The search for this year's Christmas party video game may be over. Following the rejuvenated interest in the "rhythm action" genre brought about by titles such as Beat Saber and Tetris Effect, Avicii Invector takes the cerebral visual immersion of the latter title and plants it in a beautiful, fast-paced beat experience. Made in collaboration with the superstar DJ and producer Avicii, AKA Tim Bergling, before his death last year, Avicii Invector sees you zooming across a series of gorgeous intergalactic landscapes in a WipEout-esque spacecraft, hitting buttons in time to the music on a glowing board reminiscent of the classic Guitar Hero interface. Adding to the trippy aesthetic, the gameplay has you flipping the play space 180 degrees at a time, with interludes of racing through midair rings in time to the beat. Think of Sega's Nights Into Dreams set to a series of 25 infectious club hits.

"Whether they're [international relations] students who want to apply machine learning tools to what they're working on or computer science students …

Sophisticated machine learning applications require not only enormous amounts of training data, but powerful computer hardware on which to train.

Using the data available I will make a simple Logistic Regression model to predict the status of a show. For this analysis the training set is small but the model may still provide some insights as to the important features in Netflix's decision to Renew or End a show. Since the mean rating of renewed vs ended shows seems to be a major difference a very simple model which would be intuitive would be to predict a higher IMDB rating as renewed and a lower rating as ended. My model will take into account more features than just rating and hopefully will be able to provide some insights into why shows are renewed or ended by Netflix management. For how small the dataset is that I am working with and how simple the model is these accuracy scores are pretty good!

In the process of taking it to the next level, the company is looking at the possibility to integrate the software with AI and machine learning systems.

"There's a big opportunity right now to use artificial intelligence for good. AI is not'summoning the demon' like Elon Musk says.

No, the robots are not coming for your job as they ready to take over the world ... yet. But the future of the world's workforce will mark a significant shift and work will be heavily reliant on the teamwork of human and machine, noted the just-released IDC white paper, Content Intelligence for the Future of Work. And we're not quite in sci-fi film territory either, said Holly Muscolino, research vice president of content and process strategies and the future of work at IDC. "A software robot (or'digital worker') is essentially a software program that automates a task that has previously been accomplished by a human worker," Muscolino explained. "The term'robot' is used to signify the role that these software solutions play in automation, however, beyond that, there is no relationship between a software robot and the physical robots that we may see on the manufacturing line, patrolling supermarket aisles on starring in'Star Wars'' movies." Muscolino added, "A variety of software technologies are classified as'digital workers.' The technology gaining the most airtime today is robotic process automation (RPA), but other automation technologies, and AI-enabled technologies, like digital assistants and chatbots, are also classified as'digital workers'."

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend's kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to be able to turn it on and have it spit out not just any goofy little algorithmic tune but beautiful, compelling, mysterious music; something I'd be proud to have written myself. The kitchen window was open, and as I listened to the sounds of children playing in the courtyard below, I thought about how the melodies of their voices made serendipitous counterpoint with the songs of nearby birds and the intermittent drone of traffic on the rue d'Alésia. In response to these daydreams, I was making a few tweaks to my software--a chaotic, seat-of-the-pants affair that betrayed my intuitive, self-taught approach to programming--when I saw that Bill Seaman had just uploaded a new batch of audio files to our shared Dropbox folder. I had been collaborating with Bill, a media artist, on various aspects of computational creativity over the past few years. I loaded Bill's folder of sound files along with some of my own into the software and set it rolling. I was thrilled and astonished.