The second-generation Echo Show is better than the first in every respect, ranging from its industrial design to its audio and video performance. It's the best smart display today, but that could change as soon as tomorrow if Google announces its own smart display and it turns out to be great. Sonos, meanwhile, still has the best smart speakers for music (the Sonos One and the Sonos Beam). While the second-generation Echo Show is powered by the same system-on-chip as the first-generation Echo Show (a quad-core Intel Atom x5-Z8350), the new model is outfitted with a larger, higher-resolution display; better loudspeakers; a more attractive enclosure; an integrated ZigBee smart home hub; and even the option for hardwired ethernet. Alexa is also becoming a better digital assistant, a development that will improve every Echo model.

On Oct. 11, in Washington, Future Tense will host a free screening of WarGames, followed by a discussion with Open Technology Institute director Kevin Bankston and sci-fi author Malka Older. This year, John Badham's WarGames--one of the movies most beloved by hackers, techies, and tech policy wonks (like me!)--celebrates its 35th anniversary. Though it may look a little kitschy now, it was notable for several firsts: It was the first popular film depiction of the now well-known hacker archetype. It raised the specter of an artificial intelligence starting World War III a year before James Cameron's The Terminator did, and it introduced America to a young Matthew Broderick. WarGames is the alternately lighthearted and deadly serious tale of a wargaming A.I. at U.S. missile command that almost sparks a nuclear war after being broken into by a troublesome but well-intentioned teenage hacker.

You'd have to agree, customer service has taken a *yuge leap this decade. From human backend interaction to artificial intelligence assistants – chatbots have officially taken over the world and people are ironically enjoying it. Over 80% of the 800 decision makers surveyed by Oracle said they are already using or they want to use chatbots for business by 2020. Before we explore the branded chatbots, let's learn where the chatbots live? Here are the ten brands using chatbots to change the way we deal with customers on all three levels of the buyer's journey including awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage.

After the recent uproar about "fake news", it is again all quiet in India. Well, not until, another lynching or riot happens. Whatsapp is busy spreading the use of it's service, rather than strengthening it. The issue is going to haunt us again, very soon. There are two big components of "fake news": misinformation and extreme bias.

The power of machine learning systems not only promises great technical progress, but risks societal harm. As a recent example, researchers have shown that popular word embedding algorithms exhibit stereotypical biases, such as gender bias. The widespread use of these algorithms in machine learning systems, from automated translation services to curriculum vitae scanners, can amplify stereotypes in important contexts. Although methods have been developed to measure these biases and alter word embeddings to mitigate their biased representations, there is a lack of understanding in how word embedding bias depends on the training data. In this work, we develop a technique for understanding the origins of bias in word embeddings. Given a word embedding trained on a corpus, our method identifies how perturbing the corpus will affect the bias of the resulting embedding. This can be used to trace the origins of word embedding bias back to the original training documents. Using our method, one can investigate trends in the bias of the underlying corpus and identify subsets of documents whose removal would most reduce bias. We demonstrate our techniques on both a New York Times and Wikipedia corpus and find that our influence function-based approximations are extremely accurate.

How will our societies evolve with new technologies? This is the question asked by photographer Nicolas Bigot with this series « The Robot Next Door ». This resident of the côtes d'Armor, France, is passionate about science-fiction films and has been a UI/UX designer for ten years. From his studies years in interface design between man and machine for mobile and computer, Nicolas retains an appeal for fantastical subjects. This series is a combination of all his passions.

Dr Lyu Siwei, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Albany in the United States, spoke exclusively to Daily Star Online about his fears. Lyu spent years working on a programme designed to detect so-called "deep fakes", highly convincing faked video footage where another person's head is edited into another video to make it seem as if they are saying and doing things which they never did. Some videos are so sophisticated they can mimic human facial expressions and movements such as blinking. As deep fake technology has improved, and apps such as FakeApp allow anyone with access to the internet to create believable frauds, it has become harder even for experts like Dr Lyu to detect the fakes.

This past April a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like many of his previous speeches. Wearing a crisp white shirt and dark suit, Obama faced the camera and punctuated his words with outstretched hands: "President Trump is a total and complete dipshit." Without cracking a smile, he continued. "Now, you see, I would never say these things. The view shifted to a split screen, revealing the actor Jordan Peele. Obama hadn't said anything--it was a real recording of an Obama address blended with Peele's impersonation. Side by side, the message continued as Peele, like a digital ventriloquist, put more words in the former president's mouth. In this era of fake news, the video was a public service announcement produced by BuzzFeed News, showcasing an application of new artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that could do for audio and video what Photoshop has done for digital images: ...

Artificial intelligence in space exploration is gathering momentum.