When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement. Ekman's work has been used by the FBI and police departments to identify the seeds of violent behavior in nonverbal expressions of sentiment. He has also developed the online Atlas of Emotions at the behest of the Dalai Lama.

The paper outlines the use of neural style transfer in Stewart's directorial debut, "Come Swim", which is about to premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Neural style transfer turns normal images into impressionist art, and is used by popular photo app Prisma. The paper, first spotted by Quartz, is co-bylined with Adobe research engineer Bhautik J. Joshi and producer David Shapiro. It was published yesterday on ArXiv, a repository run by Cornell University for scientific papers that are not yet peer-reviewed. "Come Swim" describes itself as "half realist, half impressionist portraits" of one man's day.

Originally from Leeds, U.K., Andy Russell received his BEng (Hons) and Ph.D degrees from the University of Liverpool. Prior to immigrating to Australia in 1982, Andy worked as a design engineer in private industry and at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University. He is currently Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University, where his primary areas of research are mechatronics and intelligent robotics. Particular interests include humanoid robotics, robot tactile sensing, olfactory sensing for robots, the design of robotic mechanisms and robot learning.

Is it acceptable for a driverless car to deliberately swerve in a way that saves its own passengers yet kills a pedestrian? That and other ethical dilemmas related to artificial intelligence will be put under the microscope by Kiwi researchers receiving $400,000 in funding from the charitable Law Foundation trust. With AI technology set to increasingly transform transport, crime prevention and other areas the Otago University research aims to inform public policy over three years. "New technologies are rapidly transforming the way we live and work, and (this funding) will help ensure that New Zealand's law and policy keeps up with the pace of change," Law Foundation executive director Lynda Hagen said. Research project leader Colin Gavaghan said the legal, practical and ethical challenges posed by AI technologies, which learn and adapt for themselves, fascinated him.

Financial institutions (FI's) face many challenges, but one of the biggest of all is fighting fraud. With so much money and valuable data at stake, the financial system will always be a target for criminals and FI's must shoulder a lot of the responsibility for security. One of the most effective methods of keeping fraudsters at bay is staying up to date with the latest technologies and there are few areas of technological innovation more exciting than artificial intelligence (AI). It's true that we are still a long way off developing true AI, but the developments that have occurred in this field are already offering great potential for FI's. How do you ensure that your security safeguards and authentication processes are rigorous enough to combat fraud, while delivering the speed and reliability modern-day consumers expect?

A hurricane hits a shore town. What is the estimated property damage? A city is doing an inventory of trees. An aid group is trying to get food to an impoverished rural population. What's the best location to make a drop?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming at us before we fully understand what it might mean. Established ways of doing things in areas like transport regulation, crime prevention and legal practice are being challenged by new technologies such as driverless cars, crime prediction software and "AI lawyers". The possible implications of AI innovations for law and public policy in New Zealand will be teased out in a new, ground-breaking Law Foundation study. The three-year multi-disciplinary project, supported by a $400,000 Law Foundation grant, is being run out of the University of Otago. Project team leader Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan of the Faculty of Law says that AI technologies – essentially, technologies that can learn and adapt for themselves – pose fascinating legal, practical and ethical challenges.

The couple have a 5-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade. U.S. Fulbright scholar JOHN EDWARD TOBIN, 24; with possession of marijuana; in Voronezh, Russia, where he was studying. In a bizarre chain of events, the Russian security service arrested Tobin on drug charges, then accused him of being a spy, an allegation denied by the State Department. The spy insinuations were later dropped, but officials may now charge him with drug dealing. A.R. AMMONS, 75, gregarious, self-effacing poet whose deceptively simple riffs on the relationship between Man and Nature have been likened to those of the 19th century transcendentalists Whitman and Emerson; of cancer; in Ithaca, N.Y.

Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.

Max's comment remains relevant to a great deal of 21st Century AI research in machine vision (i.e. up to 2014 at least), focusing on training machines to attach labels as opposed to understanding structures (I would now add "and processes involving interacting structures"). One of the points he could have made but nowhere seems to have made, is that natural vision systems are mostly concerned with motion and change, including change of shape, and change of viewpoint. The emphasis on static scenes and images may therefore conceal major problems e.g.