If you use your credit card to buy a latte in Vancouver and a couple of minutes later that card is making a purchase in Singapore, that's a red flag for fraud. But increasingly sophisticated fraud calls for more sophisticated measures to deal with it, and that is among the challenges behind RBC Research's announcement today that it is launching a new lab to explore the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the financial sector. Richard Sutton, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, has been named head academic advisor to RBC Research in machine learning. The new lab will work with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute at the University of Alberta, where Sutton is a professor. Foteini Agrafioti, head of RBC Research, which was launched last fall in Toronto, said the announcement will help her organization to play a major role in advancing AI research in the future of banking. Agrafioti said that as the complexity of fraud evolves over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect it.

Scientists have pulled inspiration from snakes to help robots detect when humans are near. The heat-sensing film has the ability to detect tiny temperature changes, and was inspired in the sensors a viper uses its skin to find prey. Researchers foresee this technology being used by search and rescue robots in order to locate humans in disaster zones. Scientists have pulled inspiration from snakes to help robots detect when humans are near. The heat-sensing film is a flexible, transparent coating made of pectin.

Somewhere around 1973, I watched the movie, Westworld; a science fiction story set in 1983 (that was the future then), where a robot malfunction creates havoc and terror for unsuspecting vacationers at a futuristic, adult-themed amusement park. It was one of the earlier films dealing with the issue of where you draw the line between what is real and what is not, and what could possibly go wrong. In this case, one robot (played by Yul Brynner) becomes independent of the controls embedded in the technology, which turns out to be the equivalent of a virus that ultimate affects the entire robot population, and complete mayhem breaks out. If you watch any of the HBO series, a newer version of Westworld is now playing, expanding on the idea from the original movie, but taking it even further into the area of artificial intelligence by empowering the robots with an ability to understand, reason, learn, and engage with humans as though they too are human -- making it almost impossible to tell the difference. Let's jump into our reality and think about the prospect of a work-related version of Westworld, where computers armed with artificial intelligence or machine learning, take over the human role; because that's a real fear in the mind of many people, "when will they replace me with a computer?"

As soon as you approach Pepper, a four-foot-tall robot, she starts sizing you up. Thanks to facial recognition capabilities, Pepper can determine your gender and age bracket. And as you begin asking her questions, she can draw from a vast volume of cloud-based information to give what she thinks are relevant answers. If you smile, she can tell the conversation is going well and that you're finding her answers helpful. If you don't, she might ask you if she's misunderstanding your requests.

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.

Kristen Stewart, best known for her role as Bella in the Twilight saga, has co-authored a paper on machine learning. It details her use of a technique known as'style transfers' for select scenes in Come Swim, a short film that will be shown at Sundance and marks her directorial debut. The process has become popular with apps such as Prisma, which allow the user to apply filters in the style of famous paintings. At its core, the system relies on deep neural networks to identify the "content" of your photo and the "style" of another, blending them together into a completely new image. Stewart and her team used style transfers to create some unusual, dream-like sequences in the film.

Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) invoke blank stares or robot take-over fears. We've created a caricature that inhibits real conversation and actually diminishes what AI is already doing for us in our everyday routines. It's Spotify or Pandora choosing our next song; it's Google crawling the internet for the best search results; or it's Amazon suggesting the best thing to buy. In other words, the robots are already here. Hollywood has fun scaring us with world-dominating machines whose mental capacity grows well beyond any human's, but the reality of AI is, it's been the not-so-scary backbone of innovation for decades.

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. Once more: Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame directs movie; writes arXiv paper about using StyleNet during production https://t.co/NZ4I1yhQUN To be someone in Hollywood, you've got to put your ML papers on Arxiv and you better use TensorFlow... https://t.co/2Rcg1ccJ36

The actress best known for her role as a lovesick teenager in Twilight has co-authored a three-page paper on artificial intelligence. Kirsten Stewart, along with Adobe Research Engineer Bhautik Joshi and Starlight Studios Producer David Shapiro, released a paper Wednesday detailing how machine learning was applied to her directorial and screenwriting debut for the short film "Come Swim." The paper, titled "Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer," explains how "neural style transfer" was used in the movie. In short, the "style transfer" can alter the style of a video in real time. For instance, had Stewart envisioned her film in the style of impressionist Claude Monet, she could have shown her algorithm a Monet work and taught the system to overlay the painting style on the film.

A heat-sensing film could let robots detect when humans are around, like pit vipers hunting out warm-blooded prey. The flexible, transparent coating is made of pectin, a low-cost plant material used to set jam. Unlike conventional electronics, it relies on currents of ions rather than electrons to detect temperature variations – just like natural membranes used by the snakes. The film can sense temperature changes as small as 10 millikelvin, which is twice as sensitive as human skin. It can detect a warm body the size of a rabbit from a metre away, something the researchers tested by microwaving a teddy bear and setting it at different distances from the film.