NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with James Vincent of The Verge about a new Warner Bros. deal with a company that uses artificial intelligence to predict movie success.

In this episode, our interviewer Audrow Nash speaks to Gil Weinberg, Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Music and the founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Weinberg leads a research lab called the Robotic Musicianship group, which focuses on developing artificial creativity and musical expression for robots and on augmented humans. Weinberg discusses several of his improvisational robots and how they work, including Shimon, a multi-armed robot marimba player, as well as his work in prosthetic devices for musicians. Below is a video that includes Shimon on marimba, Jason Barnes playing drums with a prostetic, and Prof. Gil Weinberg on bass guitar. Gil Weinberg is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Music and the founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Robotic Musicianship group.

At that time, the final contract was expected by the end of the year, and the arrangement was to be open to all member-institutions of Projekt DEAL, which comprises more than 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany. On Thursday (January 9), media messaging from Springer Nature's director of communications, Susie Winter, indeed informed us that "Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world's largest transformative open access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated January 1, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape. "It follows the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two parties on August 22, and is a giant step forward in the OA transition, enabling greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the dissemination of the fruits of German research, for the benefit of researchers everywhere." A full text of the agreement is to be released by the end of this month, and the deal is to be in force through 2022, with an option to renew for one more year, through 2023. The trend represented by the Projekt DEAL library consortium in Germany, Kaufman says, is unmistakable. "Major STM publishers are inking wide-ranging deals with customers on a national or even broader scale," he says. "In April, Elsevier inked an innovative'read and publish' agreement"--referred to as a RAP deal--"with the Norwegian academic community.

Hollywood-based film studios are increasingly using AI as part of the decision-making process when ... [ ] commissioning and producing new films. For anyone who's ever thought Hollywood's output is formulaic and tired, the movie industry may be about to get worse. Major studio Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Cinelytic, which has developed an AI-powered system that can predict the likelihood of a film's success based on such factors as actors, budget and brand. Predictably enough, Warner Bros. will be using Cinelytic's software as part of the research process it undergoes when deciding which movies to commission. While it obviously can't measure how good a film will be artistically, Warner Bros. will likely use it during early production phases to separate ideas likely to succeed from those that most likely aren't.

Tech experts have long warned about the dark side of virtual assistant AI, from Alexa to Siri, but the masses haven't listened. Now Fox is kicking it up a notch with their upcoming drama, NeXt, about Artificial Intelligence that gets super personal while creating human misery. Creator and executive producer Manny Coto brought his cast, including John Slattery, to Television Critic's Association winter press tour in Pasadena to give a first look at the series coming to Fox this spring. The NeXt in the title refers to an artificial intelligence project that takes its programming to extremes as it seeks to wipe out the humans who want to thwart its goals. Coto told reporters that the series idea actually came from a creepy incident involving his son and their Amazon Alexa. "My son woke me up and said, 'Alexa started talking to me at three a.m." Unsettled, the showrunner said they never got to the bottom of why their Alexa went midnight rogue several times, but it got him thinking about what we're allowing into our homes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to play a much greater role in 2020.