I love fiction and non-fiction, I love paper books, audiobooks, e-books, comic books, whatever. And I live near a world-class library for easy access to all of the above. But since the COVID-19 pandemic changed everyone's lives, I'm struggling to get lost in their worlds. While reading, my mind invariably wanders to the outbreak. What I can do is play video games.

Ansel, age 11, plays Fortnite featuring Travis Scott's in-game event, "Astronomical," on April 23, 2020 in South Pasadena, Calif. Ansel, age 11, plays Fortnite featuring Travis Scott's in-game event, "Astronomical," on April 23, 2020 in South Pasadena, Calif. On Thursday, Grammy-nominated rapper Travis Scott performed to millions of fans worldwide -- not during a living room set or from an empty venue, but via the massively popular video game Fortnite. Fortnite's developer Epic Games says the virtual concert drew in 12.3 million players, setting "an all-time record" for an in-game event. Over the course of the performance, Scott appeared as a towering version of himself which transformed into different globe-headed avatars transported through a series of impossible landscapes. The performance also featured the debut of a collaboration with Kid Cudi, "The Scotts."

The chatbot ecosystem is fragmented. As a dev, you know how many tools, languages, libraries, and platforms there are already. Which ones do you choose? Below are some workflow ideas I've collected from bot developers. At first we only had the German version of our bot.

Frizzle (catchphrase: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!") In one episode, she reduces the bus to microscopic size and takes her charges into the bloodstream of an ill classmate. You see the kids swimming around in tiny wetsuits that they happened to bring along, watching white blood cells battle infectious invaders.Well, that's what I was thinking about yesterday. The venue wasn't a school, it was the White House press briefing room. Instead of an eccentric science nerd, it was President Donald Trump talking about injecting disinfectant or UV rays into people's bodies to clear away the coronavirus.

Great to have you on the show, Ali. Thank you, Stephan, for having me here. It's a real pleasure to have me here. I listen to your podcast. It's great to be on it. It's great to have you on it. I've been trying to get you on this show for a while now. I'm really happy to have that finally come to pass. I'd love for our listeners to understand a bit more about the under the hood of Trendy Butler. How is this powered by an AI where all your competitors–the different subscription box companies–they seem to rely on human stylists, and you've got an AI? Most of them use a lot of AI to make their decision making. Except with us, we rely heavily on our AI. Obviously, there is still a stylist because as much as you could throw as many AIs as you want on to this, still there's an element of creativity that's needed for a person to be applying to this. You never could control, let's say the system picking an orange short with a purple shirt, you got to sometimes stop it. Most of it is actually done through our essentially wired AI system that picks these clothes for people now. The way it works under the hood, it's a little different from how others do it. I'm sure you heard of things like Stitch Fix, Trunk Club, and all these guys. The little difference is that, instead of having stylists being assisted by this AI to make these decisions, we do it the other way around. We have the AI make the decisions, and the stylists really look and see if they made these maybe improper decision making. The way it works, usually how people attack the problem or others attack the problem, is that each person they bring them up, and then look at the historical goals that they've… Because throughout the process when you signed up, you essentially are asked multiple questions. Those questions essentially help us guide our styling methods and questionnaires. The way we do it is we turn this process upside down. When we acquire a customer, we ask them a set of questions. Those questions could be from your sizing, your preference in patterns, the type of pants that you like. Then we go a little further, we look at your occupation, we look at your location, the location tells us a lot about you. That tells us the type of clothes that you want. If you send someone in Florida a heavy jacket, I'm sure they're not going to like it. The location makes a lot of sense. Occupation makes a lot of sense.

AI is having a profound impact on customer experience, revenue, operations, risk management and other business functions across multiple industries. When fully operationalized, AI and Machine Learning (ML) enable organizations to make data-driven decisions with unprecedented levels of speed, transparency, and accountability. This dramatically accelerates digital transformation initiatives delivering greater performance and a competitive edge to organizations. ML projects in data science labs tend to adopt black-box approaches that generate minimal actionable insights and result in a lack of accountability in the data-driven decision-making process. Today with the advent of AutoML 2.0 platforms, a white-box model approach is becoming increasingly important and possible.

About half of the Autonomy Ventures portfolio companies are based out of Israel. One portfolio company is Aurora Labs, which focuses on providing a software platform for autonomous and connected cars to monitor their onboard software. Aurora Labs calls their software a "self-healing software for connected cars." Your average car needs to go to a dealership in order to receive any kind of firmware or software update if an issue is detected. This is because the technician needs to plug a device into the OBDII port of the car.

Artificial intelligence implies automation beyond the physical. It implies the automation of the tasks that recently took a living brain to finish things like discussion, data analysis, even driving. Also, eventually, AI is nothing new; computer scientists have been talking about and building it throughout recent decades. What's changed is the availability of cheap computing, advances in algorithm coding, and an abundance of newly available data. We've quite recently had this really good synergy as the innovation and the algorithms both developed simultaneously.

A paralysed man can play Guitar Hero again after having his sense of touch restored with a brain-computer interface (BCI) that provides sensory feedback. Ian Burkhart, 28, suffered a severe spinal cord injury during a diving accident in 2010, which caused him to lose his sense of touch. US researchers found that, although Burkhart had almost no sensation in his hand, when they stimulated his skin, a small neural signal still reached his brain. They have since used their BCI to restore sensation in his hand by rerouting these tiny signals from the brain to the muscle, bypassing his damaged spinal cord. Ian Burkhart (left) is a 28-year-old man who suffered a spinal cord injury during a diving accident in 2010.

High-resolution images taken by satellites in orbit around Earth can detect swathes of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, a study has found for the first time. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites are able to spot floating plastics and tell them apart from other materials such as seaweed and driftwood. Astronomers say the imaging technique can automatically spot the difference with 86 per cent accuracy. In one location where the method was tested, Canada's Gulf Islands, the method was 100 per cent accurate. Conservationists are calling for similar technology to be used in the fight to clean up the world of humanity's litter.