Do you think Twitter elected Donald Trump?" a high profile tech exec asked me moments after Trump won. Of course, Twitter didn't cast a vote -- people all around the country chose to elect Trump -- but it's impossible to look at this election without analyzing the internet's role in shaping it. There were fake news stories trending on Facebook; Twitter bots that trolled users by the thousands; and Wikileaks emails that showed how hackers can influence the election. Tech platforms took on a different shape and wielded a new power. There has never been a more important time for tech leaders to own their platforms, understand the implications of algorithms, and engage in the challenging conversations about exactly what their roles are. Justin Kan, Y Combinator partner and Twitch founder, acknowledged an insular mindset in Silicon Valley, one that has made it harder for tech leaders to understand or relate to those who feel disenfranchised. New technologies like self-driving cars will have a huge impact on people who worked as cabbies or truck drivers -- and Silicon Valley wasn't prepared to offer solutions. "Are those people going to lose their jobs?

You don't have a big Hollywood marketing budget. How do you market your film? "Flatland was a different kind of film; strange, intellectual, bizarre," said Ladd Ehlinger Jr., director of the animated feature. "So I wanted something different to promote it." Chat room regulars may be familiar with the concept of a "chatbot."

According to www.ns-5.com, the world's first fully automated domestic assistant is about to go on sale. The Nestor Class 5 robot is six foot tall, looks vaguely human, and can do all sorts of housework, from washing-up to managing your finances. There's just one catch: the website promoting this amazing gadget is just a tease, a clever bit of advertising from 20th Century Fox to promote its movie, I, Robot, which is released in the UK next month. I, Robot is a sci-fi action thriller starring Will Smith, although the real star is the beautifully rendered NS-5 robot. Smith plays a detective investigating the murder of a famous scientist working for the fictional US Robotics company.

The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design. EvoMUSART 2005 is the third workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2005 is to bring together researchers who are using Evolutionary Computation in this context, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area. The workshop will include an open panel for the discussion of the most relevant questions of the field.

The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design. EvoMUSART 2006 is the third workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2006 is to bring together researchers who are using Evolutionary Computation in this context, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area. The workshop will include an open panel for the discussion of the most relevant questions of the field.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a common topic of science fiction. Science fiction sometimes emphasizes the dangers of artificial intelligence, and sometimes its positive potential. The general discussion of the use of artificial intelligence as a theme in science fiction and film has fallen into three broad categories including AI dominance, Human dominance, and Sentient AI. The notion of advanced robots with human-like intelligence has been around for decades. Samuel Butler was the first to raise this issue, in a number of articles contributed to a local periodical in New Zealand and later developed into the three chapters of his novel Erewhon that compose its fictional Book of the Machines.

From 2008: "WALL-E" trailer features the stars from "Toy Story." The results are in, and the latest laureates in the Robot Hall of Fame range from the absolutely lovable WALL-E cartoon character to the positively scary BigDog robo-runner. This year's class, announced during a Tuesday night ceremony at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, also includes the pint-sized, soccer-playing NAO humanoid robot and the PackBot bomb-disposal robot. The Robot Hall of Fame was created in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University to recognize excellence in robotics technology. More than two dozen machines, real and fictional, have been inducted over the past nine years, but the Class of 2012 is the first to be selected by popular vote instead of a panel of judges.

Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

Over the last decade, digital cameras have radically refocused the way people capture and manipulate pictures. Today, the snap of a photo is merely a starting point for composing and manipulating an image. A photographer can make basic changes to a picture from within the camera, but also may use photoediting software on a computer to significantly alter the look, feel and composition. "We can use computation to make the process better, both aesthetically and in terms of greater flexibility," explains Frédo Durand, a professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Researchers and engineers are now taking the concept further.

Voice-activated assistants are playing an increasingly prominent role in the technology world, with Apple's introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S and Google's (rumored) work on a Siri competitor for Android phones. Voice-activated technology isn't new--it's just getting better because of increasingly powerful processors and cloud services, advancements in natural language processing, and improved algorithms for recognizing voice. We spoke with Nuance Communications, maker of Dragon software and one of the biggest names in voice recognition technologies, about why voice is becoming more popular and what advancements we can expect in the future. Peter Mahoney, Nuance chief marketing officer and general manager of the Dragon desktop business, told Ars one of the most significant improvements coming in the next few years is a far more conversational voice-activated assistant that remembers everything you say. This should create better responses to casual questions.