Imagine I show you a book review, on amazon.com, Imagine I hide the number of stars, – all you get to see is the number of stars. And now I'm asking you, that review, is it good or bad? Well, it should be easy, for humans (although depending on the input there can be lots of disagreement between humans, too.) But if you want to do it automatically, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

This is the continuation of my mini-series on sentiment analysis of movie reviews, which originally appeared on recurrentnull.wordpress.com. Last time, we had a look at how well classical bag-of-words models worked for classification of the Stanford collection of IMDB reviews. As it turned out, the "winner" was Logistic Regression, using both unigrams and bigrams for classification. The best classification accuracy obtained was .89 So, bag-of-words models may be surprisingly successful, but they are limited in what they can do.

"Hum," above, is a science-fiction short from director Tom Teller and Frame 48. It follows a robot that works as a dishwasher in a restaurant, confined to a small, poorly lit room and abused by a cruel human boss. One day, an injured bird lands on the window sill and shows the robot that there's a whole world outside his cell. With help from the bird, the robot tries to break free.

Christmas is right around the corner, but Santa's not the only one dropping from the sky with presents this holiday season. Amazon's Prime Air officially began service this week, when a drone made the service's first delivery in Cambridge, England. So the future of shipping has arrived ... for a handful of people in the English countryside. Many, many more Amazonians will be getting served, however, by Prime Video, now that the company has spun it out into a standalone service. At an introductory rate that's a third the cost of Netflix, the move creates serious competition for viewing dollars around the world -- though it only brings Amazon's original programming.

Mixed Reality and Humanizing Artificial Intelligence: New Accenture Report Highlights the Evolving Role of Design as More Innovative, Responsive and Emotive Than Ever Fjord Trends 2017 takes a provocative look at the digital developments to watch in the year ahead, according to Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2016 – If this year has taught us anything, it's that digital technologies and hyper-connectivity are bringing user-led innovation to market faster than ever. Successful organizations today are those that best adapt and respond to unceasing change. Against this backdrop, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has released Fjord Trends 2017, its tenth and most provocative annual report examining the most significant emergent digital trends expected to disrupt organizations and society in the year ahead. Three meta themes emerged, challenging long-held norms and assumptions. The rise of the autonomous vehicle, smart homes and digital assistants is creating new ecosystems that threaten the smartphone's dominance as the main command center of our lives.

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Westworld has inspired some of the best, most engaging (mercifully apolitical) conversations I've had in a very long while. The series is both entertaining and thought-provoking. If you haven't seen it, Westworld is an HBO series, based on the 1973 Michael Crichton movie, about a futuristic amusement park where people can interact with synthetic humans (robots that are indistinguishable from human beings) and do pretty much whatever they want with them. Is Sex with a Robot Cheating? There are quite a few articles that explore the ethical and moral issues arising from the advent of this type of technology.

This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be -- though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

Amazon's Echo line already has a truckload of skills that tap into Alexa's ability to lend a hand with tasks, and the company adds new ones on a what seems like a weekly basis. This week, Google announced Netflix support for its connected Home speaker through Chromecast alongside the ability to display images from Google Photos. It turns out that was just the beginning as Google revealed over 30 more actions for Home from third-party developers. Using voice commands, you can try to find out why you feel crappy with WebMD, sort your to-do list with Todoist, order pizza from Domino's and get news updates from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, NPR and more. And those are just a few examples.

In 2017, artificial intelligence will slowly but surely make its presence known, both within newsrooms and to readers. In newsrooms, bots will start to produce more stories where structured data is readily available -- think game recaps, weather run downs, and overviews of how the stock market performed. This will free up resources and reduce costs. Robots will analyze complex editorial content of all lengths, and provide feedback to the humans sitting behind the keyboard. Much like how Netflix used data to help fine-tune House of Cards, news organizations will have the opportunity to adjust editorial narratives to make stories more engaging.