Reviews for the Luc Besson-directed sci-fi flick "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" filed in Tuesday, with most critics describing the film as a beautiful and expensive disaster. Adapted from the French comic "Valerian et Laureline," Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevinge star in the STX-EuraCorp production slated to premiere July 21. "Valerian" has earned a range of polarized reactions from "simply childish" to "mind-meltingly beautiful and strange" from top critics, making it hard to pin down as a viable contender for the summer box office. The sci-fi project currently holds 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes' aggregator scale. The Hollywood Reporter claimed that "Valerian" is a potential Razzie contender, saying: "The Razzies don't need to wait until the end of the year to anoint a winner for 2017. The Golden Turkey Awards should be republished with a new cover."

The VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference & Expo just wrapped up Monday night in Toronto. The two day conference was packed with simultaneous, back-to-back presentations and workshops from industry leaders such as Microsoft, Google, AMD, The VOID, IMAX, Two Bit Circus, Secret Location, Globacore, Quantum Capture, The Canadian Film Centre, and many more. By the end of the conference, 5 themes on what will guild the VR industry forward, became glaringly clear. This is the budding technology that innovators, dreamers, and creators see as the mechanism for changing lives. Rikard Steiber, President of Viveport and SVP Virtual Reality at HTC, is constantly sharing his belief that VR "will change the world."

There are 139 Chinese poems in the new book "The Sunlight that Lost the Glass Window," and the fact they're all written by one artificially intelligent bot doesn't make local scholars too pleased. "It disgusted me with its slippery tone and rhythm," poet Yu Jian told local newspaper China Youth Daily, according to the South China Morning Post. "The sentences were aimless and superficial, lacking the inner logic for emotional expression." Others said computers couldn't create poetry because they weren't alive, and that the work could "kill our beloved art." The book's contentious author is Xiaoice, a natural-language chat bot developed by Microsoft in 2014.

The animated caper "Despicable Me 3" dominated the Chinese box office over the weekend with $65.1 million in receipts, marking the biggest opening day for an animated film in China. The latest installment in the "Despicable Me" franchise smashed the previous opening-day record, set by "Kung Fu Panda 3" in 2016. It also achieved the fifth-biggest opening weekend of any film in China this year, according to film consulting firm Artisan Gateway. The film's huge weekend debut also outstrips the total ticket sales of its prequel, "Despicable Me 2," in China in 2014. The Universal Pictures film also has been a massive hit in North America and elsewhere across the globe. The Chinese market is expecting to boost its overseas revenues further.

How do you stop a robot from hurting people? Many existing robots, such as those assembling cars in factories, shut down immediately when a human comes near. But this quick fix wouldn't work for something like a self-driving car that might have to move to avoid a collision, or a care robot that might need to catch an old person if they fall. With robots set to become our servants, companions and co-workers, we need to deal with the increasingly complex situations this will create. Science fiction already envisioned this problem.

The internet is going to stop working properly. For now, it's just for one day, though campaigners warn it might be a preview of the future. The world's biggest websites are going to grind to a halt – slowing down, or stopping working in other ways – in protest against intrusions onto net neutrality. It won't be the first time that companies have sabotaged their own websites in defence of the idea that the internet should remain neutral, and that internet providers and other companies shouldn't be able to privilege some kinds of internet traffic over others. But it comes at an especially contentious time, with campaigners and companies warning that the Federal Communications Commission could be close to undermining one of the internet's central principles. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

It's going to be an extra spooky Halloween this year now that Netflix has confirmed the release date for its highly anticipated original series "Stranger Things" Season 2. The boys of Hawkins, Indiana will return on October 27, 2017 for an all new, more terrifying, adventure. The news comes from a tweet posted by Netflix on Tuesday depicting an illustration of Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will on their trusty bikes staring down some kind of colossal monster in the distance. The mysterious monster was previously revealed during the teaser trailer for Season 2 that premiered during the 2017 Superbowl. Some doors can't be closed. While the release date, which is very close to Halloween, is likely welcomed news to fans of the popular science fiction Netflix series, it's light on details for those that were hoping to get an idea of what the townspeople would be up against this time around.

At the its Enterprise World 2017 in Toronto today, OpenText announced the rollout of Magellan – the Canadian enterprise information management software company's brand new artificial intelligence platform. And OpenText is not keeping it a secret that it has its eyes set on the market share help by top AI players. "OpenText Magellan is going head-to-head with the likes of IBM's Watson and SAP Leonardo," declared Adam Howatson, chief marketing officer of OpenText. But unlike many AI players, OpenText is taking a different route with Magellan. We're using Apache Spark and Lift," Howatson told IT in Canada.

Alphabet on Monday said it has kicked off a new research initiative aimed at improving human interaction with artificial intelligence systems. The People AI Research (PAIR) program currently encompasses a dozen people who will collaborate with Googlers in various product groups -- as well as outsiders like Harvard University professor Brendan Meade and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson. The research could eventually lead to refinements in the interfaces of the smarter components of some of the world's most popular apps. And Google's efforts here could inspire other companies to adjust their software, too.

After responding to a domestic violence case in Tijeras, New Mexico on July 2, the Bernalillo County sheriff department initially announced that Amazon Echo, the voice-activated speaker device, had automatically called 911 that led the police to arrive at the scene. "Alexa calling and messaging operates via Wi-Fi between Echo devices or the Alexa app -- it does not support PSTN (public switched telephone network) calling," Hass said, NBC 26 reported. However, there are a few ways to get around the restriction, and get Alexa Echo or Echo Dot to call 911 during an emergency using third-party apps. After this is done, if the owner says "Google, dial 911" or "Alexa, dial 911" (provided one has switched the Google Now trigger word first), a call will be directly placed to the emergency services.