Last summer the Internet was overrun by psychedelic images of swirling skies sprouting dog faces and Van Gogh masterpieces embellished with dozens of staring eyes. By running their image-recognition algorithms in reverse, Google researchers had found they could generate images that some call art. At an auction in February, a print made using their "DeepDream" software fetched 8,000. But although fun, DeepDream images are limited, says Douglas Eck, a researcher in Google's main artificial intelligence research group, Google Brain. Last week he announced a new Google project called Magenta aimed at making new kinds of creative software that can generate more sophisticated artworks using music, video, and text. Magenta will draw on Google's latest research into artificial neural networks, which underpin what CEO Sundar Pichai calls his company's "AI first" strategy.

But experts believe they could become our friends and even provide enjoyable company. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. He believes it could provide company isolated people, such as the elderly. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. For a long time, Japanese scientists have been trying to create eerily human-like machines with a'presence'.

Film adaptations of massively popular video games are still a tough sell in the U.S. But with their new big-budget movie "Warcraft," Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures are betting they can take over the rest of the world. The movie, which cost an estimated 160 million to make, has all the hallmarks of a major summer box-office bomb. Reviews have been decidedly negative for the picture. Video games have traditionally struggled to make the transition to the big screen, and the effects-heavy production boasts little recognizable star power.

DIY website building service Wix.com has launched a new "artificial design intelligence" (ADI) service to automate the process of building websites. Founded out of Tel Aviv in 2006, Wix has so far served as an easy-to-use web development platform aimed at helping novices build HTML5 sites using drag-and-drop tools rather than code, while offering complementary services such as web hosting. Now with Wix ADI, the Tel Aviv-based company is looking to make creating websites even easier by using data garnered from its existing user base to feed into its new AI offering. So, websites created by algorithms is the general gist here. Wix ADI is touted as the "first-ever AI solution for website design and creation," and is being gradually introduced to users over the next few months.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) reminds us of many Hollywood movies, like The Terminator, The Matrix etc, in which machines surpass ability and smartness of human beings to perform incredible acts. With significant advancement in technology, it is now actually possible to empower a machine with AI by using a few programming techniques and database management system. But AI is no restricted to machines and robotics only, and is now seen as the next frontier of mobile devices too. Cortana, Siri and Google Now have already shown us how AI can make a difference in digital world to make human lives better. They behave as personal assistants to advise and suggest a user, like reminding birthdays of loved ones, an important meeting, a major event and many more.

Data scientists are always stressing over the "best" approach to variable selection, particularly when faced with massive amounts of information -- a frequent occurrence these days. "Massive" by today's standards means terabytes of data and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of features or predictors. There are many reasons for this "stress" but the reality is that a single, canonical solution does not exist. There are as many approaches to selecting features as there are statisticians since every statistician and their sibling has a POV or a paper on the subject. For years, there have been rumors that Google uses all available features in building its predictive algorithms.

Orcs and humans must come together to fight a new enemy in'Warcraft.' The orcs Durotan and Orgrim Doomhammer -- played via motion capture by Toby Kebbell and Rob Kazinsky -- are part of an invading force in'Warcraft.' Populating a fantasy landscape of wizards, warriors and monster wolves was all important to Warcraft director Duncan Jones. Yet just as key to the video-game adaptation is the tragedy and humanity at its core. Or, as he puts it, "we were trying to make a real movie."

Asus recently announced their latest range of products, including a predictable new ultra-thin laptop, amongst a range of other pieces of tech. However, arguably their most intriguing reveal came in the form of a little robot for you home that does everything, which Asus have aptly named the Zenbo. According to the Verge, the Asus Zenbo is unlike anything you've seen before, essentially bringing a real-world fully functioning version of BB-8 from the Star Wars series into your home. He spoke about the Zenbo's many key functions, describing the robot as a smart home manager, security guard, hands-free kitchen assistant, and family photographer, amongst many other things. It's a product that Asus are clearly very excited about.

While it has taken over 50000 pounds and a large collection of artists to hand-paint each frame of a the Van Gogh movie: Loving Vincent, recent advances in neural algorithms artistic style (Gatys et al.) allow one to capture his art style on a computer. Although the work of Gatys et al. worked well on images, the naive method for extending it to movies does not produce great results. The video below shows a new method of rendering movies in a given art style using optical flow to move the textures with the objects in the scene. A technical report is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.08153. Now that the code is written, the movie is generated with little human input.

Star Trek turned 50 in 2016. In its half-century of existence -- on TV, on the big screen, and in the worldwide community of its fans -- Star Trek has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Even casual viewers know the pointed ears, the Vulcan salute, and the meaning of "beam me up, Scotty." Yet, Star Trek does not owe its enduring popularity and its place in our collective imagination to its aliens or to its technological speculations. What makes it so unique, and so exciting, is its radical optimism about humanity's future as a society: in other words, utopia.