Are we rapidly approaching Skynet? That technology from the movie Terminator, which ultimately becomes self-aware and begins to eradicate the human race? Maybe not today, but the field of artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding. Those in the know are beginning to wonder when we need to consider the possibility. From our smartphones to our toasters, to self-driving cars, to smart homes that control the temperature and the lights in our house, we are beginning to gradually turn more decisions over to computers.

At first it seemed like director Ryan Coogler was simply listening to cultural kismet when he tapped Kendrick Lamar to put together the companion album to Black Panther. Casting the decade's reigning monarch (butterfly) of complex blackness in popular music logically followed from assembling a royal procession of black actors (among whom even Angela Bassett can sashay in as the Wakandan queen mother and barely steal focus) and a palatial retinue of behind-the-camera black excellence to mount a redefinition of the decade's reining genre of popcorn entertainment, the superhero movie. From Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City onward, Lamar's always represented his own trinity of black superhero, supervillain, and mortal in one person, exiled in a world not of his making. Who else, then, but King Kendrick or, as he's more Afrocentrically dubbed himself, King Kunta, for this epic of imagined African kingship transcending an American cartoon mythos? Who else but Kung Fu Kenny for this action film meant to dropkick historical trauma with a kinetic pivot to utopian possibility?

This idea is really interesting. Sadly I don't have nearly enough linear algebra experience to understand the details though. Would IRL still be feasible if the state was not explicit? It seems like this technique depends on prior knowledge of the state machine, but from what I understand about deep reinforcement learning, the state may be very complex, and the value function could actually be a deep neural network.

I joined the Star Wars fandom late in the game. I grew up in India, where Star Wars is less of a thing, but in 2015 I watched "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and set out on a quest to watch everything. They can move and talk (though mostly in gibberish) and act intelligently. As we all know, technology is often inspired by movies. Just look at how speech technologies are evolving and inspired by movies like Star Wars.

Then you compare a number of ANN algorithms on that on a number of data-sets (each comes with a pre-selected distance metric for the exhaustive nearest neighbour search, while the approximative algorithms may or may not use the same metric but are compared to it). I have indeed not seen many empirical tests comparing the approximate nearest neighbour to the actual precomputed nearest neighbour. What I have seen however are empirical tests where you use nearest neighbour search as a subroutine in some classification algorithm or other and where the classification performance results of the algorithm with (impractical) exhaustive search are tested against a variant with approximative search. Do you think testing only ANN against exhaustive 1NN is sufficient no matter what the techniques get used for? Apparently, you don't think just testing it through the outcome in the application scenario is sufficient, but maybe both then?

November 15, 2017 Written by: Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D As a huge Star Wars fan, I have always wanted to have a set of supernatural powers, such as the ability to sense impending attacks; influence the thoughts of others, known as the "Jedi mind trick;" and even see the future. In essence, the Force – meaning the wisdom, expertise and ability to know exactly what will happen next and what I should do in the moment. Of course, there is only one problem with all this--our current reality. Wilson predicted, the world will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time and think critically about it to make important choices wisely. And, that is exactly what IBM Watson is doing today.

Last week I went to an event hosted by StoryStream, which bills itself as as a'next generation content marketing platform for brands.' To help launch its new Aura platform, more on which in a moment, the company assembled a trio of AI experts to discuss how the technology might impact on marketing in the coming years. After an hour or so of fascinating debate it became clear that Artificial Intelligence tools for marketers have huge potential – it is just down to the foresight and imagination of those marketers as to how they are used and how effective they are. So how then might AI impact on the future of content marketing? Here are five ways that it is being used already that are likely to become a lot more common in the future.

We look at how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will affect jobs in the UK and which industries will be most affected.

Jaywing Intelligence has released Decision, a new artificial intelligence platform, which itt believes is revolutionising pay per click campaign management. The Leeds-based agency says it's been designed to help brands, that have "hit a ceiling" in campaign performance and are looking for the next gear …

One key to the future of AI will be to make it easier for companies to forge ahead with artificial intelligence projects, say analysts. AT&T (T) and Google are among those seeking a faster track for AI in business.