Back in October 2014, Taylor Swift opened an account on Line, the messaging app that is massively popular in Asia. The account currently doesn't do much. If you communicate with it, you can hear a funny voice message from Swift, for instance. Paul McCartney has one, too. Burberry and Selfridges also have accounts on WeChat and Line.

Mark Hamill is a lot busier this time around in Star Wars Episode VIII. The actor, who reprised his role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, took a break after a long day of filming the franchise's eighth installment at London's Pinewood Studios to talk about his return to video games. Hamill is part of an all-star cast that spent time with game designer Chris Roberts (creator of Wing Commander) to bring full performance-capture acting to the characters in Squadron 42. The upcoming PC action game is part of the massive crowdfunded Star Citizen universe. Hamill talks about his second stint with Roberts, and how much technology has advanced in the PC gaming space, in this exclusive interview.

Balls blasting across the court weren't a sign of basketball practice; they signified the next step in designing a "throwing" machine for athletes. "Our company," said one of the owners, Jim Langland of Ottumwa, "makes sewing machines for quilting. About three years ago, we did some R and D in a completely different direction; we're now throwing basketballs." He was on the Ottumwa campus helping a crew take photos and video of the basketball-throwing machine, which shoots balls out during practice. The quilt-sewing machine company, APQS, now has the first in its line of smart robot pitchers, the Hot Shot.

As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don't throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Traditional neural networks can't do this, and it seems like a major shortcoming. For example, imagine you want to classify what kind of event is happening at every point in a movie. It's unclear how a traditional neural network could use its reasoning about previous events in the film to inform later ones. Recurrent neural networks address this issue.

This is 2016 version of the Eurovision prediction. I have explained systematics in quite detailed fashion in the last year post which you can find here. Very shortly, I measured how many tweets have been sent about each song from each country. From this, I estimated amount of votes that each country would give to another. For example, if Germans tweets the most about Polish song, I assume that Germany will give Poland 12 points.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? In 1950 English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which starts off by proposing a thought experiment that he called the "Imitation Game." In one room is a human "interrogator" and in another room a man and a woman. The goal of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which of the unknown hidden interlocutors is the man and which is the woman.

Every year, the Association for Computing Machinery--the world's largest scientific and educational computing society--gathers to explore the future of computer interaction in a legendary conference called CHI. It's an amazing event, in which thousands of researchers, scientists, and futurists get together to push the boundaries of what it means to interact with machines. It's a dizzying collision involving enough ideas about what the future of man and machine will look like to put the world's science-fiction authors out of their jobs for good. This year's CHI 2016 conference in San Jose was no exception--but among the hundreds of projects, here are eight that stood out. The problem: In VR, objects might look real, but they don't feel real.

If you tell Siri to set an alarm for 5 am, she'll set an alarm for 5 am. But if you start asking her which prescription pain killer is least likely to upset your stomach, she's not really gonna know what to do--just because that's a pretty complicated sentence. Siri is a long way from what computer scientists call "natural language understanding." She can't truly understand the natural way we humans talk--despite the way Apple portrays her in all those TV ads. In fact, we shouldn't really be talking about her as a "her" at all.

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) plays a huge role in technology, education and research. AI is complex, but it is more efficient and reliable than humans when it comes to the workforce because it is fast and it doesn't get tired. According to new reports, AI investment continues to grow. Most of the things we see about AI springs from science fiction movies.

Showcase has announced that Canadians will be able to see Season 2 of the award-winning series Mr. Robot this summer, at the same time as Americans can see it on the USA Network. That's significant news in light of the fact that last year, Season 1 of Mr. Robot didn't debut in Canada until several months after it had wrapped up in the States. That certainly made it tough for Canadians to avoid spoilers in a series that has a lot of twists and turns. But that won't be an issue in Season 2, which debuts July 13, simultaneously on Showcase in Canada and the USA Network in the States. Elliot becomes involved with an underground hacker group called fsociety, after being recruited by its mysterious leader, played by Christian Slater.