LIKE big hairdos and dubious pop stars, the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was big in the 1980s, vanished in the 1990s--and now seems to be attempting a comeback. The term re-entered public consciousness most dramatically with the release last year of "A.I.", a movie about a robot boy. But the term is also being rehabilitated within the computer industry. Researchers, executives and marketing people are using the expression without irony or inverted commas. And it is not always hype. The term is being applied, with some justification, to products that depend on technology that was originally cooked up by AI researchers.

IS IT a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles--which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal. Games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world and the new machines will offer unprecedented levels of performance.

When BYU PhD candidate Kristine Monteith was sitting in natural language processing class, it wasn't letter sequences going through her head but music notes. The class was talking about probability in language that helps with speech recognition of knowing what words would come up next. When she did the experiment, "It made me think, oh, you could do the same thing with music," Monteith said. The Utah State graduate in music therapy pursuing her PhD in computer at BYU decided to apply her right and left brain abilities to combine music and computer science. She invented a computer program that can compose original music that evokes emotions humans can relate with, even though it was generated from a machine.

Our metal friends have long been a source of inspiration, wonder and fear for filmmakers and audiences. A way to examine our own humanity, and view emotions – or lack of them – from a new perspective, artificial intelligence has been in films for almost as long as we've been making them. We seem drawn to them, more often that not casting them as our creations gone rogue and seeking to rise up against us, but sometimes as tragic figures wanting to be more like us. Either way, they're fascinating, and pretty damn cool. Brought to artificial life by the brilliant Alan Tudyk, Sonny is the robot at the heart of the Will Smith blockbuster, which really bears no resemblance to the seminal short story collection by Isaac Asimov, other than acknowledging his three laws of robotics (for those who don't know: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.). However, Sonny is the best thing in the film, with a subtle motion captured performance hinting at the humanity lurking within, and for a film about robots, it's probably a good thing its most memorable character is one… One of those bonkers Japanese films that really has to be seen to be believed. I sadly can't include the RoboGeishas of the title due to them actually being cyborgs, but I can include the baddies' headquarters which turn into a giant robot at the end in order to walk to Mount Fuji and deliver a device 17 times more powerful than the atomic bomb. Nope, I don't know why it was specifically 17. But what I do know is that the two RoboGeishas have to fuse together in order to defeat this behemoth.

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game. While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them. Socher, now CEO of machine learning developer MetaMind, did not intend his remarks to be construed as a comparison of Watson to the academic model he and his colleagues built. As an illustration of the new technical and cultural landscape around NLP, however, the laughter Socher's comment drew was an acknowledgment that basic and applied research in language processing is no longer the exclusive province of those with either deep pockets or strictly academic intentions. Indeed, new tools and new techniques--particularly open source technologies such as Google's word2vec neural text processing tool--combined with steady increases in computing power, have broadened the potential for natural language processing far beyond the research lab or supercomputer.

Sting has had his brain scanned - so scientists can work out what makes gifted musicians tick. He underwent the examination at a Montreal university the afternoon before a Police concert in the city. Researchers say the scans uncovered an incredible ability to link seemingly different pieces of music together. A Montreal University -professor scanned Sting's brain the afternoon before a Police concert in the city in a bid to find how music is mapped in the brain. The results led to unexpected connections between the 1960s Beatles hit'Girl' and Astor Piazzolla's evocative tango composition'Libertango', at least in the mind of the famously eclectic singer songwriter.

The project uses techniques revealed earlier this year by German researchers. To make it work, the researchers could not just apply the algorithm to individual frames, as this would lead to flickering or and rough transitions. So, they introduced a temporal constraint that'penalized' deviation between two frames, meaning it considers the flow of the original video to preserve smooth transitions. In order to improve the method's consistency over larger periods of time, they incorporate long term motion estimates. They also developed a multi-pass algorithm to work around the'artefacts' created during style transfer The video was made as a part of the Deep Slow Flow project, and uses video processing methods revealed earlier this year by a team of German researchers to apply distinct styles to the clips. It begins by panning across a colourful view from the Hudson River, with One World Trade Center visible in the background.

Trying to picture yourself older or with a different hairstyle is near impossible. But now researchers have developed the ultimate face swap that analyzes a picture of your face, searches for images using key terms and seamlessly maps your it onto the results. Called Dreambit, this AI lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine. Dreambit lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine - as it has done with American actor George Clooney (pictured). 'Dreambit is a personalized image search engine,' reads the website.

A new Twitter bot shows that not all them are bigots -some just want to make you smile. '@smilevector' was recently unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting predecessor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by turning their frown upside down. Using neural networks, this algorithm can plant unsettling smiles on celebrities with what seems to be impressive accuracy. '@smilevector was unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting processor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by making them smile. Created by Tom White, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in Wellington, New Zealand, this algorithm uses a generative neural net to manipulate faces.

It could finally be the home robot you've dreamed - capable of keeping the kids quiet and doing the shopping. Asus today revealed a Zenbo, a $599 home robot it hopes will help bring robotics into the home. Chairman Jonney Shih pledged the firm will'enable robotic computing for every household.' Asus chairman Jonney Shih pledged the firm will'enable robotic computing for every household.' The robot was unveiled at Computex 2016 alongside a new range of mobile phones.