"Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels," Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL. Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

A version of Alexa won't tell kids where babies come from or spill the beans about Santa. It also won't explain some things kids might have heard on the news - like what Stormy Daniels does for a living. Amazon updated its voice assistant with a feature that can make Alexa more kid-friendly. Achild holds his Amazon Echo Dot in Kennesaw, Ga. Amazon updated its voice assistant with a feature that can make Alexa more kid-friendly.

Artificial intelligence has been THE buzzword in every tech-driven industry over the past few years as speculation around its impact on human society has been speculated upon by scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, politicians and the media outlets. The diversity in opinion highlights the fact that nobody really knows how AI will change our relationship with technology and each other. AI will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the human biological machine intelligence of our civilisation a billion-fold. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

Halo's armored hero, Master Chief, has fought the Covenant on a raft of planets throughout the galaxy. One place the super-soldier hasn't visited, though, is a village called Bamburgh on the northeast coast of England. At Gamescom 2018, I was shown a special Halo event that will appear in Forza Horizon 4 later this year. The course, presented as a virtual "training exercise," lets you drive the rugged Warthog through dense forests and sandy beaches. It looked like terrific fun and will, if nothing else, be a nice distraction while fans wait for Halo Infinite.

The rise of the machine has freed ICIJ members globally to pore over millions of documents in a custom-built search engine. But even this next-level research has posed substantial challenges: for example, what to do when certain phrases return an indigestible 150,000 results? Clearly, the next step to speeding up our research was to intelligently filter information relevant to each investigation. Here's how we streamlined the previously daunting process, giving us both unprecedented flexibility and the required search success rate. In leaks like the Paradise Papers, we dealt with millions of documents (including PDFs, photos, and emails) that traditional platforms like Excel can't process.

With the latest release of DaVinci Resolve 15, Blackmagic Design has radically made over its editing suite to create one of the best video-editing systems at any price -- even against mainstream options like Premiere Pro CC and Apple's Final Cut Pro X. It now comes with Fusion, a powerful visual effects (VFX) app used in Hollywood films, along with an excellent color corrector and audio editor. Despite doing more than most editors will ever need, the full studio release costs just $300, and you can get a stripped-down version with most features for a grand total of zero dollars. I use Adobe's Premiere Pro CC as part of its Creative Cloud suite, which costs more than $50 a month, so Resolve 15 is certainly a cheaper option. After trying it out for a week, would I be willing to switch?

Technology experts have uncovered a vast misinformation campaign attempting to spread stories on a hugescale. Facebook, and Twitter have found and removed hundreds of accounts that were apparently set up to target users in the US, UK, Latin America and the Middle East. But it is not clear what the campaign was being used for. The accounts appear to have been tied to Iranian actors and cybersecurity firms said they had appeared to be promoting Iran's geopolitical agenda around the world. But whether the campaign was being set up to launch any more specific or targeted attack remains unclear.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) just developed an AI-assisted image editing tool that automates object selection. This is the Holy Grail of selection tools -- you can behold it in the video below. For millions of people, Photoshop is a program that's used to bring out the best visual features in images. But at TNW we're more likely to use it to make Mark Zuckerberg look like a vampire or to put a sombrero on a hacker. And, speaking only for myself, using Photoshop is time-consuming and hard.

Even though we do our best to bring you a solid 52 Video Fridays every year (which works out to over 1,000 robot videos annually), we can't manage to post everything, and sometimes, we miss out on some awesome stuff. That's just one of the reasons why we always look forward to the Robot Film Festival, and the 2018 event took place in July in Portland, Ore. I showed up and gave a talk (most of which you can see in this article), and then found a seat and watched the film selections. As always, there was an impressive amount of really, really good robot videos that I'd never seen before. The videos have all been posted online, and we've picked out a few of the happiest, saddest, scariest, and cleverest to share.

The graphs are related to the dimensionality reduction. The experiment is try to reduce the dimensionality of MNIST dataset (set of images of hand-drawn digits) as much as possible without loosing their separability in the lower dimensional space. On the right is algorithm PCA which reduces the dimension by eliminating the directions which have less variance and then projecting the data on the remaining dimensions. On the left is auto-encoder (think it like a neural network same number of nodes at input and output layers, but very few at the middle, 2 in this case) which feeds the image at input layer and expect the same image at output layer, but near the middle of the network, the number of layers are drastically reduced, thus creating a squeezing kind of process, or information bottleneck kind of phenomenon. The magic is in the output.