The most terrifying film of the year didn't come from Hollywood. It came from a think tank looking to save us all from killer machines. In the movie's near future dystopia, palm-sized drones loaded up with explosives use facial recognition to hunt down and slaughter people with pinpoint precision. Swarms of the micro murderers tear through Congress, massacring Senators based on ideology. Terrorists unleash a horde of the flying monsters into schools to take out the kids of parents who dare to speak out against the threat.

Artificial intelligence (AI) takes the power of computing systems to a different level. It is amazing to even think that a computing system can emulate human beings. There are many fantastic examples of AI in various areas of our lives. That said, computing systems are still considered limited in their capabilities because they cannot think creatively like human beings. While AI can process and analyze complex data, it still does not have much prowess in areas that involve abstract, nonlinear and creative thinking.

Such creative software can be used for autonomous creative tasks, such as inventing mathematical theories, writing poems, painting pictures, and composing music. However, computational creativity studies also enable us to understand human creativity and to produce programs for creative people to use, where the software acts as a creative collaborator rather than a mere tool. Historically, it's been difficult for society to come to terms with machines that purport to be intelligent and even more difficult to admit that they might be creative. For instance, in 1934, some professors at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom built meccano models that were able to solve some mathematical equations. Groundbreaking for its time, this project was written up in a piece in Meccano Magazine.

A number of approaches have been advanced for taking data about a user's likes and dislikes and generating a general profile of the user. These profiles can be used to retrieve documents matching user interests; recommend music, movies, or other similar products; or carry out other tasks in a specialized fashion. This article presents a fundamentally new method for generating user profiles that takes advantage of a large-scale database of demographic data. These data are used to generalize user-specified data along the patterns common across the population, including areas not represented in the user's original data. The input data most often take the form of samples of the user's interests or preferences in a given area, and the profile is a generalization of these data that can be used generatively to carry out tasks on behalf of the user.

Microsoft didn't have much luck in the digital music realm, from the Zune to its Groove Music service. At the end of 2017, the company switched all of its existing Groove users over to Spotify and shut Groove down. But now it turns out the move came with an unforeseen complication, as reported by Neowin. Cortana, Microsoft's smart assistant, can no longer recognize individual songs. Previously, users could use the song identification feature by pressing Cortana's music icon while a song was playing.

Hessie Jones first made an appearance on my main podcast, Welcome! a few years ago. In this conversation, recorded just before the 2017 holidays, I chat with Hessie about how companies are going to be using Artificial Intelligence in 2018.

We have developed an autonomous robot system that takes well-composed photographs of people at social events, such as weddings and conference receptions. In this article, we outline the overall architecture of the system and describe how the various components interrelate. We also describe our experiences deploying the robot photographer at a number of real-world events. The system is capable of operating in unaltered environments and has been deployed at a number of real-world events. This article gives an overview of the entire robot photographer system, and provides details of the architecture underlying the implementation.

Conspicuously absent from the 5th Generation Computer Project's proclaimed goals is one vitally important in a 1990's knowledge-intensive society.....the ability to help people tame mountains of video-based information. A decade from now, the nation will be crisscrossed with fiberoptic bundles capable of simultaneously carrying thousands of hiresolution video conversations, and solid-state video cameras will be as abundant as microphone pickup devices are today. In short, the voice-telephone and printed-page information networks over which we communicate will be joined by 2-way, super-narrowcast video, where each knowledge worker both receives product from myriad sources ad reshapes and originates his own unique product. The main activities interactive video will support are the same ones that will occupy people a decade from nowlearning and teaching. Already, one can "walk through" homes for sale thousands of miles away, learn how to assemble, operate and fix complex machinery, drive around the streets of Aspen, Colorado, and learn facial communication skills using this powerful medium.

The chapters in this book examine the state of today's agent technology and point the way toward the exciting developments of the next millennium. Contributors include Donald A. Norman, Nicholas Negroponte, Brenda Laurel, Thomas Erickson, Ben Shneiderman, Thomas W. Malone, Pattie Maes, David C. Smith, Gene Ball, Guy A. Boy, Doug Riecken, Yoav Shoham, Tim Finin, Michael R. Genesereth, Craig A. Knoblock, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, and James E. White, among others. Held at San Francisco's W Hotel, the conference included work from researchers and practitioners who are developing novel user interface and interaction paradigms that incorporate advanced reasoning and modeling techniques. In the past few years, user interfaces have faced increasingly challenging tasks, larger numbers of users with a wide range of computer skills, and the widespread use of new platforms such as mobile devices. These trends have led to a need for advanced techniques for communication and collaboration, personalization and adaptation of behavior, agent-based assistance, integrated multimodal interfaces, and a variety of intelligent front ends for complex environments and tasks.

Scientist have developed the first bionic hand with a sense of touch that can be used outside a laboratory. Almerina Mascarello, 62, lost her left hand in an accident in a steel factory in 1993. The married mother-of-two has now been fitted with the robot hand that is not only controlled by her brain, but can also feel what it picks up. It allow her to carry out actions that most of us take for granted but pose great difficulties for amputees – such as getting dressed. Mrs Mascarello says the device, which has been compared to the robotic hand fitted to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, 'is almost like [her hand] is back again'.