Science-fiction movies written by predictive AI -- the stuff robots once thought they could only dream of doing -- has become a reality. "Sunspring" -- the first ever movie to be made by using an algorithm -- has been produced for the 48-Hour-Film Challenge at the Sci-Fi London Festival. AI researcher Ross Goodwin and filmmaker Oscar Sharp, fed'Benjamin 1980s and 1990s sci-fi screenplays in order to develop the algorithm, using LTSM, Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network -- and he must have devoured them as the characters Benjamin came up with for the movie, were called H, H2 and C. According to Ars Technica, "The AI has captured the rhythm of science fiction writing, even if some of Benjamin's sentences are hilariously nonsensical. 'We're going to see the money,' C says at one point." Benjamin's co-creator, Sharp, told Ars Technica that the most interesting part of the experiment was learning about patterns in science fiction storytelling.

The news that Christina Grimmie -- the 22-year-old singer who, as a New Jersey teen, made a name for herself on YouTube before broadening her fame in 2014 on Season 6 of "The Voice" – was shot and killed Friday while signing autographs for fans after a concert in Orlando, Fla., is tragic. But for fans of "The Voice" who watched Grimmie show off, during her time on the show, not only her impressive vocal chops and stage presence, but also her musical creativity, willingness to experiment and upbeat resilience, the loss must be heartbreaking. Those who watched Grimmie turn four chairs during her blind audition and then stick around to finish third on the show, behind only sweet, shy, country-singing runner-up Jake Worthington (of Team Blake Shelton) and silky-soulful winner Josh Kaufman (of Team Usher), knew she was an unusual talent. Grimmie's coach, Adam Levine, believed in her so fiercely that, at one point, he promised the audience she would end up winning the show. Then, when she didn't, he announced that he planned to sign her to his own label.

Google has launched a project to use artificial intelligence to create compelling art and music, offering a reminder of how technology is rapidly changing what it means to be a musician, and what makes us distinctly human. Google's Project Magenta, announced Wednesday, aims to push the state of the art in machine intelligence that's used to generate music and art. "We don't know what artists and musicians will do with these new tools, but we're excited to find out," said Douglas Eck, the project's leader in a blog post. "Daguerre and later Eastman didn't imagine what Annie Liebovitz or Richard Avedon would accomplish in photography. Surely Rickenbacker and Gibson didn't have Jimi Hendrix or St. Vincent in mind." Google has already released a song demonstrating the technology.

This tutorial will describe how a surprisingly small amount of code can be used to build a recommendation engine using the MapR Sandbox for Hadoop with Apache Mahout and Elasticsearch. This tutorial will run on the MapR Sandbox. The tutorial also requires Elasticsearch and Mahout to be installed on the sandbox. Step 1: Indexing the movie meta data in Elasticsearch In Elasticsearch, documents contain fields which are, by default, all indexed. Typically documents are written as a single-level JSON structure.

Further, recent psychoacoustical evidence suggest the approach bears some resemblance with human auditory processing for sound textures (McDermott et al., 2013; Nelken and de Cheveigné, 2013). In an influential 2007 article, Aucouturier, Defreville & Pachet (Aucouturier et al., 2007) applied a BOF model to categorize both polyphonic music and soundscapes. Their results showed that, while BOF was a meriting model for their polyphonic music dataset, it was spectacularly effective for soundscapes, reaching accuracies of 96%. The contrast, they interpreted, lied in differences in the temporal structure of both types of stimuli, with music being more formally organized and soundscapes more easily summarized by statistics. In a later companion study (Aucouturier and Defreville, 2009), they showed that soundscapes could be time-shuffled without altering listeners' perception of their acoustic similarity, while music could not. While more work was needed for music, the authors therefore concluded that BOF was a sufficient model to approximate human perception for soundscapes, practically ruling out the need to recognize the local acoustic events in a texture in order to identify it.

A sequel about married paranormal investigators, "The Conjuring 2," ascended to the top of the Friday box office, outperforming runners-up "Warcraft" and "Now You See Me 2." The three debuts supplanted last week's box-office leader "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows," which landed in the fourth spot, followed by the Warner Bros. romance "Me Before You." "The Conjuring 2" earned an estimated 16.4 million overnight. The New Line/Warner Bros. film exceeded expectations while on its way to a projected 40 million opening weekend. Though hardly a disappointment, the sequel has a steep climb to reach the tally of its predecessor, which ultimately earned nearly 320 million worldwide. Audiences liked the movie, which stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as believers working to exorcise demons from a home in North London. Like its predecessor, the second installment earned an A- from the polling firm CinemaScore.

There's a store causing a disruption tucked beside The High Line in New York City. STORY works on a far different model from your average shop: it's part magazine, part press release and part trade show. The space, employees and name don't change, but instead all of the merchandise flips over every two or so months for the newest story, like a new issue of a magazine. From this week until July 24th, STORY is showcasing its "Disrupt" story, inspired by Mr. Robot, the Golden Globe-winning hacker drama from USA Network, which returns for its second season on July 13 at 10 p.m. ET. Disrupt is far more than just a Mr. Robot-themed merchandise booth.

To hold its own against digital assistants from Google, Microsoft and Amazon, Siri needs an IQ boost. Last month, Google took the stage in Mountain View, California, to show off improvements to its digital voice assistant. Its signature ability is to have a conversation with it like you would a normal person. You can ask "Google Assistant" what's on your schedule and then have it text the person you're meeting to say you'll be late. Google remembers your first question, so you don't have to start over with a new command.

Perhaps the fear of artificial intelligence taking control of everything is overstated. A.I. might be able to drive cars and beat people at chess, but they can't write a compelling screenplay -- or even get close to one. That's what happened when filmmaker Oscar Sharp and A.I. researcher Ross Goodwin worked together to create Benjamin, a neural network they programmed to become a budding science fiction screenwriter, with pretty terrible results. They fed Benjamin a bevy of sci-fi scripts from the '80s and '90s -- though oddly, the likes of Silver Linings Playbook and Scary Movie 2 were also thrown in, among others -- and with the help of tech website Ars Technica and Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch, set out on a 48-hour mission to turn Benjamin's short film, Sunspring, into a reality. Middleditch and the other actors in Sunspring had their work cut out for them, with choppy dialogue that makes little to no sense (take Middleditch's first line, "In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood. It's something I can do").

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. 'Sunspring' was directed by Oscar Sharp and stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch. It was made for the 48-Hour Film Challenge at the Sci-Fi London festival.