Not all Twitter bots are racist -- some are genuinely creepy, (but in the best possible way). Take @smilevector, an algorithm created by New Zealand neural network researcher Tom White. If you submit a photo of your favorite celebrity in a glum or neutral pose, it'll turn it into a bizarre, "I just ate a child" kind of grin. The bot "uses a generative neural network to add or remove smiles from images it finds in the wild" or submitted to its follow list, according to its creator.

With business applications of artificial intelligence ranging from customer service, to hiring, to marketing, it's clear that AI is a tool that is critical for companies to embrace. But using AI has consequences for business structures, hierarchies, and budgets. Why Dick's Sporting Goods decided to play its own game in e commerce Dick's Sporting Goods has long partnered with eBay Enterprise on its e -commerce platform. Learn the benefits and risks of this multi -million dollar IT bet. To understand how this new technology will disrupt traditional business models, and to help prepare businesses integrate AI in their plans, TechRepublic spoke with Dave O'Flanagan, CEO and co-founder of Boxever, a data science company based in Ireland.

Robots probably won't kill people, but people could kill people with robots. That's the concern of an open letter signed by scientists and other interested parties -- including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. See also: Team KAIST won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, so now what? The Future of Life Institute, the volunteer-backed research organization which posted the letter, aims to "maximize the future benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls," according to its website.

Back in 1979, two scientists wrote a seminal textbook on computational complexity theory, describing how some problems are hard to solve. The known algorithms for handling them grow in complexity so fast that no computer can be guaranteed to solve even moderately sized problems in the lifetime of the universe. While most problems could be deemed either relatively easy or hard for a computer to solve, a few fell into a strange nether region where they could not be classified as either. The authors, Michael Garey and David S. Johnson, helpfully provided an appendix listing a dozen problems not known to fit into one category or the other. "The very first one that's listed is graph isomorphism," says Lance Fortnow, chair of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

That is what I said when I was asked whether we would ever see computer science taught in K–12. It was 2009, and I was addressing a gathering of attendees to a workshop on computational thinking (http://bit.ly/1NjmcRJ) It has been 10 years since I published my three-page "Computational Thinking" Viewpoint (http://bit.ly/1W73ekv) in the March 2006 issue of Communications. To celebrate its anniversary, let us consider how far we've come. Since the dotcom bust, there had been a steep and steady decline in undergraduate enrollments in computer science, with no end in sight.

The 19th-century U.K. Locomotive Act, also known as the Red Flag Act, required motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person waving a red flag to signal the oncoming danger. Movies can be a good place to see what the future looks like. According to Robert Wallace, a retired director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service: "... When a new James Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, 'Do you have one of those?' If I answered'no', the next question was, 'How long will it take you to make it?' Folks didn't care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional series--his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination ..."3 As an example, the CIA successfully copied the shoe-mounted spring-loaded and poison-tipped knife in From Russia With Love. It's interesting to speculate on what else Bond movies may have led to being invented. For this reason, I have been considering what movies predict about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). One theme that emerges in several science fiction movies is that of an AI mistaken for human.

Today in "terrifying things you can't look away from" is smilevector, a Twitter bot that uses a neural network to take photos from the internet and add or remove smiles. Smilevector was created this month by Tom White, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in Wellington, New Zealand. The bot is based on generative neural networks, which means it was trained by looking at lots of smiles, and has now learned to add or remove them to other photos. You must obey your smile overlord.

One early morning in March 2011, Albert Chretien and his wife, Rita, loaded their Chevrolet Astro van and drove away from their home in Penticton, British Columbia. Their destination was Las Vegas, where Albert planned to attend a trade show. Rather than stick to the most direct route, they decided to take a scenic road less travelled, Idaho State Highway 51. The Chretiens figured there had to be a turnoff from Idaho 51 that would lead them east to US Route 93 all the way to Vegas. Albert and Rita had known each other since high school. During their 38 years of marriage, they had rarely been apart. They worked together, managing their own small excavation business.

The fact that Catherine - who's learned that her ex-husband Theodore has taken up with Samantha, a honey-voiced Operating System who screens his emails, entertains his fantasies and sends his writing off to publishers - comes off as judgmental is testament to Jonze's filmmaking skills. But it's also proof of how deeply we've internalised the notion that artificial intelligence is an extension of male desires and that, really, few things may be hotter than the hard-to-nail promise of female servitude. As Laurie Penny writes in an April 2016 article in The New Statesman, the issue of whether or not robots are slaves designed to serve their masters or sentient beings with inner lives and autonomous instincts has long paralleled the questions we ask of women in the world. READ MORE: * New Zealand could become first country to use Domino's pizza delivery robot * Drones, self-drive cars and'car butler' in our near future * Professor hopes robots will take over the rehabilitation world * Robots could threaten up to half New Zealand's jobs in next 20 years * Robots fooling humans they love something that can't love them back: AI expert * Self-learning robot escapes Russian facility, disrupts traffic * New robot from Google shows off human-like qualities Robots may take on domestic tasks and give working mothers more time. From Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang classic in which Maria, a cyborg whose sultry ways plunge the city and its workers into chaos (she's later burned at a stake) to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the hit 1997 spy film whose comely fembots are programmed to ensnare the bumbling Powers with his own libido, female robots are often cast as temptresses or destroyers, coincidentally enough, the same roles reserved for flesh-and-blood women.

CIKM is a top-tier ACM conference in the areas of information retrieval, knowledge management and databases. Since 1992, it has successfully brought together leading researchers and developers from the three communities, with the purpose of identifying challenging problems facing the development of advanced knowledge and information systems, and shaping future research directions through the publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. The infographic below describes India's participation at CIKM 2015. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), a premier interdisciplinary conference, brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data. It was held at Sydney, Australia in 2015.