Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are going to have a huge impact on manufacturing.

In a particularly pungent case of victim-blaming, "hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist's alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia -- and support Trump's continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom," The Washington Post reports, citing four GOP officials involved in the discussions. The campaign includes "a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump" who in recent days have been "privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi," a Post columnist and Saudi government critic, the Post says. Still, the murmurs have begun to "flare into public view" as conservative media organizations and personalities -- Rush Limbaugh, Front Page, Donald Trump Jr., and a sanitized version on Fox News, to name a few -- "have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights." The main lines of attack -- pushed by pro-Saudi accounts on Twitter -- focus on and distort Khashoggi's association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his young and interactions as a journalist with late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and '90s. "The GOP officials declined to share the names of the lawmakers and others who are circulating information critical of Khashoggi," the Post explains, "because they said doing so would risk exposing them as sources."

This article was written by a human being who click-clacked on a keyboard until she finished a draft and sent it to an editor. But more and more, computers are taking over. In fact, the Associated Press has used "automation technology" to cover college sports since 2015. The idea isn't new--humans have obsessed over artificial intelligence (AI) since at least the 18th century, when the "Mechanical Turk" hoax led many to believe that a machine could play chess against a person and win. About 250 years later, a machine can play chess against a person and win--every time.

Paul Duan was working as a data scientist at Eventbrite in San Francisco by day, and volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens by night. He realized one day that he wanted to use AI to help unemployed people find jobs--a core mission of his Paris, France-based nonprofit Bayes Impact. Bayes Impact uses data to build social services fit for a better future. "When you work at a soup kitchen, you serve a soup one by one to each individual, and it feels great," says Duan, "But then it gets really sad because you see that there are 50 people in line behind the person, and you know that behind the closed door of the shelter you have 10,000 more on the streets. So the one question that came to mind was, 'how can we impact people at the biggest scale?'"

But the input can be pushed in certain directions. A quarter-century ago, an electronic surveillance consultant named Scott French used a supercharged Mac to imitate Jacqueline Susann's sex-drenched tales. His approach was different from Mr. Sloan's. Mr. French wrote thousands of computer-coded rules suggesting how certain character types derived from Ms. Susann's works might plausibly interact. It took Mr. French and his Mac eight years to finish the tale -- he reckoned he could have done it by himself in one.

Movidius, an Intel company, is transforming the future of computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate innovation for the next generation of smart and connected devices. By delivering low-power, high-performance SoC platforms for accelerating perceptual computing, Movidius is at the forefront of a new era of computing that enables new levels of intelligence for drones, robots, cameras, virtual and augmented reality, and other devices at the edge.

It is designed to plug in to Metacorps, an experimental web app for annotating metaphor. As Metacorps users annotate metaphors, the system will use user annotations as training data. When the system is confident, it will suggest an identification and an annotation. Once approved by the user, this becomes more training data. This naturally allows for transfer learning, where the system can, with some known degree of reliability, classify one class of metaphor after only being trained on another class of metaphor. For example, in our metaphorical violence project, metaphors may be classified by the network they were observed on, the grammatical subject or object of the violence metaphor, or the violent word used (hit, attack, beat, etc.).

Amazon has revealed plans to create more than 1,000 jobs in the UK in Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge. At least 600 "highly skilled" roles will be added in Manchester working on software, machine learning and AWS, its cloud computing business. The company will also create 250 and 180 jobs at its development centres in Edinburgh and Cambridge respectively. Doug Gurr, Amazon's UK country manager, described the new roles as "Silicon Valley jobs in Britain". Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, said the new positions were an "enormous vote of confidence in the UK".

At 25, Ms Annabelle Kwok has already made a name for herself. Two years ago, she made waves when she co-founded SmartCow, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that came up with an electronic board that could run various AI software. Last year, Ms Kwok left SmartCow and started NeuralBay, a company that focuses on detection and recognition software related to humans, objects and text, and offers AI-driven solutions for multinational corporations. Her clients include an aviation corporation, an automation industry company and chocolate company Ferrero. Ms Kwok traces her interest in tech to a box of Lego bricks with electric cables called Lego Mindstorms, which her parents, who work in banking, bought for her when she was in primary school.