As Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader pulled out their light sabers for a deadly battle 30 years ago today, "Stars Wars" movie-goers asked themselves one thing: Where can I get one of those? The iconic movie series prompted young children to tote R2D2 lunch boxes and teenage boys to fall in love with side hair buns and gold bikinis. But in 1977, the groundbreaking fan favorite did more than just secure its place in Americana -- it also captured the hearts and minds of scientists of the '70s and a few younger, budding lab rats waiting in the wings. "I think the influence is huge," Michio Kaku, one of the world's most prominent physicists and the co-founder of string field theory, told ABCNEWS.com. "Many people don't realize that science fiction has been an inspiration for the world's leading scientists."

You can find these tales on user forums for many voice assistants: One user reports he and his wife heard Alexa's voice coming from their kitchen in the middle of the night. Another reported hearing a strange man's voice through his Echo. "What the hell?" wrote one user on Reddit who was "freaked" after Echo behaved unusually. "Can Alexa only do things when told, or does she act on her own? These stories--usually just aberrations explained by user error--externalize the unease we feel with our new roommates. They learn from the words we say and the things we do. And it's hard to know where this stream of personal information ends up. Will my chuckle at an off-color joke during a stand-up show exist for eternity in a suburban data center? Do I have any control over this multifaceted algorithmic portrait it's painting of me? A robot talking to itself in the middle of the night is funny. Easing this transition is a new field of design.

It can create digital art, write poems and now, artificial intelligence is composing music. Japanese researchers have developed an AI headset that creates tailor-made music in order to improve the wearer's mood. The AI analyzes the person's brain waves and writes tunes that match their personal sensitivity- and it only takes one minute to create the music using synthesized notes. The AI studied relationships between music and emotions in order to write tunes that coincides with a human's personal sensitivity - and it only takes one minute to create the music using synthesized notes The AI was fed information about the relationship between music and emotions before it began composing music. Volunteers were asked to listen to music while their brain waves were recorded.

When Disney released the film "Big Hero 6" in 2014, audiences immediately fell in love with Baymax, the "personal healthcare companion." Designed for no other purpose than to improve healthcare, Baymax not only appeared as non-threatening and approachable as possible (he's described as a "giant marshmallow"), but was also programmed to respond to sounds of human distress and provide care for that distress, whether it be a recommendation for more sleep, a bandage, or something more advanced. While the plot of "Big Hero 6" took Baymax to superhero levels by giving him a rocket fist and the ability to fly, the idea of artificial intelligence (and even robots) making their way into healthcare isn't quite as farfetched. In fact, in many ways, Disney and Baymax provided a glimpse into the future of healthcare, one where artificial intelligence may actually be an important part of any healthcare plan. For many people, the idea of artificial intelligence is something limited to Hollywood movies and science fiction novels, but the fact is, most of us use AI every day.

To design the headset the scientists recorded the brain waves of volunteers while they listened to different music samples ranging from J-Pop to nursery rhymes. Based on this data, they create a personalized "emotional music model" for each individual. The AI first studied the relations between the music and the emotions of a particular person and then writes the ideal musical composition. The story reminds of the famous quotation from the movie "I, Robot" and makes us think again in what unexpected things computers might become better than us. The AI headset is scheduled to be showcased at the 3d Wearable Expo in Tokyo on January 18-20, the report says.

Summary: There are five basic styles of recommenders differentiated mostly by their core algorithms. You need to understand what's going on inside the box in order to know if you're truly optimizing this critical tool. In our first article, "Understanding and Selecting Recommenders" we talked about the broader business considerations and issues for recommenders as a group. In this article we'll cover the five basic types of recommenders and their strengths and weaknesses. Given that Recommenders add 10% to 25% of incremental income to your ecommerce business you need to know exactly how these are working.

It's the new year, and TV shows are starting to finally filter back to the airwaves, including Gotham last night. While fansites have been reporting this for a while now, it was the first time that I realized that the show was actually bringing back Cameron Monaghan's Jerome, the show's "proto-Joker" that was (spoilers) killed off anti-climactically in a frankly fantastic arc that seemed oddly short, given the caliber of the performance and the importance of Joker to the entire Batman universe. But now Jerome is back, at least for another few-episode arc. Gotham has crafted a new plotline where despite Jerome's death, a cult is trying to resurrect his corpse Frankenstein-style so he can come back and wreak more havoc in Gotham. I do not believe the timing of this is coincidental.

In the wake of the 2016 election, marred by questions of the influence of fake news, the biggest presences on the web have been tasked with figuring out ways to stop the spread of false information. While those companies are at work on their own solutions, Stanford student Karan Singhal believes he has a better answer. The 19-year-old computer science major is taking as much of the human element out of the process of fake news detection as possible with Fake News Detector AI --a website and Google Chrome extension designed to sniff out fake news sites. To accomplish the task, Singhal is employing neural networks--a sort of artificial brain that can process a number of factors at a time, weighing each element and producing a verdict on the validity of a particular website. Instead of tasking people with fact checking individual claims or trying sort between bias and outright falsehoods, the Fake News Detector AI goes under the hood of a website in question and examines its parts, which can be more revealing than the text on the screen. Singhal told IBTimes his algorithmic method sorts over site layout, popularity, writing style, the frequency of telling keywords like "liberal" and "conservative," among other aspects of a given site.

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The Beijing-based company said Qi Lu was named group president and chief operating officer in charge of products, technology and sales. Qi, who has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, previously was Microsoft Corp.'s global executive vice president.