is happening at every point in a movie. It's unclear how a traditional neural network could use its reasoning about previous events in the film to inform later ones. Recurrent neural networks address this issue.

Periscope may soon be able to identify what's happening in live broadcasts with the help of Twitter's Cortex. Cortex describes itself as "a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers dedicated to building a unifying representation of all of the users and content on Twitter, to help build a product in which people can easily find new experiences to share and participate in." Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! The team first showed its livestream scanning system off to MIT Technology Review, where it scanned and categorized two dozen streams at once. To achieve this, Twitter has built a proprietary computer made entirely of GPUs, which then feeds its findings to a deep learning algorithm.

This is 2016 version of the Eurovision prediction. I have explained systematics in quite detailed fashion in the last year post which you can find here. Very shortly, I measured how many tweets have been sent about each song from each country. From this, I estimated amount of votes that each country would give to another. For example, if Germans tweets the most about Polish song, I assume that Germany will give Poland 12 points.

Jordi Escale, CIO of the Government of Catalonia, says that while AI plans are at currently in their early stages - and is consulting with IBM on potential projects - there are a number of ways the technology can be used for public sector firms. "We start thinking about the impact in the services in the government like traffic control and autonomous vehicles," he says. This includes real-time facial image recognition and number plate recognition for the police. "Then there is health, supporting the doctor for knowledge by tapping all of this unstructured data," he adds.

The Washington Put up wrote earlier this week on Google's growing use of information packing containers in its searches – the inset bins on the prime of search outcomes that try and shortcut the search course of by displaying the precise factoid of curiosity on high of the standard infinite web page of hyperlinks. As customers more and more entry the net by cellular and voice, the aim of such programs is to get the person a solution comparable to "what number of ounces in a pound" or "who's the president of Estonia" as shortly as potential. Whereas serps of the psat merely returned a pile of hyperlinks for a consumer to wade via, the objective of data containers is to offer the precise response the consumer is on the lookout for by leveraging advances in pure language processing to have machines really perceive the person's query. In keeping with the Publish these factoids at the moment are displayed for nearly a 3rd of Google's 100 billion month-to-month searches, which means they're enjoying an ever-increasing position in mediating our entry to the world's data. The rise of bots throughout the communicative continuum from office instruments like Slack to social communication like Fb means machine interpretation of the world's information will more and more supplant the historic idea of the key phrase search.

The race to "cure death" has gripped Silicon Valley. In 2012, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, the'futurist' inventor best known for popularizing the idea of the "technological singularity," a hypothetical'super-intelligence' that will one day vastly outstrip the capacities of human beings. As Google's Director of Engineering, Kurzweil's job is to turn the fantasies of science fiction into consumer products -- and Google has invested billions in hopes that Kurzweil's dreams could one day become reality. One notable project, called "Calico," was announced the year after Kurzweil joined Google: a secretive biotech firm researching age-related diseases and developing anti-aging technology. Soon, Kurzweil promises, age and disease will disappear altogether, giving way to "software-based humans" with holographically projected bodies.