Janicza Bravo makes short films about loneliness. In one, Michael Cera plays an abrasive paraplegic who can't get lucky. In another, Gaby Hoffmann plays a phone stalker for whom the description "comes on too strong" is not strong enough. Bravo's shorts employ the visual grammar of art-house cinema: over-the-shoulder shots representing a character's point of view, handheld tracking shots depicting urgent movement, lingering closeups to heighten intimacy or unease, carefully composed establishing shots with an actor in the center of the frame. In March, 2015, Bravo went to Venice, on the western edge of Los Angeles, to meet with a production company called Wevr. The name is pronounced "weaver," but it can also be thought of as a sentence, with "We" as the subject and "V.R." as the verb. As anyone who has read a tech blog within the past five years, or a sci-fi novel within the past five decades, knows, "V.R." stands for virtual reality--a loosely defined phrase that is now being applied to several related forms of visual media. You put your smartphone into a portable device like a Google Cardboard or a Samsung Gear--or you use a more powerful computer-based setup, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive--and the device engulfs your field of vision and tracks your head movement. The filmic world is no longer flat. Wherever you look, there's something to see. The producers at Wevr invited Bravo to write and direct a V.R. project. "I said no," she told me. "It sounded like a technical thing, and I'm not into technical. But then I talked to my husband, and he said, 'How often do people just hand you money in this business?' So I changed my mind." She thought about what kind of story might be told most effectively in the new medium. "The two words I kept hearing about V.R. were'empathy' and'immersion,' and I wasn't sure that being immersed in one of my dark comedies would be all that useful."

For the past few minutes I've been chatting with George Washington, and honestly he seems rather drunk. He also appears to have been hanging around with 20-somethings, because he keeps saying things like "cool, haha," and "u wanna join my army or wut?" This, of course, is not actually America's first president. It is automated, conversational artificial intelligence, known as a chatbot, created by Drunk History, a comedy TV show, and made available through the messaging program Kik. You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services including Kik, WeChat, Telegram, and now, Facebook Messenger. Some are simply meant to entertain, but a growing number are designed to do something useful.

In this special guest feature, Dave O'Flanagan, CEO and co-founder of Boxever, outlines how airlines are leveraging big data and predictive capabilities to transform how they engage with customers. Dave is the CEO and co-founder of Boxever, a data science and omni-channel personalization platform for travel companies. The subprime financial crisis revealed that our data is only as good as our ability to analyze and understand it. AI will be necessary to helping prevent the next crisis before it happens. Marco Scirea, a PhD student at the IT University of Copenhagen, won the best paper award at the EvoMUSART conference for his research on music composition using artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (A.I. as many refer to it) is quickly becoming our reality. And even though its technology is all around us, many of us don't understand what that technology is. The "misconception" about artificial intelligence, is that it's a "robot," says Tim Urban, whose stick-figure-filled explainer on the technology has been read by more than 4 million people on his website, Wait But Why. The robot, however, is merely the "container" for the artificial intelligence, Urban told Olivia Stern for "Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist." "The A.I. is the software inside the container. The A.I. is, in particular, software that can make decisions."

I think that's quite a misleading title. More appropriate to say "Adversarial images for humans". What makes adversarial examples for deep learning "intriguing" is that there are indistinguishable from the original image. We want to have behavior similar to humans and how to achieve it is an open research problem.

Instead, what captured viewers' attention most was Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence program, which made its global debut on the program to predict the series finalists and winner. Named "Ai," the system got every one of its algorithm-induced guesses right. I Am Singer, broadcast by Hunan TV, has been one of China's top-rated shows since its debut in 2013. During the show's four-hour season finale on Friday, Alibaba's Ai analyzed various factors in real time, such as the popularity of the songs contestants performed, their pitch and energy onstage, lyrical content and audience feedback. Meanwhile, the show's in-house audience of 500, whose vote determined the real winner, deliberated separately.

Speculating what will cause our ultimate demise has been the stuff of science fiction for years--if it's not aliens wiping out the human race, it's probably robots. This is a proven trope that keeps moviegoers flocking to the likes of Independence Day, Ender's Game, The Terminator, or The Matrix. To deviate from the norm takes a little extra work, but one way directors can suggest a different route is with a short format proof-of-concept sales pitch. Created with nearly 40,000 in Kickstarter funding, "Rise" is a short film aspiring to feature length. Its central theme is to Terminator what District 9 was to Independence Day.

The subprime financial crisis revealed that our data is only as good as our ability to analyze and understand it. AI will be necessary to helping prevent the next crisis before it happens. In his new film "The Big Short," based on the book by Michael Lewis, Adam McKay attempts the difficult task of explaining exactly how the credit and subprime housing bubble led to the 2008 worldwide economic crash. One of McKay's main points in outlining how Michael Burry, and a handful of other Wall Street outsiders, were able to predict the impending crisis is that they simply investigated the underlying data. As Ryan Gosling's character narrates in the film: "A few did what the rest never thought to do… they looked."

How would you go about teaching an artificial intelligence how to love? Much has been written about Spike Jonze's Her, the Oscar-nominated tale of love between man and operating system. Poetic license aside, is that really possible? What computers lack are bodies. The thoughts and feelings and emotions we call "love" are not abstract experiences; they're intertwined with senses and hormones.

If you think chatbots are hot right now -- being used in psychotherapy, turning into racist trolls, and presenting an existential threat to Apple -- just wait until they turn into full-fledged personal assistants. In five years time, digital personal assistants will be even more important than smartphones, says University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos, author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World." "What you have right now on your smartphone is dozens of apps," Domingos tells Tech Insider, "with each app doing it's own thing." On any given Friday night, you use one app to find a restaurant, another to buy a movie ticket, another to figure out how to get to where you're going, and another to find a date to take out with you. "It's incredibly annoying," he says, since the apps "don't talk to each other and you have to learn all these different interfaces."