Artificial intelligence could contribute an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, but which countries and sectors will benefit the most?

Nielsen-owned Gracenote has announced the launch of an artificial intelligence service called Sonic Style that will sort massive catalogs of music by style for the first time ever. Sonic Style will classify 90 million songs not by the genre of music the artist is known for, but rather the actual style of each individual recording. Music has typically categorized by artist genres, such as rock or hip hop. However, artist genres alone do not always tell the full story of an artist's full catalog or career. Gracenote has developed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptor values.

Sonic Style is hoping to shake up the way music is traditionally categorized, moving past the typical overarching genres like rock or hip-hop to classify each song on a granular level. To that end, Gracenote has amassed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptors that create a "style profile" of each recording and can pair machine learning descriptors such as tempo and mood with editorial ones, like artist genre, era, and origin. For example, the press release suggests the service can mine through Taylor Swift's catalogue to figure out which songs are more pop, more country, more pop electronica, or god help us, more R&B. That level of musical understanding will hopefully help smart speakers, voice assistants, streaming services, and, yes, even measly humans create better, more personalized playlists. "Sonic Style applies neural network-powered machine learning to the world's music catalogs, enabling Gracenote to deliver granular views of musical styles across complete music catalogs," says Brian Hamilton, Gracenote's general manager of music and auto, in a statement.

Facebook said in March that it is making progress in addressing election abuse ahead of the U.S. midterms. Its efforts include expanding its fact-checking efforts and using artificial intelligence to block malicious accounts before they can spread misinformation.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will soon be joined by a crew of free-flying mini-robots inspired by the Jedi training droids that Luke Skywalker practiced his light saber skills with in Star Wars. NASA's one-foot-cube Astrobees will be packed with cameras, sensors, and other tools and travel around the space station; its tasks will be far more mundane, however, than the movie training droids. The bots will help with tasks like measuring noise levels, testing carbon dioxide concentrations, or shooting video of astronauts at work. Ground crews will be able to remotely control the robot, sending it to various station waypoints, or even giving it a set of tasks to carry out largely autonomously, says Trey Smith, a research scientist in NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group. "In the end, it should be able to depart from its dock, do an entire survey of several modules, and then return to its dock at the end of it," he says.

RapidMiner makes analytics teams more productive through an open and extensible data science platform. Organizations can build predictive models and put them into production faster than ever, using RapidMiner's lightning fast visual workflow designer and automated modeling capabilities combined with the Informatica Data Cloud. "We're thrilled to form a partnership with Informatica," said Jeff Bashaw, Vice President of Channel and Corporate Development at RapidMiner. "We have a shared vision for the generational opportunity of artificial intelligence, and through this partnership we'll be delivering new capabilities to our customers. For example, a financial services organization is using RapidMiner and Informatica to predict consumer needs, providing their lending team with prescriptive recommendations to minimize customer churn and identify cross sell opportunities."

Allstate deployed Amelia as a test in September and, to date, has used the platform in more than 3 million customer conversations. With an instant message interface, Amelia leads call center employees through step-by-step procedures to help answer a variety of customer questions, including policy and policyholder information. "Amelia is quickly becoming an important component of our customer service strategy," said Allstate Senior Vice President Carla Zuniga. "She provides our call center personnel with the information and procedures they need to address our customers' questions and concerns." Amelia's machine learning capability allows her to improve her ability to answer customer questions by "listening" to interactions she doesn't understand and with Allstate experts' help quickly expanding her knowledge.

Sonic Style is hoping to shake up the way music is traditionally categorized, moving past the typical overarching genres like rock or hip-hop to classify each song on a granular level. To that end, Gracenote has amassed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptors that create a "style profile" of each recording and can pair machine learning descriptors such as tempo and mood with editorial ones, like artist genre, era, and origin. For example, the press release suggests the service can mine through Taylor Swift's catalogue to figure out which songs are more pop, more country, more pop electronica, or god help us, more R&B. That level of musical understanding will hopefully help smart speakers, voice assistants, streaming services, and, yes, even measly humans create better, more personalized playlists. "Sonic Style applies neural network-powered machine learning to the world's music catalogs, enabling Gracenote to deliver granular views of musical styles across complete music catalogs," says Brian Hamilton, Gracenote's general manager of music and auto, in a statement.

The spectrum of desire that drives the design and architecture worlds has shifted. Where homes were once considered a showcase of wealth and access to the world's most elusive treasures, they are now a comfortable hub – a chamber within which we find space to cleanse ourselves of life, and clasp moments of calm to our chests, snatched from the chaos and demand of a connected world. For many, luxury has been redefined. It now revolves around adding convenience, function and intuition to the home, inevitably culminating in society entering a state of comatose artificial intelligence reliance, or at least that's what the film industry would have you believe. "The future is big business but we have had it in our lives forever and always take it in stride," says Academy Award-nominated production designer KK Barrett.

Apple's "Amazing Stories" revival finally has new showrunners on board. The tech giant has inked a deal with "Once Upon a Time" co-creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis in order for the two to take on the role and executive produce the project. Variety first reported that Horowitz and Kitsis have now assumed the role that Bryan Fuller left in February. The announcement of their involvement in the project comes days after ABC aired the finale of "Once Upon a Time" season 7, which is the fantasy series' final run. As what IBTimes learned last February, Fuller exited the reboot of Steven Spielberg's science fiction horror series due to creative differences.