Have you ever heard about Wikidata? If not, you might think of Wikipediafirst -- and that is not wrong. Wikidata is also a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia (…)." Loosely, you could describe Wikidata as Wikipedias database with over 46million data items (April 2018). And in line with Wikimedia's mission, everyone can add and edit data, and use it for free.

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the resulting AI system have superhuman navigation capabilities, the research could provide insight into how our brains work. Grid cells were the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside other navigation-related neurons. These cells are arranged in a lattice of hexagons, and the brain effectively overlays this pattern onto its environment. Whenever the animal crosses a point in space represented by one of the corners these hexagons, a neuron fires, allowing the animal to track its movement.

Want to up your SEO game and be more successful in 2018? Good! You've come to the right place. Below, you'll find tips from some of the top SEO professionals. They will tell you just about everything you need to know to succeed in 2018. However, before we get to our main event, I must note that after our 2017 edition of SEO trends launched last year on Search Engine Journal, we heard a couple of complaints about how long it was. Well, you'll be happy to know that this year's SEO trends post is a mere 13,014 words, down from 13,839 last year. As an added bonus, this year we've added this helpful TL;DR section for those of you with extremely short-attention spans who care not about context or details but simply want to know what the most important SEO trends tricks will be in 2018. So go focus on all those things and I'm sure you'll be just fine. For those of you who plan to read on, we've got some amazing insights in store for you about why all these things (and many others) will ...

Google taught its DeepMind AI to remember things like a human would. Most AIs can specialize in one area, like defeating the world's best Go players; but DeepMind was programmed to apply previous knowledge and skills to learning new tasks, drawing from a neural network of programmed skills and "memories". Now, DeepMind is teaching itself how to organize its own "brain" network. And Google researchers were shocked when, without any input from them, the AI chose to make part of its brain look nearly identical to humans. Google's DeepMind team, in collaboration with University College London (UCL) researchers, stuck the AI in a virtual reality maze to teach it spatial awareness and memorization of patterns, publishing their findings in Nature.

Laura was born in a small town in North Carolina. She went on to earn a B.S. in Textile Engineering and a B.A. in Spanish at North Carolina State University. Laura thought this unique combination of majors would be amazing after attending a summer camp in high school where she played with bouncing polymers. While attending North Carolina State University, she earned a scholarship to study a summer term in Peru, where she fell in love with the Spanish language. Upon graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. where she served in a variety of digital information roles.

I grew up in a small town in Transylvania, and will always remember the day when I assembled my first computer and loaded the first mp3 songs and movies on it. At the time we didn't yet have Internet in my home, and I was exchanging files via CDs with my friends and my father's colleagues. By the time I went to college, my campus had its own intranet, and my friends and I built up a collection of hundreds of albums, television series, movies, software packages, anything you could imagine. It was as if all of the students were part of this giant web, seeding and peering on torrents while constantly exchanging the latest school news in forums and chat rooms. Later, I used the internet to find my first internship abroad, master's scholarship, job, and apartment.

Technology nerds and enthusiasts have always dreamed of having a conversation with an artificial intelligence or AI. The living embodiment of the perfect AI would be JARVIS from the Iron Man movies. Just your voice, to have a conversation with your virtual personal assistant to do work for you. But that is science fiction. AI is still in its infancy and it has a long way to go to reach maturity to beat the Turing test.

Let me start this week by recounting a joke I once read in the Reader's Digest, I think it was.

Judea Pearl, chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, has written his first book intended for a general audience, "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect." The book, which was written with co-author Dana Mackenzie, explores causality -- the study of cause and effect -- from its origins to its applications at the leading edges of science. Pearl, a UCLA faculty member since 1970, received the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize" in computing, for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty. His new book will be published on May 15. That same day, Pearl will deliver a talk at the Charles E. Young Research Library as part of the UCLA Library Writer Series.

Among the more modern anxieties of parents today is how virtual assistants will train their children to act. The fear is that kids who habitually order Amazon's Alexa to read them a story or command Google's Assistant to tell them a joke are learning to communicate not as polite, considerate citizens, but as demanding little twerps. This worry has become so widespread that Amazon and Google both announced this week that their voice assistants can now encourage kids to punctuate their requests with "please." The version of Alexa that inhabits the new Echo Dot Kids Edition will thank children for "asking so nicely." Google Assistant's forthcoming Pretty Please feature will remind kids to "say the magic word" before complying with their wishes.