Hi everyone, its been quite awhile since I've posted. I have a number of great things in the works, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, I'd like to tell you a story about how I developed another kind of artificial intelligence. This AI can create poetry indistinguishable from real poets. The real Turing Test of this AI was to get it accepted to a literary journal, which was accomplished - this poetry was successfully accepted into a literary journal at a prestigious university.

An unmanned spacecraft carrying 6,300 pounds of supplies and science experiments caught up Saturday morning with the International Space Station as it flew 252 miles above the Indian Ocean. The Cygnus spacecraft, made by Dulles-based Orbital ATK, had launched late Tuesday from Cape Canaveral on its journey to the orbiting laboratory. Flying at more than 15,000 mph, the spacecraft was captured by the station's robotic arm at 6:51 a.m. Eastern in what a NASA official called a "textbook rendezvous." The spacecraft was launched atop an Atlas V rocket that Oribtal ATK hired from the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

She loved E.D.M., in particular the work of Calvin Harris. She used words like "swagulated" and almost never didn't call it "the internets." She was obsessed with abbrevs and the prayer-hands emoji. She politely withdrew from conversations about Zionism, Black Lives Matter, Gamergate, and 9/11, and she gave out the number of the National Suicide Prevention Hotline to friends who sounded depressed. She never spoke of sexting, only of "consensual dirty texting."

When robots go to war, they won't look like us. They'll take to the sky with rotors, or they'll cruise through the sea like bulky torpedoes. The Uran-9 is an unmanned ground combat vehicle, or a robot tank. It's the latest in a long line of war robots made by Russia, and like all of them, it hasn't seen combat yet. It features a machine gun, a 30mm cannon, and missiles.

Siri, Alexa, and other computerized companions are typically pretty good at understanding the strange questions we're asking them. Now, research that was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai this week might make it easier for machines to discern what we're saying without even hearing us. When used for evil, this might seem like a frightening prospect. "It's the end of the (privacy) world as we know it..." writes KurzweilAI.net. But, on the more innocuous end of the spectrum, more advanced lip reading automation could lead to better movie dubbing, IEEE Spectrum says.

Hawthorne, Nevada isn't known for much. The town of roughly 3,000 sits on the western edge of the state, near an Army ammunition depot, and not much else. Announced today, Hawthorne is now the site of what might be a historic precedent: the first urban delivery in the United States by a fully autonomous drone. Look at the expectant package receivers! The drone was flown by drone delivery company Flirtey, which got it's start in 2013 in Australia, delivering textbooks to universities, before it moved to Nevada.

When the apocalypse comes, it won't do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them--the affordable, commercially available quadcopters--are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn't possibly disagree more. "The Second Amendment Isn't Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army", Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair: Imagine this: A disgruntled citizen borrows 30,000 from his credit cards.

Google self-driving car finally causes an accident -- a lesson in AI. According to The Verge, Google had recently performed a software update that changed the behavior to be more human like. "So several weeks ago we began giving the self-driving car the capabilities it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane." The truth is that one of the complaints about self-driving cars is that they are too cautious so Google adapted the software so the car would move to the far right of the lane so two cars could fit in the single wide lane. This is what a regular, old fashioned, human being does so cars can move more fluidly though the heavily congested streets of California.

In San Francisco this week at Pier 48, overlooking the Giants' AT&T Ballpark, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) executives are holding a user conference to introduce products and services they hope will help make the case for choosing Google in the cloud. Sam Charrington, a cloud and big data analyst and advisor, summed up Google executives' pitch best this week on Twitter: "GCP exec team's operating thesis: 'Cloud's not done. MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Google pushing the cloud envelope too far? Google is seen by many as being behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and even IBM in the IaaS cloud market. In a new research note, Deutsche Bank investment analysts predicted that GCP is on a 400 million revenue run rate, which is roughly 20 times less than AWS's. But as cloud watcher Charrington notes: "Google came from behind to win in search, mail, maps, browser, mobile based on strength of tech/product.

Sometimes a chance mention in an otherwise plain-vanilla technology article can open your eyes to something foundational going on in our economy. Today, I had that experience when reading about a new startup, Textio, raising 8 million to build out its text analysis solution. At present the technology is focused on the language used in human resources, to help improve job descriptions, for example. The firm is applying artificial intelligence (AI) to'understand' what goes on in job descriptions, and to guide those writing the descriptions to better achieve the company's hiring goals. In the example above, the phrase is geared to attracting higher-quality female candidates, based on the qualities we associate with'love' and'passion for learning'. The company is planning to expand the targets of the Textio AI to other domains, and it's HR tool is in use by leading tech firms already.