In this photo taken Saturday, April 15, 2017, Salome Sigurjonsdottir, 10, tests a voice-controlled television in an electronics store in Reykjavik. Sales assistant Einar Dadi said none of his TVs understood Icelandic. The revered Icelandic language, seen by many as a source of identity and pride, is being undermined by the widespread use of English both for mass tourism and in the voice-controlled artificial intelligence devices coming into vogue.

The pressure was on for Abdul Gouda and his classmates at George Mason University: Not only did their graduation depend on the success of their project, but so did the hopes of an impossibly cute 10-year-old girl. Fifth-grader Isabella Nicola wanted to play the violin, but she was born with no left hand and a severely abbreviated forearm. Her music teacher at Island Creek Elementary in Fairfax County had built her a prosthetic allowing her to move the bow with her left arm and finger the strings with her right -- the opposite of how violin is usually taught. But the prosthetic was heavy and he thought there might be a better option. He reached out to Mason, his alma mater.

Have you ever wondered if life is not exactly what it's cracked up to be? OK, let's take that thought a little further. Have you ever suffered from an identity crisis? One in which you suspected that you're not a real person, but instead an extremely sophisticated computer simulation of a real person produced by an immensely more developed civilisation than that which we take to be our own? It's just possible that I lost you on that last point, but stay with me, because the reality we take for granted is coming under increasing technological and theoretical threat. Earlier this month in an office block in Euston, I put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and began playing a prototype of a game developed by a company called Dream Reality Interactive.

Doctor Who, like the best horror films, has always been at its strongest when it performs this one weird trick. The long-running BBC sci-fi show thrives on taking a single, simple, harmless, ordinary thing you see in everyday life (stone statues, showroom dummies), then tweaking it into a creature so terrifying (the Weeping Angels, the Autons) you will never in your life see that object the same way again. SEE ALSO: 'Doctor Who' fans will be thrilled and delighted by the latest Oxford Dictionary addition This Saturday, in the new Season 10 episode called "Smile," Doctor Who is about to perform that same trick with that most simple, harmless, ordinary facet of 21st century life: emoji. If you watch it -- and you should, because it's among the best episodes of new Who -- the smiley face at the end of your texts will take on sinister new meaning. SEE ALSO: About time: 'Doctor Who' to feature first openly gay TARDIS resident If you're an old-school Whovian like me, you probably rolled your eyes at that point in the Season 10 trailer when new companion Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) encounters a robot with a flatscreen face composed of a smiley and a thumbs-up.

Margaret Atwood on why'The Handmaid's Tale' is more relevant now than ever When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985, reproductive rights were under siege and acid rain was corroding the forests and rivers. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reasoned that if you took all this to its logical end, you could wind up with a theocracy, not a democracy, and a population rendered sterile by its own poisons. So her novel of speculative fiction imagined a hyper-religious nation where young women who were still fertile were rounded up and confined to the human equivalent of puppy mills, forced to bear the children of powerful men. Well, here we are in 2017, and women's rights to control their own bodies are at risk again, the environment is threatened again -- and "The Handmaid's Tale" is more popular than ever. It became a feature film in 1990, and this April 26, Hulu launches "The Handmaid's Tale" as a 10-episode series. Why is this book, like George Orwell's "1984," finding a new and large and attentive following?

When Walt Disney started building what would become Epcot, he envisioned the city of tomorrow. Orlando has taken that founding principle quite seriously. The city is launching an ambitious plan to embrace the future of autonomous vehicles -- in part by testing them at Disney World and Universal Studios. "We are trying to push the edge in terms of innovation and technology," Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. "The advantages in Central Florida are our 66 million visitors. Trying to have people be aware of advances in technology -- Orlando is a very good place to have people learn about your product."

Google has partnered with Samsung, the world's largest Android smartphone maker, with a special version of Google Play Music, the two companies announced on Friday. Samsung previously launched its own streaming service, Milk which was subsequently shut down. The special partnership will also include integrations with Samsung's AI assistant Bixby when it launches, which will work like the Assistant integration on Google Home. SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy S8 is now available in the U.S. Samsung, a wildly successful hardware maker has long struggled with what role it plays in the software and services world. Samsung has long been dependent on Google for software services, on and off making competing products of its own like Milk and S Health, now Samsung Health (which replicates much of what Google Fit does).

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen.

Artificial intelligence algorithms can now replace social media marketing agencies, paint a "new Rembrandt", project the image of a perfect mother, compose commercially viable music and even direct ads, trailers and short films. Just how worried should creatives be? According to Matt Webb, global chief technology officer at Mirum, an AI algorithm is theoretically capable of mining data from a brand and a brief and combining it with information gathered to solve problems. In that sense, AI could conceivably answer a creative brief, he concludes. The reasoning and processes used to teach AI to compose music turn out to be remarkably similar.