At IBM, when performance review time rolls around, employees get judged not only on their past accomplishments (and failures) but also on how they might perform in the future. How can IBM predict the future? Using artificial intelligence (AI), Watson Analytics looks at an employee's experiences and projects to infer the potential skills and qualities each person might have to serve IBM in the future. Watson also scours IBM's internal training system to see if an employee has gained new skills. Managers then take Watson's assessment rating into account as they make bonus, pay and promotion decisions.

LOS ANGELES: According to the founder of artificial intelligence outfit ScriptBook, Sony Pictures could have saved a fortune from 2015 to 2017 by using the company's algorithms instead of human beings to reject or greenlight movies. In a presentation at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai said that by analysing screenplays, ScriptBook retroactively identified as box-office failures 22 out of the 32 Sony movies that lost money in that period, during which Sony released a total of 62 movies. "If Sony had used our system they could have eliminated 22 movies that failed financially," said Azermai. Welcome to the brave new world of AI and machine learning as it applies to Hollywood. Many see in ScriptBook and similar AI systems the potential to destroy a major part of the film production and distribution ecosystem, displacing script readers and saving much of the money studios spend on test screenings, focus groups and market research. At its most basic, ScriptBook, founded in 2015 and based in Antwerp, Belgium, has created a tool that analyses the text of screenplays to produce financial forecasting, or as Azermai grandly puts it, "Our mission is to revolutionise the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk."

Chatbots are meant to change the way we are communicating today. They can either work with a predefined set of questions or are a learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will get better over time and is capable of more complex conversations. The basic bot is able to tell you the nearest train station while a more developed version will be able to make an appointment for you. As we are testing the different communication solutions of tomorrow already today, we had a chat with Mr. Schubach, a hospitality automation expert with forty years of experience in hospitality operations and information systems. I think our concern should extend to the human community for both reasons: first because of our evolving comfort and social interaction with non-sentient human stand-ins, and second because we are in the process of outsourcing human labor and displacing livelihoods in favor of mechanized replacements.

A few years ago it may have been the first time you used Uber and watched as your car made its way to you. Perhaps it was the first time Netflix recommended a movie that was just what you were looking for at that moment. More recently, it may have been the first time Nest automatically adjusted your home heating when you went on vacation, or when Alexa turned on your lights on command when you returned home. All these "first time" experiences share two things in common. On one hand, they are moments of surprise, delight and magic, creating first-mover emotional bonds between consumers and brands.

ZHENGZHOU: In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station. In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival. In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor. With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.

There's something big afoot in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and Epic wants all eyes forward. The developer just updated the in-game news feed with a somewhat cryptic message advertising the upcoming Season 5 battle pass, something that dedicated players have been speculating about for a while but that Epic has only recently started to address head-on. The text reads only "Worlds Collide: 3 days until Season 5." The message is accompanied by a teaser image that Epic's official Fortnite twitter sent out a little while ago. It appears to depict a stylized version of a Japanese mask depicting Kitsune, which is both the word for fox and a sort of character out of folklore and mythology. There's also a blue, crackling rift over the right eye, something that matches what players have been seeing in-game for about a week.

To fly drones commercially, however, companies must comply with numerous regulations and restrictions. The Federal Aviation Administration requires commercial drone operators to complete a "Part 107" process -- which Deangelis compared to "ground school" -- that includes testing to assure drone pilots understand things like airspace, weather patterns and sectional maps. Commercial operators must retest every two years and carry insurance that can cost several thousand dollars annually.

Dish launched Alexa support for its Hopper and Wally set-top boxes last year, so the devices can already do your bidding with just a spoken command. Now, the satellite TV provider is giving you another voice control option: one that should make you happy if you prefer Google's AI to Amazon's. So long as you have an Android device, an iPhone loaded with the AI's app or an Assistant device such as a Home speaker or a Home mini, you can navigate its channels and shows with your voice. You can ask Assistant to play, pause, fast-forward, rewind and adjust the volume of what you're watching. If you have no idea what to watch, you can also search for shows based on channel, title, actor and genre.

Just Play adds electronic and interactive Super Moon Adventure toys ready for new PJ Masks episodes and Wolfie villains. As with any children's franchise it's important to keep the on-screen and in-hand toy action fresh. After PJ Masks' upward spiral of popularity it was hard to see where the show could go next. The new characters will appear in new episodes airing through July. The Wolfie Kids, where Catboy learns to work as a team while trying to stop the new villains in town, the Wolfies.

Speculation about the theme of Fortnite: Battle Royale's season 5 since season 4 began, but over the past few days things have been starting to come into focus. There are still a lot of question marks out there, but over the past few days in-game rifts have been both eating parts of the scenery and spitting some others out. And last night we got our clearest indicator of the upcoming theme-- or at least one of the themes--yet. A stagecoach popped out of one of the rifts, supporting earlier datamined assets that we'll be seeing a lot of the Wild West in the upcoming season, something that Epic also appeared to hint at with a high-noon shootout in a recent trailer. Not only that, but a leak that accurately predicted the stagecoach says that next we'll be getting a very Wild West-looking skeleton.