Allison Parrish is a computer programer, educator, and poet whose work deals with the materiality of language. With a background in both the formal study of language (she received her BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley) and years of experience as a software developer, Parrish's work has lead her to explore words not only as symbols but also as objects in their own right, teasing the boundaries between medium and message to ask questions about how communication happens in a digital context. Electronic media open up entirely new possibilities for the manipulation of language, but they also lay bare some of the thorniest problems of textual interpretation. If we are writing for other humans we can assume a baseline understanding of how language works, an understanding which computers still do not share. If this seems abstract, consider the way that language comes to be represented as a text file in a computer: words are compressed into ASCII characters and stored as bits on a hard drive; the fundaments of human communication, having emerged out of obscure prehistory and evolved for centuries, accumulating layers of connotation and nuance along the way, are now encoded as tiny electrical charges in a matrix of transistors.

By Alissa Quart, author of "The Republic of Outsiders" and "Branded", is the editor for the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Precariousness is not just a working-class thing. In recent interviews, dozens of academics and schoolteachers, administrators, librarians, journalists and even coders have told me they too are falling prey to an unstable new America. I've started to think of this just-scraping-by group as the Middle Precariat. The word Precariat was popularized five or so years ago to describe a rapidly expanding working class with unstable, low-paid jobs.

Everywhere you look today, there are examples cropping up of how machine learning is revolutionising different industries. In media and entertainment, Spotify and Netflix sort through billions of data points to find patterns in music, films and television that consumers have enjoyed -- and then make suggestions based on their tastes. In retail, Amazon prompts consumers to buy everything from nappies to office chairs based on shoppers' previous purchases. In finance, machine learning is helping investors anticipate market trends and powering innovations underlying everything from self-driving cars to voice-assistant applications. In the payments industry, machine learning is similarly becoming an increasingly important tool to help businesses combat fraud.

In this Asia Vision Series interview on artificial intelligence, Dr Hon Hsiao-Wuen, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research Asia, talks about AI enabling the invisible revolution and driving a future of guardian angels.

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen.

In his iconic Star Wars series, George Lucas envisioned a world in a galaxy far, far away, where, among other things, doctors were droids and bots. In this world, a droid surgeon fitted Luke Skywalker with a bionic hand after a fight with Darth Vader, a bot midwife oversaw the delivery of Princess Leia and droids treated Luke Skywalker for hypothermia after his rescue from the icy planet of Hoth. Time and time again, robots, rather than humans, provided healthcare. Lucas viewed medical care as algorithmic, and therefore well within the capacity of intelligent machines. Does the world of healthcare in the Star Wars films -- where bots are the new docs -- mirror our own not-so-distant future of medicine?

Robot" found its way online, but for a limited time only. In contrast with HBO and Starz, the latest networks to make show premieres, including "The Night Of" and "Outlander," available to stream ahead of time, USA made the "Mr. The episode's availability was announced with little fanfare via a video within the "Mr. Robot" Facebook Live event held Sunday night with members of the cast, including Rami Malek and Christian Slater. The pretense of the video was a security breach as perpetrated by fsociety, the fictional hacking group from the "Mr. Robot" Twitter feed posted a schedule listing times and locations where the episode would be streaming, noting that it would be the only opportunity available until the official Wednesday airing.

Robot" begins a second season on USA on Wednesday night with a two-part opener broadcast back to back. A conspiracy thriller set in the present day – it's still 2015 on the series' clock – it's science fiction in the sense that it involves technology, but not in the quasi-supernatural manner of flying saucers, Godzillas, time travel or synthetic human or mutant superheroes and such. Still, it shares with much sci-fi a sense of the ordinary world pushed a click toward the uncanny. Into every generation a confused and disaffected hero is born. Robot" it's Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a cyberwhiz who was recruited – Season 1 spoilers ahead – to the underground hacking collective fsociety by a person (Christian Slater) who turned out to be his father, who turned out to be dead, a figment of his imagination projected wholly into his world, though invisible to everyone else – a "Sixth Sense" move, dramatically. Robot' season premiere hit online three days early, then got pulled back » Of course, imaginary characters have as much substance in fiction as "actual" ones, so things do get muddled, and I would not be surprised to learn that I have got things in this show upside-down or backward.

We've previously reported how AI is developing rapidly and gaining the ability to do things like defeat human champions at the game of Go, describe photos in words for vision-impaired users, detect cyber attacks and even write novels and financial reports. That's old hat – there's now an AI that can write screenplays. It's named itself Benjamin and its first film, a sci-fi short, has just been released on YouTube for the world to enjoy. Our new event for New York is focused on quality, not quantity. 'Sunspring' was directed by Oscar Sharp and stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch.

The term "artificial intelligence" is being thrown around a lot lately. But what is artificial intelligence, really? With A.I.'s like Siri, Cortana, and more, the world is approaching what is known as The Singularity, the era of the machine. Though these A.I. are nothing like James Cameron's Skynet in the 1984 sci-fi smash hit The Terminator, it is imperative to understand where artificial intelligence came from in order to fully comprehend where it is going next. Many filmmakers and authors were afraid of the rise of artificial intelligence and attempted to capture this fear in many notable and influential works of fiction that are still relevant today. That being said, not every artificial intelligence system wants world domination, unlike how A.I. has often been portrayed in these works.