Alex Jones's flagship radio channel is now silent – but not for the same reason as everyone else took him offline. The Federal Communications Commission has taken down Jones's flagship radio station, Liberty Radio, according to reports. It was taken offline because it was operating as a pirate radio station, the Association Press said. The lawsuit filed against those behind the station claimed that Liberty Radio had been broadcasting since at least 2013. It was doing so without a license, apparently from an apartment in Austin, Texas.

Some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) project can now be found in most companies, with the remainder seeming to at least have several projects in a planning stage. If Marc Andreessen's now famous "software will eat the world" Wall Street Journal essay was on its way to being true when he wrote it seven years ago, the "eats the world" statement is equally true today regarding AI. AI, or at least something claiming to be AI, can be seen throughout the consumer and business landscape. Are the recommendation engines that power Amazon and Netflix suggestions AI? In Netflix's case, they made a move a few years ago to have their "you might like" recommendation based on analysis of content you've liked, instead of only on what you've watched.

For one of his next films, director Tony Kaye (American History X, Lake of Fire) needs a robot, but rather than using computer-generated effects to depict one, as filmmakers have done in the past, he wants to cast an actual AI robot. Deadline reports that Kaye and producer Sam Khoze came up with the idea for the upcoming film 2nd Born, a follow to the soon-to-be-released 1st Born. The robot Kaye and Khoze have in mind would be one trained in various acting methods and techniques, according to Deadline. And aside from casting it, the two also hope for it to be recognized by the Screen Actors Guild. It centers on a young couple whose Iranian and American families have to come together to support them during their complicated first pregnancy.

Twitter is considering wide-ranging changes as it continues to be attacked for promoting conspiracy theorists and far-right activists on its platform, its boss has said. The company is looking into altering the way the service works so that it can limit the way that false stories, misinformation and hate speech are spreading across the site, CEO Jack Dorsey said. But some of its options appear to be controversial already. They include attempting to undermine the idea of filter bubbles by forcing people to see the opinions of people they disagree with – which could include many of the site's discredited and extremist voices. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.--You knew it was coming, right? When you walk around with more computing power in your pocket than it took to launch a Saturn V rocket to the moon, you get the hint that computers are increasingly doing work that we either don't like doing or never could do before. For example, take logging raw video and creating data files to let news organizations search for just the right clip when we need it. Bingo… the AI system logged it and made it available on the server. AI is also the tool behind giving viewers a better experience when they visit a station's web page.

What will happen when we've built machines as intelligent as us? According to the experts this incredible feat will be achieved in the year 2062 – a mere 44 years away – which certainly begs the question: what will the world, our jobs, the economy, politics, war, and everyday life and death, look like then? Fortunately, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at UNSW has done the research for us. An avid sci-fi fan from childhood, Walsh, who also leads the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at Data61 – Australia's Centre of Excellence for ICT Research, has long been fascinated by robots, machines and the future. In 2017, he published his first book, It's Alive!, in which he tells the story of AI and how it is already affecting our societies, economies and interactions.

Following a particular news story online is an important but difficult task, as the relevant information is often scattered across different domains/sources (e.g., news articles, blogs, comments, tweets), presented in various formats and language styles, and may overlap with thousands of other stories. In this work we join the areas of topic tracking and entity disambiguation, and propose a framework named Story Disambiguation - a cross-domain story tracking approach that builds on real-time entity disambiguation and a learning-to-rank framework to represent and update the rich semantic structure of news stories. Given a target news story, specified by a seed set of documents, the goal is to effectively select new story-relevant documents from an incoming document stream. We represent stories as entity graphs and we model the story tracking problem as a learning-to-rank task. This enables us to track content with high accuracy, from multiple domains, in real-time. We study a range of text, entity and graph based features to understand which type of features are most effective for representing stories. We further propose new semi-supervised learning techniques to automatically update the story representation over time. Our empirical study shows that we outperform the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods for tracking mixed-domain document streams, while requiring fewer labeled data to seed the tracked stories. This is particularly the case for local news stories that are easily over shadowed by other trending stories, and for complex news stories with ambiguous content in noisy stream environments.

Reinventing the future of work can lead to shared prosperity. An artificial intelligence-driven career adviser, an industrial smart glove, freelance insurance, a tactile laptop for the visually impaired. The 12 European finalists of the global MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge are "improving economic opportunity for workers," according to the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. The challenge is the flagship program of the initiative, and this year the initiative launched a worldwide competition divided into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. "If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity," Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the initiative, said in a statement.

Exponential advancements in technology within the last half century have profoundly reshaped humanity and continue to do so continuously. Concepts which once seemed as fantasy Sci-Fi, visualized through Hollywood hits such as The Terminator (1984) and Eagle Eye (2008) have steadily and inconspicuously become a part of our reality. More recently, the futurist show, Black Mirror (2011) featured on Netflix gives us a glimpse of what the future may hold. One thing in common for all of these shows is the portrayal of possibilities with regards to advancements in computer technology -- be it in the form of a highly intelligent, autonomous, sophisticated robot like the Terminator (with a massive capacity for destruction)or ARIIA, a supercomputer able to manipulate almost all connected devices and command its victims to fulfill its agenda. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seen to be the core driver of current trends within the tech sector and has vastly developed since the term was first coined in the 1950's. It is embedded in our phones, in the form of online chat bots and as phone operators to name a few contemporary use cases.

If 2017 was the year artificial intelligence rose to prominence, 2018 is when we're seeing it go mainstream. Whichever area you work in, it's likely AI will become increasingly prevalent in your everyday activity. Wherever you are in the world – whether you are an expert in AI, someone whose job increasingly uses AI or simply an interested reader we would like to hear from you. Earlier this year, the Guardian published a long read that asked: Has technology evolved beyond our control? Its author, James Bridle, argued that "our technologies are extensions of ourselves, codified in machines and infrastructures, in frameworks of knowledge and action. Computers are not here to give us all the answers, but to allow us to put new questions, in new ways, to the universe."