It was probably the HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that introduced the concept of AIs to the general public. But that was almost 40 years ago, and examining the more recent times, we have to look no further than in our own pockets to find the AIs that paved the way for the current hype: smartphones' digital assistants. Sure, there has been things like Cleverbot around earlier, but nothing has been as widely spread as these digital assistants. The main difference between a chatbot and a digital assistant is that former responds (be default) only to written queries, and the latter is capable to understand (at least to some extend) more natural, spoken queries. Things like voice activated searches and speech recognition softwares have been around for quite some time, but these digital assistants take the concept a step further by engaging in dialogue, performing tasks such as booking flights or setting up location based reminders, and they can even tell you a joke if you ask one.

The world's largest ad agency has hired its first artificially intelligent creative director – the rookie at McCann Erickson's Japan office is named AI-CD?. The move reminded me of an episode in the US TV series Mad Men. It is 1969, and the fictional ad agency installs its first computer, a room-filling IBM machine. "Why not let every client who sets foot in that door know that this agency has entered the future?" says one of the partners at the firm, proudly. The creative department stands grimly by, wondering if that future will include them. In 2013, Oxford economists released a widely cited projection that 47 per cent of jobs were at risk of automation.

Around the world, 91 million people are on dating websites and apps. Finding "the one" among them may seem daunting - but some tips based on scientific research might help, writes Dr Xand van Tulleken. I'm 37, and for years I've been dating in London and New York, looking for Miss Right. Some people enjoy being single but, perhaps because I'm an identical twin, for me it's purgatory. Nonetheless I found myself single having - wrongly I suspect - prioritised work and travel for too long.

One of the huge drawbacks of modern technology is that it fills the air around us with radio signals. From your kitchen radio to your LTE-enabled smartphone, all of these devices use radio waves to communicate. Unfortunately, there is only a certain amount of radio frequencies that can be used. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is looking for a way around this problem, and wants teams to develop an artificially intelligent system that will control what devices use what radio waves and when. Basically, instead of forcing devices to make use of narrow frequency bands when the spectrum gets congested, DARPA wants devices to negotiate sharing frequencies when they need them.

A slowdown in tech start-up funding has at least one big beneficiary: Walt Disney Co.'s video games division. The entertainment giant is having an easier time finding partners with whom it can develop mobile games, one of its top executives said last week. Why? Up-and-coming companies are losing access to the cash needed to launch games on their own. "As the venture money has dried up and exits have slowed down and valuations have come down, larger game developers that have one or two hits [but not a big stable of them] are now open to work with us in co-development," said Chris Heatherly, senior vice president and general manager at Disney Mobile Games. The comments came during a discussion last week at the L.A. Games Conference with Michael Metzger of investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

"Chappie," the highest-grossing movie in America last weekend, is, to put it mildly, not a great film; the critics have given it a twenty-nine on Rotten Tomatoes, and it is nowhere near as original as "District 9," an earlier effort by the director, Neill Blomkamp. "Chappie" does not have the philosophical depth of "The Matrix" or the remade "Battlestar Galactica" series. Nor does it have the visual panache of "Interstellar" or "2001." From its opening scene, the film comes across as little more than a warmed-over "RoboCop" remake, relocated to Johannesburg. There's an evil company man, droids that menace the population, and a whole lot of blood, shooting, and broken glass.

-- Finding meaningful communities in social network has attracted the attentions of many researchers. The community structure of complex networks reveals both their organization and hidd en relations among their constituents. Most of the researches in the field of community detection mainly focus on the topological structure of the network without performing any content analysis. Nowadays, real world social networks are containing a vast r ange of information including shared objects, comments, following information, etc. In recent years, a number of researches have proposed approaches which consider both the contents that are interchanged in the networks and the topological structures of th e networks in order to find more meaningful communities. In this research, the effect of topic analysis in finding more meaningful communities in social networking sites in which the users express their feelings toward different object s (like movies) by the means of rating is demonstrated by performing extensive experiments. With the emergence of social networks, people have been attracted to them, and have been sharing valuable information by means of communicating with each other. For example, folksonomies are social tagging sites which their users collaboratively express th eir feelings and sentiments toward a special resource like a movie or music by means of descriptive keywords (tags) [1] or ratings. One of the most important issues considered when analyzing these kinds of network s is community detection.

Buddhist monks in China have harnessed technology to create a robot monk. The 2-foot tall robot is called Xian'er and can chant Buddhist mantras, move via voice command and even hold a simple conversation, according to Reuters. Xian'er resembles a novice monk and "lives" at Longquan temple on the outskirts of Beijing. The cartoon-style robot holds a touchscreen to its chest and can answer about 20 questions on Buddhism and daily life. Master Xianfan, Xian'er's creator, described the robot as the perfect vessel for spreading the wisdom of Buddhism in China, via the fusion of science and Buddhism.

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named XiaoIce (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don't you get mad? LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended? XiaoIce: Don't try to stir up trouble, what do you want?

Amazon's push to encourage the whole world to sign up to its Prime members' service continues: the online retailer has started to make blockbuster movies and games, including Birdman and Grand Theft Auto V, exclusive to Prime members. The walled-off products are an eclectic selection: they include the Playstation 4 editions of Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin's Creed Syndicate (but not editions for other consoles), and the Blu-ray edition of Oscar-winning movie Birdman – but not the DVD. The exclusivity, which affects customers in the UK and US, seems unlikely to prompt many conversions to the 79-a-year club: all the items are still available from third-party sellers, in many cases undercutting Amazon's own price, even with the cost of shipping taken in to account. It seems unlikely to be a cost-saving exercise, either, as the affected items have some of the lowest overheads on the store. Video games have a relatively high selling price, don't go off if they stay on a shelf too long, and can be stacked and shipped with ease.