Daniel Saunders participated in the Insight Health Data Science program in the Fall of 2016, and currently works as a Data Scientist at Wayfair. Previously, Daniel was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento, and received his PhD in Psychology from Queen's University. While at Insight, Daniel built an NLP-driven engine to generate stress impact scores for newspaper front pages, trained on the reactions of Facebook users to news story headlines. In this blog post, he describes his creative process in developing this project. For my Insight Health Data Science project, I wanted to tackle a problem related to mental health, since my Ph.D. is in Psychology and my father is a mental health advocate in British Columbia.

Quidditch - the game played by Harry Potter - is now magically appearing in the Oxford Dictionaries, joining that other Potter term "muggle". But what other words dreamed up by author JK Rowling are on the cusp of gaining official recognition? Potterhead... Wrock... Bellatrix... three terms that muggles may not understand. And if you need to be told what a muggle is in the first place, then you can at least consult a dictionary on that one. The BBC has learned that another small list of words associated with the Harry Potter book series are on the Oxford University Press watchlist, which decides on the words likely to gain inclusion in its dictionaries.

CBS News, and reporter David Pogue, displayed some new technologies threatening jobs, while the International Federation of Robotics suggested that deploying robots actually increases jobs. In this Sunday Morning CBS News piece, David Pogue cites the numbers of drivers that will be displaced as self-driving cars and trucks hit the roads (180k taxi drivers, 600k Uber drivers and 3.5 million truck drivers). He then explores other areas where bots and robots will soon disrupt employment: 230k workers in fintech along with 47% of many other occupations could be lost to automation in the next 20 years. He concludes with an MIT economics professor who suggests that, historically, new occupations have risen and overall employment has also risen even as major disruptions have happened over the last 100 years. Last week's Chicago Automate and ProMat trade shows began with a press conference by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) which included a CEO Roundtable discussing automation, the future of US manufacturing, and the jobs issue.

We might not always be aware of it, but Artificial Intelligence is now an established component of our daily experience as consumers. Whether it's choosing a movie based on unique recommendations from Netflix, asking Alexa to share the local weather, or interacting with online customer support via bots, AI is behind the scenes delivering highly personalized, smart interactions. Retailers and brands, acutely aware of the unparallelled opportunity before them, are now fully embracing AI to create these same experiences. When a shopper visits an AI-powered ecommerce site, like one of the hundreds powered by Salesforce Einstein, the very fabric of the site is unique to them. From rich product imagery on the homepage to product assortments in search results, the future of AI brings personalized shopping experiences to a whole new level.

Banking Technology's deputy editor, Antony Peyton, has been replaced by an artificial intelligence (AI) powered robot – paving the way for scintillating journalism free from acidic remarks and unfettered bouts of sarcasm. With the relentless rise of AI and robots, it was only a matter of time before a journalist would be thrown on the scrap heap – rather like a glossy brochure received at a fintech conference. Tanya Andreasyan, Banking Technology's editor, says: "Tony has been here for just over a year and in that time has been here. I suppose I could add something fake and congratulatory but I'm not a politician, so won't. "I've tolerated his presence for long enough and it's now time for him to retire gracefully.

Initially, everything about Colossal seems inexplicably, gratuitously absurd. Or Anne Hathaway being involved with any of the above. Yet, after nearly two hours, the movie manages to sweep you up in its world, and it starts to make a weird kind of sense. And eventually, all the things that seemed unfathomable at first become exactly what makes its message so clear. That's not to say writer/director Nacho Vigalondo's (Timecrimes) latest film is perfect. But considering there's never been a kaiju movie that's an allegory for destructive relationships, it might be downright revolutionary.

We are in an age of machines that learn how to solve complex problems. Yet while headlines are made when computers can beat humans at Go or outperform them in speed dating, more powerful computers and larger data sets means machine learning already affects us in far more subtle ways. Algorithms used by online giants such as Google, Netflix and Amazon shape what we buy, the films we watch and how the global economy operates. In chemistry, the same concept can help us develop new drugs, materials and processes. So what is machine learning, and how does it work?

The hype machinery is kicking into high gear with all types of vendors touting offerings, and even leadership, in the emerging markets for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, or AI. The big vendors want in on the action too. Salesforce claims it's Einstein delivers'AI for Everyone' (does E AI2?!). IBM has been positioning Watson as the AI solution for business--accidentally leaving the door open for a more astute Sherlock to steal the show. Journalists, writers, filmmakers, and even the average "Joe blogger" have been sharing their visions of what a machine learning and AI future hold.

Every day, millions of people make buying decisions based on search – products to buy, restaurants in the neighborhood, and tons of other choices. According to the Nielsen Report "Global Trust in Advertising" however, while consumers rely on online opinions or price comparisons, more often than not, it's word-of-mouth recommendations that are the most effective. The most credible advertising comes straight from the people we know and trust, and over 83% of respondents completely or somewhat trust the suggestions of friends and family. So when we make a final decision to buy, it's reasonable to assume that we ask a spouse, relatives or close friends for advice. After all, they are the ones who know us, our tastes, preferences, sense of fashion, etc.

The wide angle lenses introduce unpleasant distortion, and the small camera sensors can't produce those blurry backgrounds we see in higher-end portraits. Roughly 24 billion selfies were added to the Google Photos service in 2016, according to the company. Most of them, we're not ashamed to say, were garbage. So, when Adobe showed off a "sneak peek" video in which a man makes a run-of-the-mill selfie look like a pro-grade (or at least enthusiast-level) portrait, it seemed like magic. However, most of the retouching technology on display already exists in Adobe's arsenal--but now the company is leveraging artificial intelligence to bring those advanced capabilities into the one-tap world of smartphone photo editing.