Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that. YUVAL NOAH HARARI, Lecturer, Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997 AMC Sun. Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 EPIX Wed. 10 p.m., Thur. The X-Files: Fight the Future 1998 IFC Thur. Hard to Kill 1990 Sundance Mon. 8 p.m., Tue. A scientist gives his bodyguard superhuman powers in order to fight racists. A lawyer unwittingly becomes friends with an unstable woman who has a criminal history. A successful businesswoman puts her family, career and life on the line to satisfy her addiction to sex. With his father trapped in the wreckage of their spacecraft, a youth treks across Earth's now-hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon and signal for help. In the future a cutting-edge android in the form of a boy embarks on a journey to discover his true nature. An 11-year-old boy experiences the worst day of his young life but soon learns that he's not alone when other members of his family encounter their own calamities. A struggling writer falls in love with a stenographer while trying to finish his new novel in 30 days.

It may be time to add'novelist' to the list of professions under threat from super-smart computer software, because a short story authored by artificial intelligence has made it through to the latter stages of a literary competition in Japan. The AI software isn't self-aware enough to think up and submit its own work though (not yet, anyway) – the short-form novel was written with the help of a team of researchers from the Future University Hakodate in Japan. Human beings selected certain words and phrases to be used, and set up an overall framework for the story, before letting the software come up with the text itself. One of two submissions from the university made it through the first round of the Nikkei Shinichi Hoshi Literary Award ceremony – perhaps the entry's title, which translates as The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, should have been enough to tip the judges off – but the competition is unique in that it openly accepts entries from non-human writers (Shinichi Hoshi himself was a science-fiction author). Of 1,450 or so novels accepted this year, 11 were written with the involvement of AI programs, the Japan News reports.

You might want to take the help of artificial intelligence. Developed by scientists in Japan, a super-smart AI robot recently authored a short story, with some assistance from humans. What is more, the work has made it through the initial stages of screening, as part of a literary competition. While the feat is a testament to the fast-improving capabilities of artificial intelligence, the software isn't completely self-aware when it comes to articulating coherent thoughts using words, and creating original pieces of literature. The short novel, titled "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (meaning'the day a computer writes a novel'), was composed with help from scientists at Japan's Future University Hakodate.

Brain science draws legions of eager students to the field and countless millions in dollars, euros and renminbi to fund research. These endeavors, however, have not yielded major improvements in treating patients who suffer from psychiatric disorders for decades. The languid pace of translating research into therapies stems from the inherent difficulties in understanding mental illness. "Psychiatry deals with brains interacting with the world and with other brains, so we're not just considering a brain's function but its function in complex situations," says Quentin Huys of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (E.T.H. Zurich) and the University of Zurich, lead author of a review of the emerging field of computational psychiatry, published this month in Nature Neuroscience. Computational psychiatry sets forth the ambitious goal of using sophisticated numerical tools to understand and treat mental illness.

A novel written through an artificial intelligence program has passed through the first round of judging for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The book is called, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, and is one of 11 books submitted to the prize that were written by robots (1,450 books were submitted in total). "I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions," said Satoshi Hase, a Japanese science fiction novelist who was part of the press conference surrounding the award. These programs are not without some human intelligence.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll on drugs and substance abuse was conducted by NORC Feb. 11-14. It is based on online and telephone interviews of 1,042 adults who are members of NORC's nationally representative AmeriSpeak panel. The original sample was drawn from respondents selected randomly from NORC's National Frame based on address-based sampling and recruited by mail, email, telephone and face-to-face interviews. NORC interviews participants over the phone if they don't have Internet access. With a probability basis and coverage of people who can't access the Internet, surveys using AmeriSpeak are nationally representative.

This week, a short novel written by an AI program did well in a Japanese literary contest, scientists spotted traces of a possible new particle that could shake the foundations of physics and a team of researchers discovered in the human genome a "nearly intact" genetic blueprint for a 700,000-year-old stowaway virus. A short novel written by a Japanese artificial intelligence software program passed the first screening round for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. "The day a computer wrote a novel," the program wrote near the end of the piece, "the computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A team of scientists from Tufts University and the University of Michigan Health System has found a "nearly intact" genetic copy of an ancient virus that spliced itself into our DNA. The team doesn't rule out the possibility that it could come alive again.

Sequential recurrent neural networks (RNNs) over finite alphabets are remarkably effective models of natural language. RNNs now obtain language modeling results that substantially improve over long-standing state-of-the-art baselines, as well as in various conditional language modeling tasks such as machine translation, image caption generation, and dialogue generation. Despite these impressive results, such models are a priori inappropriate models of language. One point of criticism is that language users create and understand new words all the time, challenging the finite vocabulary assumption. A second is that relationships among words are computed in terms of latent nested structures rather than sequential surface order (Chomsky, 1957; Everaert, Huybregts, Chomsky, Berwick, and Bolhuis, 2015).

Organizations like Insight Data science founded by Jake Klamka is specifically designed for helping PhD's transition into industry. At the other end of the spectrum, aspiring data scientists, who have enough domain expertise and are keen to pursue this art can take umbrage from the example of Clare Corthell who has embarked on a self crafted journey to embrace the art of data science purely on online learning MOOCs. In Fact she has herself come out with a curriculum for data science with the Open Source Data Science Masters--OSDSM- program. These courses can help you to bridge the gap in your learning and practicing the craft. The OSDSM is a collection of open source resources that will help you to acquire skills necessary to be a competent entry level data scientist. You can access the curriculum here . You have to be adept at learning and upgrading on the job and on the fly. Kunal Punera the Co founder / CTO at Bento labs talks about this aspect when he says.. I spent two years at RelateIQ. I worked on building the data mining system from scratch -- and by the time I left I had built most of the data products deployed in RelateIQ.