Reports that robots, automation and artificial intelligence are going to put millions of us out of work may sound troubling, but should we believe them? That largely depends on whether we're technology optimists or pessimists. In our Future of Work series we look at how jobs might change in the future. The Snewing family lived in 62 Falkner Street, Liverpool, for more than four decades. They were saddlers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Google has just started to fund computer software which will write local news. A short story written by Japanese computer software made it to second rounds of national literary prize. And an artificial intelligence company called deep mind has created software that can generate music by listening to music. All these foregoing flashy news stories are evident of the benefit and popularization of Artificial Intelligence in the modern world. Earlier, the computer generated works relied heavily upon the input provided by the programmer, the software was very much like a tool or a mechanism like brush or canvas.

Espoo, Finland - Nokia has unveiled the latest version of its Cognitive Analytics for Customer Insight software, providing powerful new capabilities so service provider business, IT and engineering organizations can consistently deliver a superior real-time and personalized customer experience. Nokia Cognitive Analytics for Customer Insight provides a holistic, real-time view of the customer experience to help service providers quickly identify issues and prioritize improvements based on their customer and business impact. It features Nokia's Customer Experience Index (CEI), which correlates information from the network, devices, customer care, billing and other sources with satisfaction surveys like the Net Promoter Score to produce a customer-specific score that tracks service performance and subscriber satisfaction. In this latest release, Nokia CEI now taps advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms co-developed with Nokia Bell Labs to provide new levels of prediction and automation capabilities to improve the subscriber experience. The algorithms optimize themselves over time, decreasing the time required for the initial tuning of the index from months to days, and delivering a far more accurate view of subscriber satisfaction.

Whether you're aware of it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) has a ubiquitous presence in our lives today – think the personalised playlists on Spotify or the'Recommended for you' lists on Netflix, both of which use AI to curate a selection tailored just for you. Now its presence is being felt in the area of document management, with AI and cognitive computing set to revolutionise the ways in which we store, archive, process and extract information.

Recurrent neural networks when activated can remain active for a time following that activation as neurons within the network continue to excite other neurons, even in the absence of external inputs. These internal activations contain some information about the inputs into the network. The "echo state" refers to these internal reverberations which give the RNN an implicit memory, even when the neurons themselves are stateless (i.e. Even randomly connected and weighted RNNs have these properties. As it concerns machine learning, the important property of the RNN is how long the information can be stored in these "echos".

Reuters is building an AI tool to help journalists analyse data, suggest story ideas, and even write some sentences, aiming not to replace reporters but instead augment them with a digital data scientist-cum-copywriting assistant. Called Lynx Insight, it has been trialled by dozens of journalists since the summer, and will now be rolled out across Reuters newsrooms. Reg Chua, executive editor of editorial operations, data and innovation at Reuters, says the aim is to divvy up editorial work into what machines do best (such as chew through data and spot patterns), and what human editorial staff excel at (such as asking questions, judging importance, understanding context and -- presumably -- drinking excessive amounts of coffee). That differs from previous editorial tech efforts that sought to train AI to write entire stories, such as snippets about local sports teams or earthquake warnings. Reuters already tried that with financial stories, and that work has "informed" the new aim to build a "cybernetic newsroom", rather than a fully automated one, says Chua. "The real value is using machines to do what they're good at and then presenting that to humans -- that's the best of both worlds."

The deluge of online and offline misinformation is overloading the exchange of ideas upon which democracies depend. Fake news, conspiracy theories, and deceptive social bots proliferate, facilitating the manipulation of public opinion. Countering misinformation while protecting freedom of speech will require collaboration across industry, journalism, and academia. The Workshop on Digital Misinformation — held in May 2017 in conjunction with the International Conference on Web and Social Media in Montréal, Québec, Canada — was intended to foster these efforts. The meeting brought together more than 100 stakeholders from academia, media, and tech companies to discuss the research challenges implicit in building a trustworthy Web. Below we outline the main findings from the discussion.

The Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC’17)1 was hosted at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from June 19th - June 23rd, 2017. The ICCC’17 organising committee consisted of Ashok Goel (General Chair), Kazjon Grace (Workshop Co-chair), Matthew Guzdial (Media Chair), Mikhail Jacob (Local Chair), Anna Jordanous (Program Co-chair), Ruli Manurung (Workshop Co-chair) and Alison Pease (Program Co-chair). This report summarises the main topics addressed.

A drone camera films a herd of caribou as they migrate in Western Canada. The footage offers a unique look at the behavior of individuals within the herd. Flying cameras are giving biologists an all-encompassing view of migration that reveals how social interactions motivate the animals' every move. Ecologists Andrew Berdahl, a Santa Fe Institute fellow, Colin Torney of the University of Glasgow, and colleagues flew drones to capture footage of Dolphin and Union caribou, a Canadian herd, as the animals crossed from Victoria Island to the Canadian mainland in the last stage of their fall migration. Scientists have long pondered the dynamics of animal migrations, but they've had limited ways to study them.

LONDON, UK – Think back to your last year in customer interactions. How many customer complaints did you process? Out of those, how many people complained about contact centre wait times? Now, ask yourself: how many of those customers were angry, sad, or dissatisfied about the level of service they received? Satisfying customers, it seems, is a neverending challenge.