As Star Trek star William Shatner turns 90, he's signing up as a brand ambassador for StoryFile, a company focused on artificial intelligence. Shatner will become the first person to use a new program called StoryFile Life to create "an AI-powered interactive conversational video so family and friends can interact with him for years to come." Shatner's StoryFile profile, which uses AI and the company's proprietary technology Conversa, will be made available for the public to interact with on internet-connected devices in May. "This is for all my children and all my children's children and all my children's loved ones and all the loved ones of the loved ones," Shatner said in a press release. You can watch a behind-the-scenes video of the recording here.

I've been keeping an eye on the use of machine learning algorithms, particularly by venture capitalists, to make investment decisions for some time now. They've been investing in machine learning companies for years, so applying their products to other businesses, once you have studied how they work, seems a reasonable proposition. After all, what is the decision to invest in a startup based on? Basically, the fruit of a set of analyses and previous experiences that can be systematized and verified in different ways, while the experience corresponds, in reality, to the imperfect distillation, with its biases and errors, of a series of previous decisions, weighted by the results obtained in each. That said, venture capitalists are not entirely objective: they usually allow multiple factors to enter the decision-making process, which include anything from the feelings generated by the company's founding team, to more or less rigorous analyses of its capacity for future development.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. This was a mantra I picked up on the playground at elementary school--something I repeated over and over again anytime I came face to face with racism. It was a coping mechanism meant to guard my heart from the cacophony of discriminatory comments that shaped me as a young Korean American girl growing up in predominantly white spaces. But now that I'm well into adulthood, I think about the girls of color who are also being taught to pretend that words don't hurt--and the people this way of thinking actually protects. It's hard to escape the unrelenting consequences of racism: In the past year alone, we lost Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and the six women of Asian descent murdered in Atlanta (Xiaojie "Emily" Tan, Daoyou Feng, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant) at the hands of this insidious disease--and those are just the names that were in the headlines. If we don't acknowledge ...

Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created one of the first chatbots, which he named ELIZA. Weizenbaum modeled its conversational style after Carl Rogers, a psychotherapist who was known for parroting patients' responses back at them. His hypothesis was that while chatbots could emulate human conversation superficially, they could not fully capture the nuances of a genuine discussion between humans. To Weizenbaum's complete surprise, ELIZA did end up fooling many people into believing they were having a therapeutic breakthrough with a real live therapist. While modern customer service bots aren't likely to help customers dig deep into their psychological issues, the technology behind computers processing human language is getting more advanced day by day.

I know this has been asked many times and in many different ways. And there are tons of blog posts, articles, videos and courses addressing this and comparing hundreds of tools, libraries, frameworks… And that's part of my problem: I am facing so many options that I feel like Buridan's ass, dying of starvation for not knowing what to do. Although I don't want to write too much, I need to speak a little about our situation, in order to put the question in our context. We have only four people, which could be qualified as beginner data scientists. One of us has a profile that is a little bit more "engineer", so data engineer could be more suitable for him.

What's New: Artificial intelligence (AI) developer Jagadish K. Mahendran and his team designed an AI-powered, voice-activated backpack that can help the visually impaired navigate and perceive the world around them. The backpack helps detect common challenges such as traffic signs, hanging obstacles, crosswalks, moving objects and changing elevations, all while running on a low-power, interactive device. "Last year when I met up with a visually impaired friend, I was struck by the irony that while I have been teaching robots to see, there are many people who cannot see and need help. This motivated me to build the visual assistance system with OpenCV's Artificial Intelligence Kit with Depth (OAK-D), powered by Intel." Why It Matters: The World Health Organisation estimates that globally 285 million people are visually impaired.

It's the year 2030, we are living in an age of increasing automation and artificially intelligent bots are powering this. All the trivial decisions are driven by machines and they are redesigning our ways of life. Lorem Ipsum is frustrated with the work lately and has a splitting headache, the automated recommendations from his Google health don't help and he gets an appointment with his doctor. It takes him just 30 minutes to go get through all the arduous stages of his brain test until he sees the doctor finally. "The scan results look negative for any abnormality, the brain health score is on the positive side", the doctor concludes it is just a headache and prescribes the medicines.

Dan Wright just became CEO of DataRobot, a company valued at more than $2.7 billion that is promising to automate the building, deployment, and management of AI models in a way that makes AI accessible to every organization. Following the release of version 7.0 of the DataRobot platform, Wright told VentureBeat that the industry requires a new era of democratization of AI that eliminates dependencies on data science teams. He explained that manual machine learning operations (MLOps) processes are simply not able to keep pace with changing business conditions. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. VentureBeat: Now that you're the CEO, what is the primary mission?

The Bank of England has revealed the design for the UK's new £50 note featuring computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing. Turing was selected to appear on the note in July 2019 in recognition of his groundbreaking work in mathematics and computer science, as well as his role in cracking the Enigma code used by Germany in World War II. The polymer note will enter circulation from June 23 this year, and incorporates a number of designs linked to Turing's life and legacy. These include technical drawings for the bombe, a decryption device used during WWII; a string of ticker tape with Turing's birthday rendered in binary (23 June 1912); a green and gold security foil resembling a microchip; and a table and mathematical formulae taken from one of Turing's most famous papers. As well as honoring his scientific achievements, Turing was also selected to appear on the bank note in recognition of his persecution by the UK government for homosexuality.

I am particularly interested in the areas of sustainability, finance, and various topics related to data science. In the sustainability field, the circular economy, sustainable consumption patterns, and the intersection of sustainability, digital transformation, and data science are issues I especially care about. On the data side, I enjoy working on NLP problems, time series forecasting, and data visualization. One of my latest projects implements the Longformer model to analyze biographical data. And an area I am currently learning more about is unit testing in machine learning.