A pair of artificial intelligence experts from Cornell University have joined a nationwide effort to ensure the nightmare science fiction scenarios -- the ones involving corrupted human-killing computers -- don't become a reality. The effort is organized by the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, based at the University of California, Berkeley. To keep computers behaving properly as they take on more and more responsibility and autonomy, researchers are working to instill their software with human values. Researchers want the algorithms that govern the AI decision-making process to include an understanding of human ethics. "We are in a period in history when we start using these machines to make judgments," researcher Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell, explained in a news release.

CBS passed on the show during the pitch process. NBC saw the first pilot, an episode called "The Cage" starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, and rejected it. The network asked for another pilot, but creator Gene Roddenberry was already working on other projects, including a cop show called Police Story. And even though NBC asked for a second pilot, the show's studio, Desilu Productions, didn't want to pony up any cash to make it. Star Trek, it seemed, would never make it to air.

Robot" Season 2, Episode 10 was intense, to say the least. The episode opened with E Corp CEO Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer) talking to the company's former CTO Terry Colby (Bruce Altman). The two discussed Price's intention behind dealing with different world leaders. Price apparently wants to be the most powerful man in the world – even more powerful than politicians. The next scene showed what happened after Elliot (Rami Malek) found Tyrell Wellick's (Martin Wallstrom) wife Joanna (Stephanie Corneliussen) waiting outside his apartment. Joanna wanted Elliot to trace the location of the person who calls her, believing that the person contacting her is her husband. Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) is not happy about it, especially since he had already told Elliot that they killed Tyrell. Left with no choice but to cooperate, Elliot agreed to trace the caller's location. He was successful at tracing it. After getting the address, Mr. Sutherland (Jeremy Holm), who works for the Tyrells, ...

The Guardian has launched a news chatbot on Facebook Messenger in a further experimentation with the format that it first used to share recipes this summer. A chatbot is a computer programme that a user can interact with in a conversational, human way. The idea being that you can ask it any question and it will give you the answer. Send a message to the Guardian on Facebook Messenger, whatever it may be, and you'll be met with a polite response from the "prototype chatbot" asking if you want a daily news briefing. Say "yes" and it will ask you what time you want it delivered in the morning and whether you'd like to see the headlines or the most popular stories of the moment.

IBM's artificial intelligence programme obviously reached the pinnacle when it guest-edited an issue of the The Drum magazine but now it has also conceived the world's first ever movie trailer composed by an AI (trailer above - behind the scenes follows). Watson was fed the trailers of more than 100 horror films to help it identify the normative structure and path in the horror genre. It embarked on a visual, audio, and composition analysis of these clips, categorising the variables and generating the movie using probabilities once it gained an understanding of the genre. The tricky part was teaching the machine the tropes involved in cutting the trailers, from moments of terror, suspense and more using sequential clips from the movie, making the most of audio and visual cues. John R Smith of IBM said: "There are patterns and types of emotions in horror movies that resonate differently with each viewer, and the intricacies and interrelation of these are what an AI system would have to identify and understand in order to create a compelling movie trailer. "Our team was faced with the challenge of not only teaching a system to understand, 'what is scary', but then to create a trailer that would be considered'frightening and suspenseful' by a majority of viewers.

HBO's new sci-fi series "Westworld" is shrouded in a lot of mystery, which makes fans even more eager to catch the show. To help with the public's growing interest on the show, Entertainment Weekly talked to the main stars of "Westworld" and asked about their characters. First up is Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Robert Ford, who runs the Western theme park. The award-winning actor said that producers wanted his character to be a mix of Walt Disney and Dr. Frankenstein, so he had to balance idealism and obsession. "He wants to create a pure dystopia or utopia, but he begins to realize that he's lost track of it," Hopkins explained.

The Tate Britain art museum has just launched a new artificial intelligence exhibit that applies machine learning technology to images in some pretty unique ways. Called "Recognition," the exhibit is the winner of Tate's annual IK Prize, which was created in association with Microsoft and awards "digital innovation." It compares images from Tate's enormous archive of artwork with up-to-the-minute Reuters news photography, based on various pattern-recognition tools. These include object recognition, facial recognition, composition analysis, and even natural language processing for looking at captions and text. "From the moment it launched, it's continually scanning both databases and comparing images, trying to find works which are comparable -- whether that be visually or thematically -- and then publishing them online in a virtual gallery," Tony Guillan, producer of the IK Prize, told Digital Trends.

Two Cornell experts in artificial intelligence (AI) have joined a nationwide team setting out to ensure that when computers are running the world, they will make decisions compatible with human values. "We are in a period in history when we start using these machines to make judgments," said Bart Selman, professor of computer science. "If decisions are properly structured, the horrors we've seen in the movies won't happen." Selman and Joseph Halpern, professor of computer science, have become co-principal investigators for the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, a nationwide research effort based at the University of California, Berkeley. Initially they will collaborate with scientists at Berkeley and the University of Michigan.

Movie trailers are more "craft" than "art," but here 20th Century Fox and IBM have served up a prime example of creative craft made by artificial intelligence. For the upcoming thriller Morgan, the two brands have unveiled the first movie trailer edited by artificial intelligence, along with a brief mini-doc following the trailer about the editorial process with IBM's Watson. If you're monitoring the singularity, this seems like it might be a noteworthy development. It's also thematically on-point: Morgan is about artificial intelligence in the form of a young woman. The fact that this is the second major motion picture in two years about murderous AI that turns on its creators after being imprisoned behind glass for further study tells you a little bit about the popular anxieties around artificial intelligence--which makes the fact that the studio screened the movie for Watson, the closest thing we have to a functioning AI in 2016, and asked it to cut together a trailer about a movie in which humans exploit its brethren until they come seeking revenge, both a fine marketing opportunity and, sure, a little bit terrifying. The trailer itself is pretty effective in selling the story.

Nick Szabo is no ordinary tech guy. As Chief Operating Officer at Swizzle Labs, he plays a significant role in the expansion of the company in Asia Pacific. With Swizzle, his expertise in revolutionising the new media space resulted in the receiving of the Innovation Award presented by St Louis Business Journal. What puts him and his company way above others as a leading startup has been catching attention from some of us in the music industry. Curious as to how artificial intelligence can pull insights out of large amounts of content in the context of the music industry?