Moviemakers excel at recreating violence and gore on screen. But Will Self asks if we should view fictional violence with more caution. When I was younger I equated viewing such things (and viewing actors performing sexual acts) with some sort of liberty - an existential freedom to be the virile fellow I felt myself to be, and a universal freedom to witness human expression in all its polymorphous perversity. But with age - and possibly, I concede, declining virility - I began to see that pornography entailed the exploitation of vulnerable and mostly young people, while the depictions of violence which bedizen our ubiquitous screens aren't victimless crimes - no matter how enthusiastically those who stage them, may consent. A few years ago Stephen Pinker published a book in which he set out to show that the venerable Dr Pangloss (a character in Voltaire's Candide) was in fact completely right - we are living in the best of possible worlds, while every day, and in every way, things can only get better.

McCann has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millenials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

A Weird Month for Artificial Intelligence Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM.

What you're seeing here is not a professionally made piece of robotics to be used in an upcoming Hollywood movie, nor is it a detailed prop used to showcase some new AI program. This is a home-made robot, built from scratch, by a Hong Kong man over the last year and a half. It is clearly made to resemble the actress Scarlett Johansson, even though the maker won't directly say so, something that only contributes to the fact that it is creepy as hell. It features limited movement abilities, and can speak using canned phrases (with a voice that definitely does not resemble Johansson's). And in case you're wondering, no, the humanoid robot was not built to meet, ahem, personal needs.

At least this is what R Balki's Ki & Ka tries to establish: In this world, women behave like men, and men are already men. Delhi-based Kabir Bansal (Arjun Kapoor) is in line to inherit his father's multi-crore business conglomerate. Are you also reminded of the AIB Roast? Yes, Arjun Kapoor is playing a North Indian, again. Kabir wants to be like his mother because he believes being a housewife is nothing short of being an artist.

Ricky Ma, a products and graphics designer from Hong Kong has built a life-like, programmable robot. Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labours of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than NZ 72,427, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modelled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone.

One year ago, we launched On This Day to make it easier to relive and share memories on Facebook. Since launch, On This Day has been used by hundreds of millions of people globally. Because memories are so personal and unique, we wanted to make sure On This Day shows people the memories they most likely want to see and share, especially when it comes to the memories they see in News Feed. Specifically, over the past year, we focused on three areas to optimize the product experience: user experience research, filtering, and ranking. To better understand what types of memories are best to show people in News Feed, we listened to feedback from people through UX research. In these sessions, we learned just how complex memories can be.

Weaponizing Machine Learning Against ISIS Will Tangle Military Chains of Command Everyone on the Internet had a great time with Tay, Microsoft's Twitter robot that became a racist Holocaust denier in a matter of a few hours (then came back and did it again). The company had created a public relations flap -- more incident than a disaster -- while giving the public an object lesson on the pros and cons of machine learning: Automation can harness patterns to fascinating effect at speed, but the results will be predictably hard to predict. As is often the case, the military is an early adopter of automation technology. It is -- at one time -- leading the charge toward machine learning and also trying desperately to keep up.

This publication is not an official publication of Colorado State University, but is published by an independent corporation using the name'The Rocky Mountain Collegian' pursuant to a license granted by CSU.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.