Less than 12 hours after a sniper killed several police officers in Dallas, three dozen fresh-faced recruits sat solemnly in dark-blue uniforms outside the Los Angeles Police Department's downtown headquarters, staring straight ahead during a graduation ceremony marking the end of their journey to become fully-fledged cops. "Today was supposed to be a happy day," L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti told them. "But we come here today with tears in our hearts, with hearts that are broken." Thursday night's attack in Dallas hung over the LAPD's graduation ceremony Friday morning, the pomp and circumstance clouded by concern. One veteran officer's eyes welled with tears as he talked about the attack.

A 13-year-old in California shook her head at the TV. A 5-year-old in Pittsburgh asked her father why people are so angry. As America coped with one tragic moment after another this week, with the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile followed by the shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas, the country's parents had an added task: explaining each act of violence to their children. "If [children] see a bunch of this on television, they can become the indirect victims of trauma," said Suzanne Silverstein, director of the Cedars-Sinai Psychological Trauma Center. African American children might be afraid for their own lives or for their friends and families when they see black men being shot.

Amazon's voice activated digital assistant Alexa appears to know more about Prime Day than she's letting on. All she'll do at this point is recite a cryptic poem pointing to a possible deal on July 8, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO -- The off-season sale Amazon calls Prime Day hits July 12. If you're thinking of taking part, you'll save money and time by planning ahead. Here's how to prepare yourself ahead of the marketing bonanza, from apps that alert on price drops to asking Alexa.

Todor Primov, life sciences product manager at Ontotext, discusses some of the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the face of healthcare. A common joke among certain circles is that AI can be defined as "whatever we haven't done yet". While the current popularity of AI among investors, startups and the wider media is unparalleled, we need to retain focus on what exactly AI means, and its specific sector-based applications. In healthcare and pharmaceutical research, 'AI-like' technologies hold huge promise, but what are the problems these solutions are purporting to solve, and where are the business opportunities? Data volume is a problem in the healthcare sector too.

P.S. Send any tips to data@diamandis.com, What it is: British programmer Joshua Browder is a modern-day Robin Hood after a chatbot he programmed to challenge parking tickets has helped thousands of users appeal some 3 million worth of citations. DoNotPay asks you several questions about your violation and, if you might have a case, auto-generates an appeal for you to file. Business Insider reports that the bot has appealed over 250,000 parking tickets in London and New York with a 64% success rate. Why it's important: This Browder-built bot proves that AI-enabled chatbots aren't just for convenience -- they can also be used for social good.

From Harry Potter and Romeo and Juliet to the stories of Oedipus and Icarus, almost every tale told conforms to one of just six plots, researchers have claimed. A major new analysis of over 1,700 stories identified the core plots'which form the building blocks of complex narratives'. Researchers used complex data-mining to locate words linked to positive or negative emotion in each story to reveal the set of arcs. A major new analysis of over 1,700 stories identified the core plots'which form the building blocks of complex narratives'. Shown, the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which researchers found has the'rise, fall rise' plot.

What do you get when you take the former head of platform at Facebook, a former Mozilla engineer, veterans of other companies like Microsoft and Amazon, and an interest in building an assistive chatbot that stands apart from competitors in the space? The answer is Ozlo, a chatbot in the form of a cute, blue critter that answers questions from users with cards that contain deep links to relevant apps and websites. The company built around the service – headed up by CEO Charles Jolley, the former Facebook platform head – has offices in Palo Alto and Seattle and a workforce of 28. MUST READ: iPhone 7: Seriously, this phone sounds boring to you? And it landed a 14 million investment in May from Greylock and AME Cloud Ventures partly because Ozlo represents something a little different in a world that's starting to move from apps to more voice interaction with our devices.

Upwork just released our quarterly list of the 20 fastest-growing skills in the U.S. freelance market. This list is a snapshot of what companies most value and need in their freelancers, and it reflects the top tech and business trends of today. But I've been thinking about the future of work as well as the present day. I just returned from the World Economic Forum meeting in China, where I caught a glimpse of the kinds of technologies that will shape our world in five to ten years. Chief among those are virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

The O'Reilly AI Conference will cover all the most essential--and intriguing--topics in applied AI. And you'll meet the brightest minds in applied AI, including keynotes from Microsoft's Lili Cheng, Peter Norvig of Google, and Facebook's Yann LeCun. Urs Muller from NVIDIA will address learning for autonomous driving. Google's Martin Wicke will dive into scalable machine learning. Hilary Mason will describe her work implementing AI at Fast Forward Labs.

On October 14-15, 2016, the NYU Center for Bioethics in conjunction with NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness will host a conference on "The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence". Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) makes questions about the ethics of AI more pressing than ever. Existing AI systems already raise numerous ethical issues: for example, machine classification systems raise questions about privacy and bias. AI systems in the near-term future raise many more issues: for example, autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons raise questions about safety and moral responsibility. AI systems in the long-term future raise more issues in turn: for example, human-level artificial general intelligence systems raise questions about the moral status of the systems themselves.