Samantha Gilweit, who is used to performing improv comedy in front of large crowds, went with her best opening bit, the one about drunken princesses that never fails. She delivered the punchline, and…dead silence. Her mind raced with how to recover. A second later, smiley-face emoji appeared over the heads of the animated robots and digitally rendered humanoids that stood in for the audience, followed by a gush of hearts. That's how "you knew you were killing it," the 31-year-old said.

Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant is spreading to third-party hardware with the Triby connected speaker. The 199 Triby from Invoxia is in some ways similar to Amazon's Echo speaker. Using Alexa voice commands, it connects to Internet radio services such as Pandora and Spotify, delivers the weather and other information, lets you buy stuff from Amazon, and can control a range of connected-home devices. And like the Echo, the Triby supports always-on voice commands, so you can control these functions from across the room. But while Echo requires a power cord to operate, Triby has a built-in battery that lasts up to two weeks on a charge, and provides eight to 10 hours of music playback.

"Stories don't interest me," Geoff Dyer told the Huffington Post in 2014. That this is true is evident in his new collection of essays, "White Sands." Which doesn't mean that "White Sands" isn't a good read, because it is. You must, however, get used to Dyer's tone, which is persnickety and unenthusiastic. His virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesn't pretend to be heading anywhere, but then "White Sands" turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving.

The Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei said that he will release a documentary film next year on the refugee crisis. Ai, often described as China's most high-profile artist, was speaking at a news conference in Bern to mark the opening of the "Chinese Whispers" exhibition, featuring around 150 works of contemporary Chinese artists - including Ai Weiwei artwork "Fragments"- at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern. Ai said he has spent a lot of time in refugee camps in recent months and witnessed a "very difficult situation" and decided to share his experience by making a film. "It's a documentary film, we have been shooting over 600 hours, and I've did hundred of interviews, there is all kind of people: politicians, refugees or priests or NGOs…all kind of people involved in this crisis," Weiwei told reporters. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei looks on as he visits a migrant's makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 9, 2016.

The first time I saw it, I was like, 'You people are nuts, this is not going to be interesting.' And by the end I was cheering. You just kind of get into it once these robots start racing."

The next J.J. Abrams-produced original sci-fi film has just signed its lead actors, and perhaps spilled some more plot details. According to Variety, J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot company has landed actors David Oyelowo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw to star in God Particle, the latest in Bad Robot's series of low-budget sci-fi originals that includes 2008's Cloverfield and this month's 10 Cloverfield Lane. Oyelowo is best known for his inspired portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in 2013's Selma, but has also appeared in Jack Reacher and A Most Violent Year, while Mbatha-Raw has shown up in Concussion, Beyond the Lights and the short-lived 2010 Bad Robot series Undercovers. Meanwhile, the official plot synopsis for God Particle, which is being directed by Julius Onah, follows "a team of astronauts on a mission who make a terrifying discovery that challenges all they know about the fabric of reality, as they desperately fight for survival." But The Wrap has added a few new wrinkles to that narrative, reporting that the film "follows an American space station crew who, believing they have destroyed Earth via a Hadron accelerator, allow the crew of hostile nations to board their ship, with disastrous results."

Recommender Systems (RS) [1] are a kind of system that seek to recommend to users what they are likely interested in. Unlike search engines, the users do not need to type any keyword. The RS's will learn their interest automatically. For instance, if the user has just bought a numeric camera, the RS will recommend to him some SD memory cards; if a user watches a lot of action movies, the RS may suggest some other action movies to him. And this is the typical behaviors which we observe universally in Netflix (movies), Youtube (videos), Google Play (apps), Facebook (friends), Amazon (goods) and other platforms today.

In Facebook Messenger, for example, several news organization such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already using bots and some level of automation to deliver news through the platform. Artificial intelligence understands the environment it operates in and performs certain actions as a result of it. AI seeks to learn what its users want and how they want it. In the specific case of news media, articles can be processed through algorithms that analyze readers' locations, social media posts and other publicly available data. They can then be served content tailored to their personality, mood and social economic status, among other things.

They sound cute, but for the second year in a row, politically motivated groups calling themselves the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies have more or less successfully gamed the Hugo Award nominations, some of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction and fantasy. The Chuck Tingle book is one of their recommendations. The puppies oppose diversity initiatives and support lists that are dominated by white men. Their targets, which they call SJW for "social justice warriors," are women, people of color, LGBT writers, editors and artists and the people who support them, including L.A. Times Critic at Large John Scalzi. Rabid Puppies leader Vox Day, a self-described libertarian, has criticized best-selling science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, who is black, as an "ignorant half-savage," writing, "Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males."

It's that time of year: The most prepared of you are carboloading after weeks of training for Marathon Monday, while the least prepared are scrambling to finish your taxes. Either way, surely you'll need some breaks in the pasta and accounting. Should you take your kids to Disney's live-action/CGI remake of its beloved 1967 film "The Jungle Book"? Absolutely, says Ty Burr, who gives three stars to this movie placing "talking animals of almost tactile musculature and movement" in a lush jungle landscape; it holds up right until its overly frenetic final scenes. The jungle beasts are voiced by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, and Scarlett Johanssen, and newcomer Neel Sethi is charming as Mowgli.