The Post's experiment involves a telepresence robot from Double Robotics and a partnership with Twitter. Basically, the machine is an iPad mounted on a Segway-style base. All week it'll be roaming the floor of the convention, streaming live on Periscope. Viewers will be able to tune in and ask questions of delegates, politicians and anyone else who happens upon the bot. It will give those watching at home a much more candid look at the RNC than normal, but might also provide some excellent opportunities for the public to pepper officials with tough questions.

Sure, Facebook has "M", Google has "Google Now", and Siri's voice isn't always that of a woman. But it does feel worth noting that (typically male-dominated) engineering groups routinely give women's names to the things you issue commands to. Is artificial intelligence work about Adams making Eves? The response to this critique is usually about the voices people trust and find easy to understand. Adrienne LaFrance over at The Atlantic does a good job discussing those points, so go read her article.

It stole the show in the most recent Star Wars film and left audiences wondering how it worked. Now the engineers behind the iconic BB8 robot from The Force Awakens have revealed for the first time how they were able to create a working version of the spherical droid. Josh Lee, BB8 design engineer and Matt Denton, electronics software engineer on movie have given the public the first glimpse at the inner workings of the tiny robot. The inner mechanics of Star Wars BB8 have been revealed for the first time, revealing a pendulum structure at sits inside the ball that forms the droid's body. The engineers behind BB8 said when they were first presented with the challenge of creating a spherical robot by the Force Awakens director JJ Abrahms, they found several ways of creating the robot.

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Robot" débuted, last year, it felt like a shock to multiple systems, one of them being the network on which it aired. That was USA, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal and Comcast; the home of upbeat, aspirational procedurals, it's known as the "blue skies" network. Robot" was more of a hurricane advisory. Created by a newcomer, Sam Esmail, it was a parable of class rage, with a vigilante anti-hero, welding the paranoid style in American TV drama onto the ideology--and, just as important, the aesthetics--of both the Occupy movement and Anonymous. Esmail's plot was a Philip K. Dick puzzle box, exposing one false reality after another.

There's even a subreddit dedicated to adding realistic color to old black and white images. It can be a time-consuming process and you need to be very familiar with Photoshop -- or similar software -- to do it convincingly. However, Algorithmia has implemented the Colorful Image Colorization algorithm created by Richard Zhang, Philip Isola and Alexei A. Efros. This algorithm automates the process of colorization by leveraging Algorithmia's cloud-based GPU network of hosted trained deep learning models. Deep learning is itself a fascinating and challenging field in computing. The idea is to create algorithms which can accurately model high-level abstractions that are typically exclusive to the human brain, such as recognizing and understanding how to accurately color a black and white image based on contextual understanding, for example.

The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone. In writer/director Alex Garland's thought-provoking new film--out Friday--we meet Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificially-intelligent robot. Ava's creator, genius tech billionaire Nathan (Oscar Isaac), has asked his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to determine whether Ava's thinking is indistinguishable from a human's. Until she meets Caleb, Ava has only ever met her maker and one other woman. Her existence, and her ability to learn how to interact, is a fascinating study of what makes us human.

For grown adults, there's no better feeling than coming across a gadget or toy that makes you feel young again – that's what makes Anki's newest robot, Cozmo, so charming. The robot, reminiscent of Wall-E and Eve in one body, is designed to look and feel like a Pixar character come to life. His facial animations and body movements are incredibly fun to interact with, but underneath all this cuteness are some serious robotics that Anki wants to share with developers and researchers to turn Cozmo into the ultimate learning tool. When Cozmo becomes available in October, Anki will release SDKs to let developers create their own Cozmo functions. The SDK simplifies complex functions, like path planning and facial recognition, into a single line of code which makes complicated tasks extremely easy to program.

Do you remember that memorable scene in the Harry Potter books when a person seeking revenge on Ron turns out to be Dumbledore hiding behind a cream cake? If you don't, that's probably because you read the version of Harry Potter written by J.K. Rowling instead of an LSTM recurrent neural network -- trained to generate new Hogwarts-related stories using a data set consisting of the series' first four books. "I've been experimenting with deep learning over the past few weeks, and the Harry Potter story is the result of one of those experiments," creator Max Deutsch tells Digital Trends. "Beyond just looking for a fun way to practice what I've been learning, the Harry Potter project was an attempt to make something enjoyable to read." Since the results are more surreal mash-up than anything likely to give Rowling sleepless nights, "enjoyable" may not be exactly the word.

Both the bookies and the pollsters predicted the outcome of the European Referendum incorrectly, but do you know who got it right? According to analysis from Pheme, of the 291,000 tweets where a vote was expressed, leave votes outnumbered remain significantly – and that's not even Pheme's main aim. Named after the Greek goddess of fame and rumours, the project, which began in 2014, is designed to assess online rumours, to help journalists determine what's true and what's made up. "Professor Rob Procter (now at Warwick) and I were discussing the manual analysis his team did with the Guardian on analysing rumours circulating during the England riots in 2011 – for example, that the London Eye was on fire," says Kalina Bontcheva, Professor of Text Analytics at the University of Sheffield, who works on Pheme. "My background is in automatic text analysis, so we discussed how rumour analysis and detection can be automated or, at least, support be offered to decision makers to help them with the process."