Epic Games has release its second teaser image before Thursday's big Season 5 launch. While yesterday we saw what might be a Japanese cat mask, today the theme is incredibly clear: Vikings are landing in Fortnite: Battle Royale. A viking-themed harvesting tool is the latest clue to Fortnite's fifth season.Credit: Epic Games While yesterday's cat-mask is a little ambiguous I think we can all agree this is a viking axe. Clearly, the anchor found near Snobby Shores and Greasy Grove was also viking-made. And while a Wild West stagecoach popped up near Moisty Mires, indicating that area might transform into a cowboy desert, it seems likely now that this area of Fortnite's shoreline is going to be transformed into a viking-themed area---the game's own little Kattegat.

GUESS?, Inc. ("GUESS") (NYSE: GES) has reached another major milestone in its partnership with Alibaba Group ("Alibaba") (NYSE: BABA) to bring artificial intelligence to the fashion world to provide customers with a more enriching shopping experience that combines online and offline shopping behaviors. Rounding out a comprehensive partnership that began in 2013 with the launch of GUESS in Tmall, this year, GUESS also became a global strategic partner of Alibaba's FashionAI project, an initiative to give shoppers a glimpse of what the future of fashion retail will look like powered by artificial intelligence. With the launch of the interactive concept shop driven by Alibaba AI, GUESS and Alibaba saw the implementation of the O2O (online-to-offline) project come to life, marking the maturity of the unified customer experience concept. On July 4, 2018, Alibaba launched the pilot FashionAI concept shop on the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus, pairing GUESS' extensive retail knowledge and latest collections with advanced Alibaba AI and other technologies on the sidelines of the 2018 Fashion and Textile Conference. Besides the FashionAI concept store's futuristic appeal, the project was aimed at providing a better retail experience for shoppers and to help brands better use analytics in ordering and maintaining inventory.

If you just started playing Fortnite recently, you might be a little confused about why people are freaking out right now. The game is currently in the final moments of Season 4, with Season 5 right around the corner and a bunch of in-game events starting to tie into whatever is coming next. But, of course, that might not make any sense it all, leaving yopu with a lot of questions about why a straightforward PvP game has a giant crack in the sky. What does it all even mean? Season 5 is tied to the Season 5 battle pass, and it translates to a whole lot of different things about the experience of Fortnite: Battle Royale.

Reddit has seen its biggest ever ban, with more than 350,000 kicked out of a subreddit. What's more, those people specifically wanted to be banned – and many had joined in the hope of doing so. The event all took place because the subreddit in question was themed around the villain from Avengers: Infinity War. The forum advanced the idea that Thanos wasn't actually a villain at all, with the name /r/thanosdidnothingwrong. 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.

"President Trump is a complete and total dipshit." So announced Barack Obama, in a video released on YouTube earlier this year. Uncharacteristic, certainly, but it appeared very real. It was, however, a falsified video made -- by BuzzFeed and the actor and director Jordan Peele -- with the help of artificial intelligence. Deepfakes, as they have been dubbed, are the most recent -- and perhaps most troubling -- manifestation in the evolving arms race of digital disinformation.

At IBM, when performance review time rolls around, employees get judged not only on their past accomplishments (and failures) but also on how they might perform in the future. How can IBM predict the future? Using artificial intelligence (AI), Watson Analytics looks at an employee's experiences and projects to infer the potential skills and qualities each person might have to serve IBM in the future. Watson also scours IBM's internal training system to see if an employee has gained new skills. Managers then take Watson's assessment rating into account as they make bonus, pay and promotion decisions.

LOS ANGELES: According to the founder of artificial intelligence outfit ScriptBook, Sony Pictures could have saved a fortune from 2015 to 2017 by using the company's algorithms instead of human beings to reject or greenlight movies. In a presentation at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai said that by analysing screenplays, ScriptBook retroactively identified as box-office failures 22 out of the 32 Sony movies that lost money in that period, during which Sony released a total of 62 movies. "If Sony had used our system they could have eliminated 22 movies that failed financially," said Azermai. Welcome to the brave new world of AI and machine learning as it applies to Hollywood. Many see in ScriptBook and similar AI systems the potential to destroy a major part of the film production and distribution ecosystem, displacing script readers and saving much of the money studios spend on test screenings, focus groups and market research. At its most basic, ScriptBook, founded in 2015 and based in Antwerp, Belgium, has created a tool that analyses the text of screenplays to produce financial forecasting, or as Azermai grandly puts it, "Our mission is to revolutionise the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk."

Chatbots are meant to change the way we are communicating today. They can either work with a predefined set of questions or are a learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will get better over time and is capable of more complex conversations. The basic bot is able to tell you the nearest train station while a more developed version will be able to make an appointment for you. As we are testing the different communication solutions of tomorrow already today, we had a chat with Mr. Schubach, a hospitality automation expert with forty years of experience in hospitality operations and information systems. I think our concern should extend to the human community for both reasons: first because of our evolving comfort and social interaction with non-sentient human stand-ins, and second because we are in the process of outsourcing human labor and displacing livelihoods in favor of mechanized replacements.

A few years ago it may have been the first time you used Uber and watched as your car made its way to you. Perhaps it was the first time Netflix recommended a movie that was just what you were looking for at that moment. More recently, it may have been the first time Nest automatically adjusted your home heating when you went on vacation, or when Alexa turned on your lights on command when you returned home. All these "first time" experiences share two things in common. On one hand, they are moments of surprise, delight and magic, creating first-mover emotional bonds between consumers and brands.

ZHENGZHOU: In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station. In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival. In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor. With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.