The world's largest radio telescope China completed Sunday could answer one of mankind's oldest questions about the cosmos: is there other life out there? China's Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, could have the ability to detect alien life, as it searches space for strange objects such as neutral hydrogen, faint pulsars, and low frequency gravitational waves, according to China's state-run Xinhua News Agency. The telescope, which China hopes is operational by September, will be open to the global scientific community in up to three years. The magnitude of the 185 million, 500-meter-wide telescope with 4,450 panels attests to the world's increasing commitment to searching for other life in the galaxy. The discovery that life forms on Earth can survive in the harshest environments, as well as estimates the Milky Way, alone, has thousands of Earth-like planets, has spurred these investments.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. When trading resumes Tuesday, investors will be watching whether the stock market can retain the momentum it had at the end of last week when U.S. stocks had almost completely recovered from the losses suffered after British citizens voted to leave the European Union. The Bank of England has promised to take steps to boost the British economy, but U.S. investors may be looking close to home when the latest national jobs report is released Friday. Zombies released: Universal Studios Hollywood will open its "The Walking Dead" attraction Monday, one of several new attractions this summer at Southern California theme parks. "Walking Dead" will rely on a combination of animatronics and real-life actors playing zombies who chase and lunge at park visitors.

Even though you may not realize it, machine learning-powered matchmaking is present everywhere in our daily lives, from the type of content shown on our Facebook news feeds to the suggested TV shows that come up on Netflix, and even to the matches suggested on dating sites/apps like Match.com and Tinder. As machine learning continues to advance, it will start to make its way to the hiring process, driving efficiencies in connecting employers and candidates, especially for technical jobs. Analyzing large amounts of data on candidates will become increasingly important during the hiring process for many companies. Today, matching algorithms use strings and keywords in resumes to filter candidates. This enables companies to get more accurate results, quicker, during the hiring process.

Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and “occupy” events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizenry express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of keyphrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions. We illustrate the application of our system to 10 countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Results demonstrate our successes in capturing significant societal unrest in these countries with an average lead time of 4.08 days. We also study the selective superiorities of news media versus social media (Twitter, Facebook) to identify relevant trade-offs.

Software faults raise questions about the validity of brain studies (arstechnica.com) Is "Python Machine Learning" by Sebastian Raschka a good book?

Echobox, a London-based AI startup targeting the publishing industry, has secured 3.4 million from Mangrove Capital Partners and LocalGlobe. The startup's AI service is used by publishers to enhance their reach and distribution on social media. The startup claims its tech can predict if an article will go viral and when the optimal time to publish content is. Axel Springer and Le Monde are among its clients. "Having worked at a well-known publisher, I was amazed by how they were investing vast resources in trying to perfect the science of content distribution in-house with data scientists and analytics tools to guide decision-making," said Echobox CEO Antoine Amann.

PRO: Chris Bishop, director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, said earlier this year that he believes the hyperbole around the AI risks could jeopardise any future developments that may in fact assist humanity. "Any scenario in which AI is an existential threat to humanity is not just around the corner," he told the Guardian. Referring to the views of high-profile cynics like professor Stephen Hawking, Bishop said: "I think they must be talking decades away for those comments to make any sense. Right now we are in control of that technology and we can make lots of choices about the paths that we follow." Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, meanwhile says the popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong because it "equates intelligence with autonomy".

Bots have officially taken over, and they're about to make our lives a whole lot easier. In April, Facebook introduced bots for Messenger, but the world's most popular social media platform is not the only company to open a "bot store" with consumer functions, and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa are steadily increasing in both popularity and functionality. With Kik, you can chat with Michelangelo and see the climate conditions through Yahoo! With Operator, shopping is as easy as sending a text, and Pana, the online travel agency, turns a simple chat conversation via text into real bookings. In fact, everyone from 1–800-Flowers and the NBA to Taco Bell is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

I'm starting to enjoy talking to computers. I don't use speech-to-text all that much because I'm so keyboard-oriented, but I love being able to run a search by voice or ask for last night's baseball scores. Siri works well for this, though I'm now using Android and am thus in the hands of Google Now, which keeps asking me to re-train it by speaking'OK Google' over and over again. Despite this annoyance, a day rarely passes that I don't talk to Google Now. Which raises an interesting question.

The popular discussion around "robots writing the news" tends to presuppose that automation will displace human journalists. While that's certainly possible in some cases, the AP says it hasn't eliminated any reporting jobs as a result of its deals with Automated Insights. Rather, it says the automated earnings stories free journalists to focus on adding detail and context to the more newsworthy reports. And the automated sports recaps have allowed the agency to expand its coverage to events it had previously ignored. For instance, the AP did not previously offer recaps of most minor-league baseball games.