When Facebook Messenger first proclaimed the future of commerce was messaging in April 2016, it provided companies with a viable distribution mechanism (to over 1 billion monthly active users and growing) but excluded an important element in the equation -- a discovery mechanism. Developers and brands who chose Kik as their distribution platform fared a bit better, as Kik's official Bot Shop launch allowed discoverability and curation within multiple categories, modeled after Apple's App Store. By August over 20,000 bots had been created on Kik's Bot Shop. At the time Facebook Messenger announced it was supporting payments in September, over 30,000 bots had been built on Messenger. Although that's a far cry from the 2 million-plus apps in both Apple and and Google's app stores, discoverability remained a hurdle for bot creators.

Or why I don't want to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. No offense to the Peppers, but just because I listen to alternative music and "people like me who listen to alt music" enjoy hearing the Peppers it does not then mean that I want to hear them. I am not "people like me", I am me. And I want the smart computers behind my favorite services to know me enough to deliver the content I want. It doesn't matter which service we talk about.

This loggerhead turtle is sporting a high-tech GPS tracking device that lets scientists track its foraging and nesting habits. The ongoing project has allowed scientists to find better ways to protect the species. But it also has helped reveal something interesting about the animals: they always, always travel to their birthplace to lay their eggs. One loggerhead traveled 100 miles just to get back home.

The paper outlines the use of neural style transfer in Stewart's directorial debut, Come Swim, which is about to premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Neural style transfer turns normal images into impressionist art, and is used by popular photo app Prisma. The paper, first spotted by Quartz, is co-bylined with Adobe research engineer Bhautik J. Joshi and producer David Shapiro. It was published yesterday on ArXiv, a repository run by Cornell University for scientific papers that are not yet peer-reviewed. Come Swim describes itself as "half realist, half impressionist portraits" of one man's day.

By Daniel Schwartz for Fathom If you think you need superpowers to understand a new foreign language, reduce background noise in a boisterous bar, or block out a crying baby on a redeye, then you've never heard of InspEar Active Earbuds. The revolutionary new bionic earphones, powered by technology developed for industrial workers and soldiers in combat, take high-quality noise-canceling headphones to a new level. They will translate foreign languages in real time, carry out voice commands like Siri and Alexa, and, believe it or not, augment natural hearing by minimizing all external noise or selectively decreasing unwanted sounds to enhance those that matter. We just have to wait until they're available at the end of the year. According to a representative from French startup InspEar, the buds will be wired to a pocket-friendly server that runs on artificial intelligence, with a battery life of about eight hours. The cord is worn down the back (you can pretend you're Beyonce or Jay-Z), will not have an exterior microphone (the device picks up voices through the inner ear), and will plug into any smart device.

Here's a sentence you don't get to read everyday: Kristen Stewart has surprised the artificial intelligence community by publishing a paper on machine learning. The Twilight actress recently made her directorial debut with the short film Come Swim, and in it used a machine learning technique known as "style transfer" (where the aesthetics of one image or video is applied to another) to create an impressionistic visual style. Along with special effects engineer Bhautik J Joshi and producer David Shapiro, Stewart has co-authored a paper on this work in the film, publishing it in the popular online repository for non-peer reviewed work, arXiv. The paper itself is titled "Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim," and offers a detailed case study on how to use this sort of machine learning in a film. The paper describes Come Swim as a "poetic, impressionistic portrait of a heartbroken man underwater," with the film's aesthetic grounded by a painting of Stewart's showing a "man rousing from sleep." The team used existing neural networks to transfer the style of this painting onto a test frame, and then fine-tuned their setup by adding "blocks of color and texture" until they'd created the desired painting-like effect.

What does a newly hatched crocodile see while it is being transported to water between its mother's jaws? How should a wild dog pup behave if it wants to be accepted by an approaching pack of adults? These and other questions will be answered in a new BBC wildlife series screening this week, in which the stars of the show are not only the animals being filmed, but the animatronic "spy creatures" used to film them. Spy in the Wild is the BBC's first major natural history series since Planet Earth II, but the footage that makes up the five-part series was captured in a very different way to Sir David Attenborough's wildlife spectacular. Using 30 remote-controlled robotic animals, each concealing miniature cameras, programme-makers captured footage they say is among some of the most intimate and revealing to date, showing a range of animal behaviours that appear to demonstrate grief, friendship and even empathy with other species.

When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement. Ekman's work has been used by the FBI and police departments to identify the seeds of violent behavior in nonverbal expressions of sentiment. He has also developed the online Atlas of Emotions at the behest of the Dalai Lama.

Kristen Stewart, the Hollywood actress perhaps best known for her role in the "Twilight" movies, has co-authored a new research paper that discusses the use of artificial intelligence technology, to create art in her screenwriting debut film, "Come Swim." The 17-minute film, starring Josh Kaye and Sydney Lopez, has been written and directed by Stewart. The movie is set to feature in the Sundance Film Festival 2017 that kicked off Thursday. It was inspired by one of Stewart's own paintings that itself originated from one of her poems. "It's basically about that moment when you wake up and you get dressed and you realize ... I'm not sad anymore. I've been dropped back into everyone else's reality and now I can live again," Stewart told the New York Times Magazine while describing the concept of the film.

Kristen Stewart – the actress best known for "Twilight" – has co-written a paper on machine learning. The paper outlines the use of neural style transfer in Stewart's directorial debut, "Come Swim", which is about to premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Neural style transfer turns normal images into impressionist art, and is used by popular photo app Prisma. The paper, first spotted by Quartz, is co-bylined with Adobe research engineer Bhautik J. Joshi and producer David Shapiro. It was published yesterday on ArXiv, a repository run by Cornell University for scientific papers that are not yet peer-reviewed.