Returning to Short of the Week for a third time, creative studio Factory Fifteen serve-up this enticing science-fiction short that centres around a worker in a futuristic car manufacturing plant as he starts to experience problems with the artificial intelligence that runs the production line. A 4-minute introduction to a world the talented team are currently developing into a larger project, ANA dazzles with its impressive aesthetic but really hooks its audience in with its intriguing narrative take on the singularity. Aiming to put a new twist on a popular science-fiction storyline and make their concept more relatable by showing how such a situation could affect the "ordinary" man, ANA explores one vignette from a world where technology is rising-up against those that created it. Produced as a way to entice an audience into the universe they are currently evolving into a longer piece, Factory Fifteen's Paul Nicholls spoke to Short of the Week about the aims of the project: "We had multiple ambitions with the film. A short-term ambition was to create a really high-end piece of drama, mixing performance and VFX. For us the design of the world (Jonah, Chupan Chupai, The Bug) is as important as the performance in our projects, to create a believable world. Working with Richard Brake (Game Of Thrones, Batman Begins, Doom), we knew we had the performance down, it was then up to us and the rest of the team to deliver the rest. The long-term goal was to develop this as a teaser to a larger project, which is currently in development".

During the holiday season, warehouses across the country used different kinds of robots to fill retail orders and they made--and continue to make--warehouses more efficient than ever before. In fact, if robots were more broadly implemented it's estimated retailers could reduce their fulfillment costs by 450 million to 900 million in North America, according to research from Janney Capital Markets. Today there is a growing group of startup companies developing robots for use in manufacturing, e-commerce and logistics operations. A decade ago, robots working in a warehouse -- or, for that matter, writing newspaper stories, caring for the elderly or providing comfort to hospitalized children -- was the stuff of science fiction. But today, the world is on the cusp of a rapid economic transformation via robotics and artificial intelligence.

"Soon, our habitat will be invaded by unreal humans. Not only they'll influence our way of living, but also intervene in our modus operandi." I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Last week I released a list of must watch movies on Machine Learning and Data Science. I've watched 8 of them till now.

The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand. Despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree. Those may sound like the Luddite ravings of a crackpot who breached security at an IEEE conference. In fact, the opinions belong to IEEE Fellow Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan is one of the world's most respected authorities on machine learning and an astute observer of the field. His CV would require its own massive database, and his standing in the field is such that he was chosen to write the introduction to the 2013 National Research Council report "Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis." San Francisco writer Lee Gomes interviewed him for IEEE Spectrum on 3 October 2014. IEEE Spectrum: I infer from your writing that you believe there's a lot of misinformation out there about deep learning, big data, computer vision, and the like. Michael Jordan: Well, on all academic topics there is a lot of misinformation. The media is trying to do its best to find topics that people are going to read about. Sometimes those go beyond where the achievements actually are.

Empathy is a tricky business. The range and complexity of human emotion makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ever really understand how someone else is feeling. Nevertheless, empathy is considered to be a crucial aspect of what makes us human--indeed, our brains appear to be hardwired for it. So perhaps it won't come as much of a surprise that as machine learning becomes ever more sophisticated and capable of mimicking some of the most complex functions of the human brain, figuring out a way to teach a computer empathy is quickly becoming a business in itself. Known as artificial empathy, the idea here is to train machines to recognize social signals from humans, aka'visual data,' and then produce an appropriate response.

Now in its 30th year South by Southwest is synonymous with creativity and innovation for advertisers and marketers from around the world and this year has seen the program significantly expand with hundreds of new sessions catering to a record breaking 72,000 delegates across its interactive, music and film festivals. So beyond dizzying crowds, and the ever-present fear of missing out on the next big thing, what are some of the key trends to have emerged from the annual techie talkfest and what are the things which were hot in previous years but have now have lost their cool after going mainstream? Walking around Austin, VR is everywhere. Demand by festival goers to get their hands on the latest 360 experience has left people queuing day and night for their chance to play. Samsung, realising the round the clock queues their 5D sensory experience would attract, took things a step further with a tweet containing #VRonDemand summoning one of Austin's iconic hipster peddled pedicabs to your location wherever you were, taking the experience out of the showroom and into the streets. However, there was no sign of Microsoft's augmented reality visor the Hololens this year.

Beware this article may contain spoilers! Here is a list of AI movies you should definitely watch. I guess I first realised what AI meant when I was watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence: a small boy could technically be replaced by a robot, expressing his feelings, thinking and learning things like a real human. What struck me in the movie, was that no matter what the robot did to be like a real boy, it seemed to stop him from being accepted as a son. It seemed inevitable: Humans & AI could not coexist in the same Universe. This actually happened in a lot of movies like HER where Samantha can no longer stay within our human world and all the OSes need to go away in order to evolve.

I have been getting into Natural Language Processing more lately, and have been reading about tools and products that are available right now. I came across the name Narrative Science again. It's an Artificial Intelligence technology company based in Chicago. I first heard about them a few years ago when I read an article about one of their products writing pretty decent sports reports for local newspapers. I looked around their website to see if I can learn a bit more about their technology, but unsurprisingly they are very cagey about revealing anything actionable about their work.

And no sound bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, will bring them back to life." First written in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza, these words from Rafeef Ziadah's poem "We Teach Life, Sir" became popularised by a 2011 performance that went viral. A Palestinian performance poet based in London, Ziadah is an activist in her own right and a member of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee. She has helped spearhead many of the initiatives calling for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel until it adheres to the demands granting Palestinians rights under international law. The poem is now featured on Ziadah's latest album of the same name, which blends her poetry with original music composed by Phil Mansour. Al Jazeera spoke with Ziadah about her latest album, the inspiration and politics of her art, as well as her UK-based activism. Al Jazeera: Your poems were previously known for your captivating performance. Why did you decide to add music to your poems? Rafeef Ziadah: Both my first album "Hadeel" and this second one "We Teach Life" have been collaborations with wonderful musicians who deliberately worked to ensure the music strengthened and emphasised the words. With an album, unlike live performances, people are not able to see me and relate to my facial expressions or hand gestures - on the album we wanted to recreate that connection and music really helped to bring the poems to life. I was happy to work with activist-artist Phil Monsour (who produced the album). The music has also helped introduce the work to a broader audience and is beginning to have radio play on independent radio stations around the world. Al Jazeera: How long did it take you to make this album? Why have you decided to release it now and what do you hope will come out of its release? Ziadah: The album was a slow collaboration that started with a number of poetry pieces and slowly grew in number. It took about 12 months to complete the final production, but the poems were written over several years and recorded in a few countries depending on accessibility. It is really an attempt to capture in words a number of recent experiences of Palestinians inside historic Palestine and in exile as well. This work is also - in many ways- a collective effort beyond myself and the musicians because we launched a crowd funding campaign to support the final stages of production and many people generously donated to make sure narratives that are largely absent in the Western mainstream can be heard. As I explain in the album's artwork "the poems and music here have been written over several years, three wars, two sieges, too many borders and many protests and picket lines.

Lightroom users who sync their photos to the app's Web module can now test out a new and improved way to locate specific images: Search. As part of a new Lightroom Technology Preview series debuting today, Adobe is making the search feature available to Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscribers to test and offer feedback before finalizing it. As described in a blog post Friday morning, Search lets you type in a keyword to enable Lightroom to display all related images it finds in your library, even images you never tagged or labeled. Macworld got to test out the new feature early, and it worked quite nicely. Just log in to your account, and click on the Lr logo at the top left to access the menu. There, you'll find the new Technology Previews feature.