Microsoft has developed an AI to draw entirely original images based on nothing more than text. You type it, a computer draws it, and we're one step closer to a world where using software like Photoshop and Illustrator is a hands-off experience. Researchers created a text-to-image bot that spits out pretty amazing images when fed a series of descriptive words like "this bird is red with white and has a very short beak." This was accomplished through the creation of neural network called an Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) that creates the image pixel-by-pixel. Like any other artist or designer, it does both broad strokes and fine details in layers.

AI and machine learning has been shaping our experience as consumers for some time now. From the ubiquitous Google search to Spotify and Netflix recommendations, or asking Siri or Alexa just about anything, we haven't really resisted the idea of bots making our lives that little bit easier. So why is it only now that AI is on every marketer's lips? "I think there's now a democratisation of AI," explained Marketo's Customer Success Director Mike Handes at ADMA's recent Town Hall, Marketing in an AI-first World. "Technology vendors have embraced it, making it more accessible for marketers to create greater engagement or better outcomes for customers. In the past, the idea of automating communications brought a sense of lost control."

Tomb Raider is directed by Norwegian Roar Uthaug and written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and also stars Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained) and Dominic West (The Wire, 300). The film arrives in theaters on March 16th.

Here at Vilynx we're always looking to empower our customers by providing them tools that will help them make a big impact on their KPIs in the most efficient way. We're happy to announce that we just launched a brand new feature called Trending Stories. Trending Stories accompanies, and expands on, our existing Trending Topics feature. It uses Machine Learning to help streamline the editorial process by providing access to a real time stream of breaking news. As we crawl numerous news sites and social media, our deep learning algorithms are able to break through the chaos and identify topics which are being talked about and are gaining momentum.

Microsoft believes 2018 is the ''year of AI''. To that effect, the company has been investing in multiple projects pertaining to the field of artificial intelligence. In fact, only a couple of days ago, Microsoft announced an AI which reads and answers questions about a document with human-level accuracy. Similarly, the tech giant is aiming to decode the immune system using AI as well. Today, Microsoft has revealed yet another new AI tech under development - a bot that draws what you tell it to. This new tech, dubbed the ''drawing bot'', can generate highly detailed images based on caption-like text descriptions.

Dr. Sabine Hauert, President and Co-Founder of Robohub.org and Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol, provided the InterConnect 2017 audience with an insightful (and interactive) discussion about robotics – highlighting the need for balanced media and communications around robotics and artificial intelligence. As a member of the Royal Society's Working Group on Machine Learning, Dr. Hauert is an expert in science communication and a frequent speaker on the future of robotics. In her talk, Hauert explains how robots can be game changers, but not in the way we think. Robots are not going to replace humans, they are going to make their jobs much more humane. Difficult, demeaning, demanding, dangerous, dull – these are the jobs robots will be taking. Productivity is one of the primary benefits of robotics in the workplace.

Microsoft and Chinese retailer Alibaba independently announced that they had made software that matched or outperformed humans on a reading-comprehension test devised at Stanford. Microsoft called it a "major milestone." Media coverage amplified the claims, with Newsweek estimating "millions of jobs at risk." Those jobs seem safe for a while. Closer examination of the tech giants' claims suggests their software hasn't yet drawn level with humans, even within the narrow confines of the test used.

With an affection for nerd culture that is inversely proportional to its budget, this lo-fi sci-fi comedy is destined for laugh-filled late-night viewing. "This Giant Papier-Mâché Boulder Is Actually Really Heavy" pays homage to favorites like "Doctor Who" and "Battlestar Galactica" while looking like it cost less than a cosplay effort to make. Serious fan Jeffrey (Daniel Pujol) drags his friends Tom (cowriter and director Christian Nicolson) and Gavin (Lewis Roscoe) to a science-fiction convention. There, they get far more than their passes offer when they're sucked into an alternate universe that looks just like a black-and-white B movie set in space, where they're the heroes who have to fight intergalactic supervillain Lord Froth (Joseph Wycoff) alongside heroine Emmanor (Sez Niederer). Fans of the silliness of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and "Galaxy Quest" will find that Nicolson and his co-writer Andrew Beszant are on their wavelength with this inventive New Zealand film.

Visionary open-source advocate Usama Fayyad says there's so much low-hanging fruit for machine learning, that the value of practically any initiative would likely be "plus or minus a million" dollars. His point is that machine learning offers a wealth of opportunities for companies to harness big data. The key is always application: getting the job done, and ensuring it's aligned with important business initiatives. Find out how to do that by listening to this episode of DM Radio! Eric has more than 20 years of experience as a career journalist with a keen focus on enterprise technologies.

If you're handed a note that asks you to draw a picture of a bird with a yellow body, black wings and a short beak, chances are you'll start with a rough outline of a bird, then glance back at the note, see the yellow part and reach for a yellow pen to fill in the body, read the note again and reach for a black pen to draw the wings and, after a final check, shorten the beak and define it with a reflective glint. Then, for good measure, you might sketch a tree branch where the bird rests. Now, there's a bot that can do that, too. The new artificial intelligence technology under development in Microsoft's research labs is programmed to pay close attention to individual words when generating images from caption-like text descriptions. This deliberate focus produced a nearly three-fold boost in image quality compared to the previous state-of-the-art technique for text-to-image generation, according to results on an industry standard test reported in a research paper posted on arXiv.org.