BB-8, the adorable yet heroic droid who made his debut in the latest Star Wars film, is now also the poster child of a hot youth-focused tech trend: toys that improve over time. In this case, the toy robot now has the ability to react to screenings of "The Force Awakens." On Tuesday, Sphero pushed out a smartphone app update giving our current favorite toy robot the ability to listen and respond to the movie's dialog. Before you start the movie--which was just released on home video--you'll need to update then open iPhone or Android Sphero BB-8 control app, then connect it to the baseball-sized robot. You'll want to keep BB-8 in his charging cradle, so he doesn't roll off your table or couch.

Enabling the feature is easy, though you'll need an iPhone or iPad to use it right now. To use it, ask Siri to "turn on VoiceOver," a built-in iOS feature that describes out loud whatever is on your screen. You can also tap into Settings, then "General" and "Accessibility" to manually flip on VoiceOver. Representatives for Facebook say the feature will come to other platforms in the near future. While they didn't specify which, the demo shown to The Huffington Post ran on a laptop.

Feature extraction has gained increasing attention in the field of machine learning, as in order to detect patterns, extract information, or predict future observations from big data, the urge of informative features is crucial. The process of extracting features is highly linked to dimensionality reduction as it implies the transformation of the data from a sparse high-dimensional space, to higher level meaningful abstractions. This dissertation employs Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to capture higher level features of paragraph vectors. Although Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations are considered the state of the art for extracting paragraph vectors, we show that a quick topic analysis model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation can provide meaningful features too. We evaluate the two methods on the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, a collection of 25,203 movie plot summaries extracted from Wikipedia. Finally, for both approaches, we use K-Nearest Neighbors to discover similar movies, and plot the projected representations using T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding to depict the context similarities. These similarities, expressed as movie distances, can be used for movies recommendation. The recommended movies of this approach are compared with the recommended movies from IMDB, which use a collaborative filtering recommendation approach, to show that our two models could constitute either an alternative or a supplementary recommendation approach.

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.

I have 34 years as an engineer here at Intel. Almost all but about the last, I don't know, four or five has been mainly on the manufacturing side; all of our silicon manufacturing. Which, in many ways makes you a maker because you're producing a million chips a day. When I look at a 3D printer, I look at it as not only what can I build with it, but I understand exactly how that machine works. I could take it apart and put it back together.

We live in times, where science fiction authors are struggling to keep up with reality. In recent years, there has been an explosion of research and experiments that deal with creativity and A.I. Almost every week, there is a new bot that paints, writes stories, composes music, designs objects or builds houses: Artificial Intelligence systems performing creative tasks? Our research started by wondering about this phenomenon and playfully experimenting with it. This lead to an in-depth investigation, of what we call "CreativeAI". This document is the first chapter of our adventure into CreativeAI, aiming at establishing a backstory and language we can use to talk about this intricate subject.

A 42-year-old man in Hong Kong spent 50,000 to realize a childhood dream: making a robot modeled on a Hollywood star, Reuters reports. Jezebel concurs, writing, "It does look just enough like Johansson for her to maybe want to consider taking out a restraining order." Still--after a year and a half of work, including teaching himself programming and electromechanics--Ma isn't letting anyone bring him down. "If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," he tells Reuters, which has photos and video of his creation. Ma built the Mark 1 on the balcony of his apartment. It was a largely lonely experience.

Theme park fans are in for a treat when Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey officially opens on Thursday inside Hogwarts Castle at Universal Studios Hollywood. For those who have never been on the world's best dark ride, Forbidden Journey literally turns the traditional dark ride experience on its head by placing riders on the end of a unique robotic arm as they travel past domed projection screens and animatronic characters. For those who have visited Universal's Islands of Adventure, the West Coast version of Forbidden Journey adds 3-D imagery to the domed screen segments that were only 2-D when the ride debuted in 2010 at the Florida theme park. Candlesticks float above riders aboard Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood. Candlesticks float above riders aboard Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood.

A Hong Kong man has built a robot version of Scarlett Johansson in his flat. Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old designer, has poured more than 34,000 and over a year of work into the catchily-named'Mark 1' humanoid robot. Speaking to Reuters, Ma said he decided to model the Mark 1's appearance on a Hollywood star. He didn't say which, but it's fair to assume Scarlett Johansson may have given him a lot of inspiration. The robot can move its limbs, alter its facial expressions, and even reply when spoken to by Ma through a microphone. Mark 1 has a special talent for responding to compliments.