Maestro: A computer has created a remix of of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony which is to be played in public for the first time tonight It's enough to make Beethoven roll over in his grave. A computer programme that composes music by monitoring a person's emotional response to sounds, is to have one of its musical creations performed by a full chamber orchestra at a prestigious music festival tonight. Using its artificial intelligence, the silicon songsmith has produced a remix of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, which will be performed by the The Ten Tors Orchestra at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth. Researchers played the German composer's seminal piece to three test subjects as they underwent MRI scans while the programme monitored their brains for emotional indicators. Then using a programmed knowledge of music, it generated a new piece designed to create a similar emotional response.

"You no longer need an Alexa-enabled device to test your skills. Developers worldwide can use Echosim.io to experience Alexa." Alexa originated as the voice behind the increasingly popular Amazon Echo and has developed since into a powerful platform for voice-activated commands. In Echo form, Alexa can access music streaming services, control lighting and heat, order pizza, or answer simple, Googlable questions. The potential is also there for Alexa to do a lot more. With the help of some coding knowledge, customers can create their own custom commands Alexa can respond to – a big strength of the platform that means updates and improvements will be regularly created and added. Developer attraction could also be an edge for Amazon's Echo as rival tech companies like Google come out with their own versions.

The latest venture from Google's innovation team has many in the creative community pondering an old question: What is art? Magenta, the internet giant's latest artificial intelligence project, is a stab at programming an algorithm to create music. Magenta has already produced a single "song" of sorts, a four-note melody composed by Magenta and accompanied by a human-produced drum beat. "Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation," wrote Magenta researcher Douglas Eck in a blog post. "With Magenta, we want to explore the other side – developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own."

We've built computers that can outplay the finest chess grandmasters in the world, virtual personal assistants that can schedule tasks and control our homes, and algorithms that can predict with increasing accuracy what we'll want to watch, read, or listen to next. But true artificial intelligence – a computer that can solve a wide range of problems through reason, planning, abstraction, and learning – hasn't come about yet. There are machines that are better than humans at specific tasks, but no machine that's as good as or better than a human at thinking. We're getting close to that point, though, Google chairman Eric Schmidt argued in an op-ed for the BBC on Saturday. Mr. Schmidt says artificial intelligence (AI) research has been steadily building since the term was first coined in 1955, and that scientists have made a few big breakthroughs in the past several years.

Writing basic stats from a sporting event or the latest stock prices can be a tedious assignment for journalists. "Neothetics Inc. (NEOT) on Thursday reported a loss of $6.9 million in its first quarter. The San Diego-based company said it had a loss of 50 cents per share. Neothetics shares have decreased 16 percent since the beginning of the year." This is important information for someone with stock in the pharmaceutical company Neothetics, but not very useful to a mass audience. These basic stories can become a waste of time and resources for news outlets, especially a wire service such as the Associated Press.

"I get lost in your eyes," you say? Researchers are working on ways to find you and save the resulting image for posterity – or for a criminal investigation. Scientists have found that photo portraits of an individual can yield images of the photographer or people standing close to the photographer. These additional images appear as reflections in the eyes of the photo's subject. Even though enhancements of the reflected images appear blurry, they carry enough detail to allow others to identify the people reflected in the subject's eyes.

Little Theater has a tiny orchestra pit, with room for only a handful of players, and a modest budget. So when it mounts a big musical like "Beauty and the Beast," it brings in an electronic ringer. A laptop computer, loaded with a program called OrchEXTRA, serves as a "virtual orchestra," from strings to woodwinds, drums to horns, giving the music such a rich sound that audience members may wonder how a full Broadway orchestra fits into the tiny pit. "As far as sound quality, these things are great," says Dorian Boyd, the sound designer/technician for Little Theater, referring to OrchEXTRA. Virtual orchestras are much better than the early systems of just a few years ago, he says, which could sound like "video game music."

You needn't have taken a philosophy course to see "A.I.," the new Steven Spielberg movie, but you may wish you'd enrolled in Philosophy 101 by the time you exit the cinema. "A.I." (Artificial Intelligence), is a futuristic story in which a robot resembling an 11-year-old boy embarks on a Pinocchio-like quest to become human. Mr. Spielberg's movie posits the idea that machines can develop self-awareness, and even understand love. Is Spielberg's premise as far-fetched as "E.T." flying a bicycle past the moon? Not according to Ray Kurzweil, who is something of a superstar in the AI community, currently made up of hundreds of corporations and universities across the world.

"Tracking Mean Shift Clustered Point Clouds for 3D Surveillance", and "Multiview Fusion for Canonical View Generation based on Homography Constraints" ACM Mulimedia Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, October 2006.

NB: Some of the movies use old formats and may not work on your machine without conversion. All are also now available in the WEBM format, which should work, and s houjld be tried first. All the videos are downloadable, under creative commons 3.0 licences. Anyone interested in obtaining and running the toolkit (including some of the demos'frozen' here) should see The Free Poplog Web site. More examples may be added later. Note on Pre-SimAgent demos: Items 10 and 12 below include demos using our pop11 tools before SimAgent was developed. Experience with those projects helped to show the need for the SimAgent tools and the RCLIB graphical interface. If you would like to explore some pre-cursors to SimAgent take a look at the demos near the end of this file.