In 2015, director Justin Kurzel and actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard teamed for a prestigious cinematic adaptation, a bloody, mad take on "Macbeth." Taking on the popular video game "Assassin's Creed" seems like quite the left turn, and while the results aren't as striking as the previous outing -- it's pretty uneven -- the film is thoroughly stamped with Kurzel's unique visual style, which makes for an exciting, if strange ride. There is a complicated and deep mythology behind the game, and the film follows it mostly faithfully. Callum Lynch (Fassbender) is a death row inmate with a violent childhood. He is put to death by lethal injection, but wakes up in a clinic at the shadowy Abstergo corporation.

"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is expected to rule the box office during the long Christmas weekend, despite a glut of new films jostling for moviegoers' dollars. The second weekend for the Lucasfilm prequel is expected to easily top newcomers, including the new animated musical "Sing," the romance-in-space drama "Passengers" and the video-game action flick "Assassin's Creed." "Rogue One," released by the Walt Disney Co., dominated last weekend with $155 million in U.S.-Canada box office, making it the third-highest opening of the year. Driven by strong reviews and high anticipation among the Jedi fanbase, the space saga could add $130 million or more in domestic receipts during the six-day weekend that starts Wednesday, according to analysts. Internationally, "Rogue One" has already earned $151 million for a global total of $323.5 million so far.

You don't have to be a Go champion to have artificial intelligence change your game. You get in your car, and your Apple iPhone tells you what traffic looks like where you're going--before you ask. We're all on the road with Tesla's self-driving cars, which are redefining what driving means. The artificial intelligence calendar assistant Amy emails three of your friends to figure out a meeting time that works for everyone--and nails it. Thankfully, chatting with Amazon's Alexa is a lot more entertaining than, say, would be Hal, the fictional artificial intelligence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg just achieved what most of us have only seen in the movie "Iron Man" and never dreamed would be possible in 2016: He has an artificial intelligence (AI) system running his home, which incidentally, just like you, hates Nickelback. Inspired by Stark's home in "Iron Man," Zuckerberg developed the project and named it "Jarvis," just like in the movie. And oh yeah, it's voiced by Morgan Freeman. So Zuck may have just one-upped "Iron Man" for real. It may be a little less high-tech than the one in the movie, but we're still impressed.

With continuing advances in technology, robots are likely to become more common in many types of workplaces, from manufacturing and food service providers to hospitality and healthcare. Whereas they were once limited to functions such as welding and painting in industrial environments, robots are now moving heavy items from place to place, packaging and shipping orders from warehouses, performing some types of surgeries, even greeting visitors at hotels. Shipping exemplifies where robotics has made significant progress, according to David Bourne, principal systems scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Bourne notes the massive use of robots to fetch products for workers who then package and ship those products. "This points to the new wave of robotic applications where people and robots work together on tasks according to their skills," he said.

Stock photo company Shutterstock introduced reverse image search for desktop earlier this spring. This made it easy for users to search Shutterstock's website with an image, instead of using keywords. Shutterstock's data scientist Kevin Lester, who looks closely at the adoption of these new tools, was able to find out what patterns emerge from the data. In fact, Lester shared with IBTimes, that those who used reverse-image search for searches wound up making more downloads per search than those from a user with a text-based search. "We've found that users who performed at least one reverse image search prior to making a purchase with Shutterstock were 3.49 times more likely to make a subsequent purchase than those who did not," says Lester.

Engineers at the EPFL Technology Institute in Switzerland have built a drone made with artificial feathers. It can fly at high speeds, make sharp turns and manoeuvre through tight spaces.

Algorithms use ratings, rankings and recommendations to present us with items Before items can be ranked, they need a measure by which they can be ordered This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion With ranked lists in hand, websites may turn around and make recommendations This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion This holiday season, when we Google for the most trending gifts, compare different items on Amazon or take a break to watch a holiday movie on Netflix, we are making use of what might be called'the three R's' of the Internet Age: rating, ranking and recommending Apple's new AirPods are tough to recycle: Breakdown reveals... How to win like Andy Murray: Adversity and hardship could be... Does hurting a girlfriend's CAT make you more immoral than... The root of human kindness is NOT in our ancestors:... Apple's new AirPods are tough to recycle: Breakdown reveals... How to win like Andy Murray: Adversity and hardship could be... Does hurting a girlfriend's CAT make you more immoral than... The root of human kindness is NOT in our ancestors:... Websites' algorithms use the'new 3 Rs' to combine, process and synthesize information before presenting it to us. AMAZON'S ALGORITHM DOESN'T ALWAYS GIVE THE BETTER PRICE Before items can be ranked, they need a measure by which they can be ordered This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion With ranked lists in hand, websites may turn around and make recommendations Amazon has mechanisms in place to screen out these sorts of reviews – for example, by requiring a purchase to have been made from a given account before it can submit a review. The prime example of recommendation systems is Netflix's method.

Mark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances. Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be "easier than [he] expected" in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon's Echo. To be fair, most (all?) Echo owners didn't build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that's what Zuckerberg set out to do, coding his own personal Jarvis using Python, PHP and Objective C, and incorporating machine learning techniques including language processing, speech recognition and face recognition. The Facebook CEO also had to wrangle a bunch of connected devices that don't necessarily talk to each other out of the box, including Sonos, Spotify, a Samsung TV, a Crestron smart home and lighting system, a Nest cam and more. And once these were all tied together, Zuckerberg also had to build a way to translate natural language requests made as though you were talking too another person into commands that could operate all of the above.

When director Justin Kurzel re-teamed with cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and Oscar-caliber actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard for Assassin's Creed after working together on the critically-acclaimed Macbeth, we thought we might have our first great video game movie adaptation at last. Early reviews are now rolling in for the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide, and they aren't pretty. The film currently sits at a 20% at Rotten Tomatoes with only 6 out of 23 reviews being positive. Yes, film reviews can tick up and down, but it's extremely unlikely that a movie starting out this low will ever make its way up to "fresh." And yes, Rotten Tomatoes is often flawed, but it's not usually wildly off the mark.