Employers are using artificial intelligence (AI) in recruiting chatbots, in video interviews to assess job candidates' body language or word choices, or to extract themes from engagement survey responses. But how companies are using AI to benefit the employee experience, support compliance efforts and ease administrative workloads is not as well-known. "So much of the buzz about AI has been for its'sexy' uses around sourcing and screening in recruiting, but there are a growing number of other applications of value to HR to be aware of," said Jeanne Meister, founding partner of Future Workplace, an HR advisory and research firm in New York City. One example of AI's expanding utility: using it to audit employees' expense reports, to ensure they comply with company policy and avoid wasteful spending. AppZen in Sunnyvale, Calif., uses AI to read and extract information from receipts to catch duplicates, out-of-policy spending, incorrect amounts or suspicious merchants.

The authorities have sought to justify mass surveillance in Xinjiang as a means to fight terrorism. Fu Xiaolong of Cloud Walk a facial recognition developer told the Financial Times: "The police are using a big-data rating system to rate highly suspicious groups of people based on where they go and what they do." He added that the risk rises if the person "frequently visits transport hubs and goes to suspicious places like a knife store". Another way that the police can use AI to predict crimes is through algorithms that use "crowd analysis" to detect "suspicious" patterns of individuals to determine if they are a thief, for example. It can also be used to monitor "high risk" locations, such as knife and hammer shops.

My trip to Amazon's Staten Island center had its origins two months earlier. I was writing about a former worker named Justin Rashad Long, who contended that he had been fired for speaking out about working conditions there. Beyond the claim of retaliation, Mr. Long said laboring at Amazon had been a tremendous slog: Employees worked long shifts with few breaks. Managers held them to unreasonable goals. The time they spent waiting in line at metal detectors -- to discourage theft -- lengthened their day.

I'm on the phone with a startup executive roleplaying as a frustrated customer, and a note along with a speedometer icon appears on my computer screen: Speaking slowly -- You are speaking slower than usual. Try increasing your speaking pace. I speed up, and the message disappears, only to be replaced with another: Continuous Speaking -- Finish your thought. Later, as the exec struggles to find the date of a made-up transaction, the software I'm using detects the strained note in his voice, and again decides I should intervene. A new message appears, this one accompanied by a pink heart: Empathy Cue -- Think about how the customer is feeling.

Earlier this month, an unexceptional thread appeared on Reddit announcing that there is a new way "to cook egg white[s] without a frying pan". As so often happens on this website, which calls itself "the front page of the internet", this seemingly banal comment inspired a slew of responses. "I've never heard of people frying eggs without a frying pan," one incredulous Redditor replied. "I'm gonna try this," added another. One particularly enthusiastic commenter even offered to look up the scientific literature on the history of cooking egg whites without a frying pan. Every day, millions of these unremarkable conversations unfold on Reddit, spanning from cooking techniques to geopolitics in the Western Sahara to birds with arms.

In 1983, millions of unsold cartridges of the Atari game ET The Extra Terrestrial were secretly buried in a concrete-covered landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Thanks to extremely rushed development and alleged interference from Universal Pictures, the movie tie-in was one of the worst video games ever made, and a mass grave was the only option for the poor, unwanted cartridges. Unfortunately, like movies adapted from games, games adapted from movies are often bad. Historically, this has not been the result of too much interference from the movie studios that own the licences, but too little. Promising pop-culture properties such as Transformers, Robocop and Harry Potter have often been farmed out to contracted development studios that are then given far too little time to make anything half decent. The forthcoming Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, however, has better prospects than most.

When you're watching a modern blockbuster such as The Avengers, it's hard to escape the feeling that what you're seeing is almost entirely computer-generated imagery, from the effects to the sets to fantastical creatures. But if there's one thing you can rely on to be 100% real, it's the actors. We might have virtual pop stars like Hatsune Miku, but there has never been a world-famous virtual film star. Even that link with corporeal reality, though, is no longer absolute. You may have already seen examples of what's possible: Peter Cushing (or his image) appearing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story more than 20 years after his death, or Tupac Shakur performing from beyond the grave at Coachella in 2012.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Despite sending humans to Earth's orbit and the moon, the idea of humans surviving in outer space must seem like science fiction. Creating an environment that can sustain human life in the almost total absence of gravity, as well as no electrical outlets or oxygen, takes a lot of experimentation. That's been the job of teams of dedicated scientists who have facilitated some of the most unforgettable moments in space exploration. We compiled 30 common items that were invented for use in the race for space.

Tin foil is one way to keep modern car key fobs safe from creative thieves. Kim Komando explains the technology -- and how to keep them safe. In March, a Tesla Model 3 was hacked. The duo responsible for uncovering the vulnerability accessed the car's web browser, executed code on its firmware and displayed a message on the infotainment system before making off with the Model 3 and $375,000. The hackers didn't remotely take total control of the car or wreak havoc on its door locks or brakes while an innocent driver sat inside.

Teaching artificial intelligence to think like children may make them better learners. Kanishk Gandhi and Brenden Lake at New York University found that a common assumption children make while learning, called the mutual exclusivity bias, would make AIs better at learning tasks such as processing language. Mutual exclusivity bias refers to the incorrect assumption that once an object has a name or a label, it can't also have another. "A child will find it difficult to call a …