Add write pop music hits to the list of things that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now do. As well as write poetry and novels, AI is now being used to create music by a Grammy-nominee producer, who collaborated with IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform on his newest release. Alex Da Kid used Watson to analyze the composition of five years' worth of Billboard songs, as well as cultural artefacts such as newspaper articles, film scripts and social media commentary. The idea was to understand the "emotional temperature" of the time period, and use this to inform Alex's creative process. I asked him to explain how the insights from the data contributed to the finished work, and he told me "Watson scraped millions of conversations, newspaper headlines and speeches – all of which showed me how emotionally volatile we as humans are and have been, particularly over the last five years."

A kind of ethics fever has taken hold of the AI community. As smart machines displace human jobs and seem poised to make life-or-death decisions in self-driving cars and health care, concerns about where AI is taking us are gaining increasing urgency. Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies' social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City.

Do you think you can tell a piece of music composed by artificial intelligence (AI) from one created by a human composer? Before you read any further, let's find out. The following audio consists of two fragments, one written by AI, the other by a human. If you didn't get it right the first time, no worries--we'll have a couple more mini-quizzes like this below. The AI that wrote the fragment above has been programmed by Jukedeck, a UK-based startup working on machine-made music that won the competition at TechCrunch Disrupt London in 2015.

It's still rough around the edges, but FaceApp demonstrates the scary future of neural network-based image editing. Neural networks are revolutionizing computing, and image editing is one area that will experience drastic changes. Already, apps like Prisma are demonstrating this power, but a new company is using neural networks in a different way with an app called FaceApp. Unlike Prisma, which keeps the content of a source photo but changes the style, FaceApp looks to change the content while maintaining photorealism. Available now as a free download for iOS, with an Android version coming soon, FaceApp currently offers six filters: Smile, Hot, Young, Old, Male, and Female.

"I think that everyone recognizes that for IoT to really realize its full potential and value that it is about creating ecosystems and marketplaces and that no single vendor is able to support what is required," explained Esmeralda Swartz, VP, Marketing Enterprise and Cloud at Ericsson, in this SYS-CON.tv Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place June 6-8, 2017 at Javits Center, New York City, is co-located with 20th International @CloudExpo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

With the extraordinary change that technology has brought to the news and information landscape, the future of news depends on journalists working alongside smart machines. The first wave of this symbiosis was news automation, where artificial intelligence systems generate written stories and alerts directly from data. The goal is not to displace journalists from their jobs -- it's about freeing up their time from labor-intensive tasks so they can do higher-order journalism. Following the direction set in motion by automation, the next evolution will be about leveraging smart tools that can help journalists augment their own writing. This means AI-powered interfaces capable of providing context to topics in real time and even optimizing a news report based on its dateline and subject matter.

The show features colorful characters, sharp dialogue, and complex political machinations, but what really sets it apart from other sci-fi TV is the realistic way that it handles gravity and orbital trajectories. Much of the credit for that goes to showrunner Naren Shankar, who holds a PhD in physics and engineering from Cornell. "Most space battles are just re-hashes of World War II fighter battles in the Pacific," Shankar says in Episode 240 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And that's fine, if they want to be that kind of a fantasy, but I find great beauty in the way the ships move in our show." That attention to detail is most evident in Episode 4, "CQB," which is set aboard a damaged spacecraft whose engines are failing, resulting in an intermittent loss of the ship's artificial gravity.

You can solve that optimisation problem using both gradient descent and as a closed-form solution, although for really big datasets it is preferable to use the former since calculating the inverse would be really computationally costly.

When you imagine the ideal chatbot, what do you picture? The bot in your mind's eye may resemble something along the lines of blockbuster movie favorites like Baymax from Big Hero 6, Wall-E's EVE, or my personal hero, C-3PO. You probably didn't imagine a small tower that lives on your shelf, like Alexa; a virtual being that resides in the cloud and is accessed through your smartphone, like Siri; or even a pop-up chat window on your computer screen that can answer questions about your favorite products. Besides their looks, there's another major difference between today's artificial intelligence (AI) and our movie favorites: Our most beloved fictional chatbots all possess emotional intelligence (EI). As we move into the future, AI needs humanizing qualities to improve the way it interacts with us, meets our needs for information, and even controls the other technology around us.

Created by Sebastian Schmieg and launched in October 2016 on the website of The Photographers' Gallery, Decision Space marked the beginning of a series of works raising questions around photography, big-data, surveillance, the hidden manual labor behind artificial intelligence and the biases embedded in algorithmic systems. In Decision Space, visitors were invited to assign all the images available on the gallery's website to one of four categories: Problem, Solution, Past and Future. The project resulted in a new conceptual dataset for machine learning and machine vision which can be now be browsed and downloaded at "This is the Problem, the Solution, the Past and the Future". This new dataset makes possible experiments in teaching computers how to understand images within a set of meaningful and complex categories. It consists of around 2.500 photos and includes artists like Cindy Sherman, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Sebastião Salgado, Weegee, Valie Export, Francesca Woodman, Simon Fujiwara, Trevor Paglen and many more.