When you go to the movies, how do you decide what you want to see? Maybe you're more likely to purchase a ticket if a movie is part of an established franchise in which you are already invested. Maybe a beloved actor or the buzz of awards-season brings you to the big screen. Or maybe a friend hasn't stopped raving about a recent release and you just have to check it out for yourself. Whichever reason brings you to the movies, the question has now become whether artificial intelligence (AI) can predict what you're most likely to see.

Samsung is set to become the latest technology giant to vie for a place in your living room with a voice-enabled smart speaker, following similar efforts from Amazon, Apple and Google. The smart speaker is anticipated to cost around $300, making it considerably more expensive than the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, but still cheaper than Apple's $349 HomePod. To justify this price, it will market the speaker as a high-end music player with innovative features like sound shifting, whereby the direction of the audio will be beamed at the person speaking to the device. 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. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

When we discuss about artificial intelligence (AI), how are machines learning? What kinds of projects feed into greater understanding? For our friends over at IBM, one surprising answer is movies. To build smarter AI systems, IBM researchers are using movie plots and neural networks to explore new ways of enhancing the language understanding capabilities of AI models. IBM will present key findings from two papers on these topics at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) annual meeting this week in Melbourne, Australia.

Mark Zuckerberg has defended the rights of holocaust deniers to stay on Facebook – because they are being genuine. The Facebook boss said that he found the belief that the holocaust did not happen was deeply offensive. But he said that the people using his site to promote should be allowed to use it and that the posts should stay up. There are many things that people get wrong and those that claim that the holocaust did not happen are one of them, he suggested during an interview. He claimed that since the people are mistaken in their belief, rather than intending to harm anyone, they will continue to be allowed to post on the site.

In the last two decades, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown from a very small community of data scientists to something that is woven into many people's daily lives. Machine learning, computer vision, and other AI disciplines--supported by the cloud--are helping people achieve more, from mundane tasks, like avoiding a traffic jam, to revolutionary breakthroughs, like curing cancer. Over the past year, Microsoft has been on a journey to apply these transformative technologies to the world's biggest environmental challenges. On July 12, 2017, Microsoft launched AI for Earth as a $2 million program in London, with a goal of providing AI and cloud tools to researchers working on the frontlines of environmental challenges in the areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity, and climate change. Since that time, AI for Earth has grown into a $50 million over five-year program, with 112 grantees in 27 countries and seven featured projects.

Some would say it's the magic of a festival - stumbling upon a random stage and accidentally discovering your new favourite band. You could call it following your festival instinct. But what if you ditched all that and did the complete opposite? What if you took arguably the most nerdy thing in the world - statistics - and used it to try to have the best festival experience ever? I consulted a stats expert, packed up a giant bar chart, and headed to 2000 Trees in Gloucestershire to find out. And - just a warning - this article is incredibly, incredibly geeky.

On paper Israel and China are unlikely close trading partners. China, the world's second-largest country, is the biggest exporter on the planet. While Israel, a tiny strip of land in the Middle East, is only in 45th place on the global exporting league table. And importantly - Israel has always been a steadfast ally of the US. So given the current trading spat between the US and China, you would expect Israel to be firmly on the American side.

The next time you sit down to watch a movie, the algorithm behind your streaming service might recommend a blockbuster that was written by AI, performed by robots, and animated and rendered by a deep learning algorithm. An AI algorithm may have even read the script and suggested the studio buy the rights. It's easy to think that technology like algorithms and robots will make the film industry go the way of the factory worker and the customer service rep, and argue that artistic filmmaking is in its death throes. For the film industry, the same narrative doesn't apply -- artificial intelligence seems to have enhanced Hollywood's creativity, not squelched it. It's true that some jobs and tasks are being rendered obsolete now that computers can do them better.

Entertainment companies are entering the Age of Data, where they'll have access to more information than ever about their products, their audiences and how to create, market and distribute one to the other. Now, those companies and their leadership have to be ready to embrace the coming huge opportunities, especially as data-driven competitors such as Netflix, MoviePass and Amazon transform the industry. That was one message this morning from Stephen F. DeAngelis, CEO and founder of AI provider Enterra Solutions, speaking before a group of Hollywood technology executives in Beverly Hills. He noted wryly that Hollywood has portrayed AI technologies in dark or at least complicated ways over the years, from the murderous HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the world-ending SkyNet in the Terminator films to the runaway AIs of Ex Machina and Her. We're quite a ways still from AI with that kind of power and autonomy, DeAngelis said, but he cautioned that people think of AI tools in overly limited ways.

In a world where our content is increasingly digital, it feels like searching for an exact piece of information should be simple. However, when was the last time you scrolled through your phone's photos to look for a specific moment but had trouble finding it? While content is becoming more accessible, the volume has made searching tougher. This past October, cloud storage company Box announced a new feature called Skills, which uses artificial intelligence to make content like photos and video "smarter." When we saw this, we thought it had the potential to help residents and city staff more efficiently search the vast video archives of our city meetings. We explain more below, but if you want to jump straight to the experience, here are our Box Skills-enabled videos: San Jose Smart Cities & Service Improvements Committee meetings.