Leonardo da Vinci famously created drawings and paintings that showed a bird's eye view of certain areas of Italy with a level of detail that was not otherwise possible until the invention of photography and flying machines. Indeed, many critics have wondered how he could have imagined these details. But now researchers are working on the inverse problem: given a satellite image of Earth's surface, what does that area look like from the ground? How clear can such an artificial image be? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Xueqing Deng and colleagues at the University of California, Merced.

The startup acquisition war continues, and it's Facebook that's thrown the latest punch. According to media reports, the social media giant has acquired, in early July, a London-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup. The startup's name is Bloomsbury, and it seems to have been acquired for a price of somewhere between $23 million and $30 million. Bloomsbury is a startup that develops natural language processing (NLP) technology, allowing machines to read documents and answer questions based on what they'd learned from them. The media are saying Facebook is going to use Bloomsbury to tackle fake news and other isuses it has with content.

Yandex spokesman Ilya Grabovsky said Thursday that some Internet users contacted the company Wednesday to say that its public search engine was yielding what looked like personal Google files. Grabovsky said the company has alerted Google.

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 Intl. Film Festival, ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai said that by analyzing 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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in health care has become the subject of both great promise and great hyperbole. Beyond buzzwords and a plethora of venture capital investments, AI and other mathematical techniques are beginning to emerge in a second wave of domain-specific systems of intelligence. The key missing factor has been a business model in the payer-and-provider community that enables the "best" (aka: most validated, most clinically proven, most workflow-integrated) models to drive an economic value both to the care paradigm and to the cost centers of health care data storage and analytical processing. As the cloud storage wars have entered health care, a question has emerged: Beyond security and the improved economics of cloud storage versus physical storage, what will drive revenue for cloud vendors? Furthermore, how will horizontal cloud vendors prove the validity of AI offerings to impact the business needs of providers and payers such as improved quality, decreased workload and better outcomes?

What if I tell you that Netflix is NOT in the business of media entertainment? Netflix not only has the largest worldwide subscriber base of any business but managed to keep growing it by 25% last year. Its market capitalization competes head to head with Disney, the most-valued entertainment company in the world. Netflix success story can not be explained without understanding their granular knowledge of their subscriber base and their AI driven focus on personalization. Netflix not only looks at millions of ratings, searches and "plays" a day, but the entire viewing history of billions of hours of content streamed per month.

Groupe PSA and Inria today announced the creation of an OpenLab dedicated to artificial intelligence. The studied areas will include autonomous and intelligent vehicles, mobility services, manufacturing, design development tools, the design itslelf and digital marketing as well as quality and finance. "Artificial intelligence will quickly become an efficiency factor for the group. The OpenLab will work on artificial intelligence algorithms enabling autonomous vehicles to drive in complex environments for example. It will also work on predictive maintenance, powertrain design optimisation and the modelling of complex systems such as cities, to offer mobility services adapted to people's needs" said Carla Gohin, Groupe PSA's Vice President for Research and Advanced Engineering. Inria's project teams will participate in this OpenLab bringing their high-level algorithmic expertise as part of a fruitful dialogue with Groupe PSA's experts on all the identified topics.

Who's ready for the final "find the battle star" challenge of season 4 of Fortnite: Battle Royale? We've arrived at week 10 at last, and there's one final "find something" challenge of the year. No treasure map, no cackling gnomes, instead Fortnite players are being asked to "Search Between Movie Titles" instead. It's a bit different than the other search between landmark challenges because the landmarks themselves aren't listed outright. If this was like the other challenges, it would instead read "Search between a White Lion, an Orange Crusher and a TV Set," but Epic wanted to add another step in here.

'AI courses should be incorporated at the undergraduate level across all disciplines like humanities and social sciences.