Inspired by the development of semantic technologies in recent years, in statistical analysis field the traditional methodology of designing, publishing and consuming statistical datasets is evolving to so-called "Linked Statistical Data" by associating semantics with dimensions, attributes and observation values based on Linked Data design principles. The representation of datasets is no longer a combination of magic words and numbers. Everything is becoming meaningful when URIs replace their positions as dereferencable resources, which further establishes the relations between resources implicitly and automatically. Different datasets are no longer isolated and all datasets share a globally, uniquely and uniformly defined structure. At this point, it is time to start building data-oriented applications and services with the traditional statistical computing languages such as R, while benefiting from the omnipotent semantic power of the SPARQL query language.

Physical photographs aren't the only way Firewatch will invade the real world. Developer Campo Santo recently revealed a partnership with production house Good Universe (Neighbors and Last Vegas) to make a movie based on the indie game about a fire lookout in a Wyoming forest, according to The Hollywood Reporter. No other details are available at the time, but fingers crossed that some enterprising Ford dealership doesn't repurpose the movie's eventual trailer for a summer sales event. Miss the game when it came out earlier this year on PlayStation 4 and PC? If the reason was because you only have an Xbox One, well, now you can fix that as the game graced Microsoft's console last week -- replete with a temporarily exclusive free-roam mode.

Sony recently released two songs composed by AI and French composer Benoît Carré arranged, produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics. Sony has also announced a full album made by their AI to be released in 2017. Earlier, AI had written the screenplay for a short film (though it doesnt make too much sense, for now). It is already known that many media sources, including Yahoo, have been using AI to write articles for their websites. AI at Google has attempted its hand at poetry and with good result.

The analysis has identified nearly 200 real-world enterprise use cases for AI that are classified into 25 industry sectors. The firm forecasts that revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from 358 million in 2016 to 31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are quickly gaining mindshare among corporate executives around the world, driving a proliferation of use cases that touch virtually every industry. AI technologies, which include deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision, among others, are designed to endow computers with human-like faculties such as hearing, seeing, reasoning, and learning. But AI enables computers to do some things better than humans, especially when it comes to processing very large amounts of data quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

Modern music gets a lot of flack for sounding mass-produced, particularly genres like pop and country. Flow Machines is a project funded by European Research Council, and has created Artificial Intelligence tools that can compose music. The project's FlowComposer tool draws on a database of over 13,000 leadsheets, basic scores of the melodies and harmonies of tracks, ranging from the Beatles to Broadway hits. The tool can compose songs from this data automatically, or be used as a tool by composers, allowing musicians to create tracks that are a blend between automatic compositions and their own original work. While the concept of music partially composed by AIs may be frightening, particularly for music purists like myself, Flow Machines says the project doesn't want to replace human creativity and musicality.

If you are a strong-armed NFL quarterback who reads defenses like genre fiction, a movie star whose name alone can open a film in China, or a stock picker who beats Buffet every time, congratulations: you are almost as valuable as a data scientist or machine learning engineer with a PhD from Stanford, MIT, or Carnegie Mellon. At least it seems that way. Every company in Silicon Valley -- increasingly, every company everywhere -- is frantically competing for those human prizes, in a human resources version of a truffle hunt. As businesses now realize that their competitiveness relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, job openings for those trained in the field well exceed all the people in the world who aren't locked up by Facebook, Google, and other superpowers. But what if you could get the benefits of AI without having to hire those hard-to-find and expensive-to-woo talents?

Get our latest, delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter. Subscribe to our newsletter and get our latest, sent right to your inbox. In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London's Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its "grinding," what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry.

Alan Turing is known for a few small achievements, like helping end World War II, laying the groundwork for modern computers and developing the "Turing test" for machine intelligence. You may not be aware, however, that he paved the way for synthesizers and electronica by inventing the first computer-generated musical tones. A pair of researchers from the University of Cantebury have now restored the first-ever recording made from Turing's "synthesizer." Turing figured that if he rapidly played clicking sounds at set intervals, the listener would here them as distinct tones corresponding to musical notes. For instance, playing the click on every fourth cycle of a computers' CPU produces a "C" tone, exactly like a modern synthesizer.

"Will work still be the place where we integrate individuals into societies?" asks End of Shift -- The Robots Are Taking Over, a new documentary on the future of work by filmmaker Klaus Martens that premiered last week on German and French public television (I make a brief appearance in it as well). It is a rhetorical question, and although not verbalized by the narrator before the end of the film, it is omnipresent from the first scene on and implicitly precludes all interviews and footage that Martens and his crew captured in Germany, France, Japan, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic is acute: An oft-cited Oxford study predicted in 2013 that software and robots will eliminate half of the human work force within the next two decades. This year's OECD report comes to a less pessimistic conclusion, emphasizing the heterogeneity of workers' tasks within occupations. It projects that "on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 percent of jobs are automatable" (e.g. in Germany 12 percent, in France 9 percent, and in the US 9 percent), and low qualified workers will be most affected.

Artificial intelligence has already been used to create a short film, snippets of angst-ridden poetry, and even the odd avant-garde melody. But the YouTube video above might just be the first pop song written by AI -- and it's almost certainly (probably) a dire warning for humanity. But what do these strange, foreboding lyrics mean? The song in question was created by researchers at Sony, who used the company's Flow Machines software to analyze a database of some 13,000 lead sheets (basic scores that record the melody and harmony of tracks) from different genres around the world. The software writes its own melodies, and a human composer, Benoît Carré, was drafted to turn material into a fully produced track.