The Christmas countdown clock is ticking, and you might be wondering what games to ask for in your stocking. With so many launching every month, it can be tricky to pick out the must-plays. The Game Awards recognises the best games released every year, and has announced the full list of nominees. Perhaps unsurprisingly Red Dead Redemption II and God of War lead the pack, with eight nominations each. Both were nominated for the highest prize, Game of the Year, alongside Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Celeste, Marvel's Spider-Man and Monster Hunter: World.

When King George III of England began to show signs of acute mania toward the end of his reign, rumors about the royal madness multiplied quickly in the public mind. One legend had it that George tried to shake hands with a tree, believing it to be the King of Prussia. Another described how he was whisked away to a house on Queen Square, in the Bloomsbury district of London, to receive treatment among his subjects. The tale goes on that George's wife, Queen Charlotte, hired out the cellar of a local pub to stock provisions for the king's meals while he stayed under his doctor's care. More than two centuries later, this story about Queen Square is still popular in London guidebooks.

So sad, RIP Hal9000/Douglas Rain #Repost @disco_infernal ・・・ RIP to #DouglasRain – best known as the voice of the sentient HAL 9000 computer in #2001ASpaceOdyssey an absolutely chilling, (mostly) emotionless and iconic performance! A post shared by muthur9000 YUTANI.BLOG&PODCAST (@muthur9000) on Nov 12, 2018 at 3:10am PST I was just adding a HAL 9000 emote to my discord when I heard the news. Sad to find out Douglas Rain passed away on the morning of the 11th November 2018 at St. Marys Memorial Hospital. He died of natural causes at age 90 and is survived by his two sons, daughter, granddaughter and daughter-in-law. "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. My nickname @muthur9000 is a combination of my two favourite science fiction portrayals of Artificial Intelligence, MU/TH/UR from the Alien Universe and HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This Saturday I will be attending an exclusive screening of 2001 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary, and they will be a Q and A with Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. It will be a beautiful but sombre screening for me. It's the second time I will be watching it in the 70mm "Unrestored" print showcasing its original format. Douglas Rain also co-founded the Stratford Festival, The festival's director mentioned his passing in a media release. "Canadian theatre has lost one of its greatest talents and a guiding light in its development.

Douglas Rain, a Shakespeare actor who provided the eerie, calmly homicidal voice of HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at the age of 90. The Canadian actor died Sunday morning, according to the Stratford Festival, where Rain spent 32 seasons acting in such roles such as Othello's Iago and Twelfth Night's Malvolio. He was also a founding member of the company. The Winnipeg-born actor had dozens of theater, film and television credits. However, Rain's biggest mark on pop culture was less Shakespearean, but perhaps just as much a classic: as 2001's HAL 9000, a sentient, rogue computer in a film written in collaboration with science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and widely regarded as Kubrick's masterpiece.

Actor Douglas Rain, who was the voice of the sinister computer Hal in sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died, the organisers of a theatre festival he founded have said. Rain died at the age of 90, according to the Stratford Festival in Canada. The actor performed for 32 seasons at the Shakespearean festival and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1972. But he will be best remembered as the voice of Hal 9000, the AI computer in Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 film. Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons. He will be greatly missed.

In this week's #DataTalk, we talked about autonomous vehicles and computer vision with Dr. Inmar Givoni, who is the Autonomy Engineering Manager at Uber Advanced Technology Group. Prior to that she was the Director of Machine Learning at Kindred, where her team developed algorithms for machine intelligence, at the intersection of robotics and AI. She was the VP of Big Data at Kobo, where she led her team in applying machine learning and big data techniques to drive e-commerce, customer satisfaction, CRM, and personalization in the e-pubs and e-readers business. She first joined Kobo in 2013 as a senior research scientist working on content analysis, website optimization, and reading modeling among other things. Prior to that, Inmar was a member of technical staff at Altera (now Intel) where she worked on optimization algorithms for cutting-edge programmable logic devices.

Every week, we talk about important data and analytics topics with data science leaders from around the world on Facebook Live. You can subscribe to the DataTalk podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, SoundCloud and Spotify. This data science video and podcast series is part of Experian's effort to help people understand how data-powered decisions can help organizations develop innovative solutions and drive more business. To keep up with upcoming events, join our Data Science Community on Facebook or check out the archive of recent data science videos. To suggest future data science topics or guests, please contact Mike Delgado. In this week's #DataTalk, we talked with Kristen Hammilton, CEO & Founder of Koru, about the future of recruitment using predictive hiring. This is going to be a very exciting chat because we're talking about AI and how it's helping recruiters find the right candidates for jobs, and it's actually a fascinating field. Has to do with prediction, has to do with artificial intelligence, and I'm very excited to talk to Kristen Hamilton, who is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Koru, based in Seattle, and Kristen, great to have you on our show today. Kristen: Michael, it's really great to be here, thanks. Mike: So Kristen, can you kind of tell us about your journey that brought you into working in data science? I think every entrepreneurial journey starts with a problem that you've become impassioned with, that you really can't sleep well at night until you figure out how to solve. And the challenge that we initially started facing was actually the gap between education and employment.

The staff at John & Tony's Steakhouse in West Chicago know the couple well: There's 54-year-old John – a genial man with a big, partially toothless smile who works in truck deliveries – and his wife, Jackie, a petite, dark-haired beauty in a wheelchair whose favorite dish is bacon-wrapped dates. The inseparable pair are staples at John & Tony's, and it's their annual dining spot for celebrating Valentine's Day – but the wait staff are accustomed to taking other reservation calls, too, from people who simply want to sit near them to observe John's doting love. Because Jackie is no normal suburban wife; she doesn't walk, talk, laugh or even eat her beloved dates. Instead, she's a life-sized doll that John'married' on the Jerry Springer show years ago, but he treats her like she's a human princess, gazing adoringly at and chatting away to his silent bride (as strangers look on, aghast.) John and Jackie are the stars of new documentary Silicone Soul, which chronicles the lives of men who've fallen in love with dolls – as well as other doll enthusiasts who have interests and motivations separate from sex or romance, such as a female artist who uses dolls for photography and friendship.

Schneider Electric Chief Digital Officer Herve Coureil sat down with TechRepulic's Dan Patterson and talked about practical uses for AI in business. The following is an edited transcript of the interview. Dan Patterson: This may sound like an elementary question. How are we seeing not just business use AI now? I think we can all kind of point to some examples, but give me the next 18 to 36 months and help us understand, should companies, should enterprise companies, build, buy, or innovate?

Elon Musk is usually far from a technological pessimist. From electric cars to Mars colonies, he's made his name by insisting that the future can get here faster. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, he sounds very different. Speaking at MIT in 2014, he called AI humanity's "biggest existential threat" and compared it to "summoning the demon." He reiterated those fears in an interview published Friday with Recode's Kara Swisher, though with a little less apocalyptic rhetoric.