He's been there for three weeks now -- though he is quick to point out that he was out of the office for one of them so it's really only been two weeks -- but that's not stopping Quartz from launching one of the Bot Studio's first experiments, a Twitter bot to help attendees of the NICAR conference. People going to #NICAR17 can ask a Twitter bot. Keefe says the Bot Studio, which is funded by a $240,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information. Keefe joined Quartz after spending 16 years at WNYC. We spoke about the lessons he learned from public radio, his goals for the Bot Studio, and what it'll take for bots to catch on.

I once spent a week tailing the band Hanson, three teenage boys who had grown up on an island where the only pop available to them was from Time Life rock'n' roll anthologies, 1957-69. And the music they made reflected it -- their songs were the products of people who had thought deeply about Bobby Darin but had never heard Led Zeppelin or LL Cool J. And sometimes I think about Hanson when I'm sitting down to dinner at Kismet, the new quasi-Middle Eastern restaurant on Los Feliz's southern edge. It's not because the sleek dining room is old-fashioned -- the plant-filled Midcentury Modern groove could not be more present-day Los Angeles -- or because its customers, who all look like recent Wesleyan grads, are anything less than yoga-toned and chic. The menu, surpassingly light and vegetable-intensive, has the carefully layered flavors, the touches of heat, tartness and herbal intensity that we have grown to expect from the best new kitchens. The aesthetic of co-chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, whom you may know from Madcapra in Grand Central Market if not from their former restaurant Glasserie out by Brooklyn's Pulaski Bridge, is up-to-date: the tahini is made with sunflower seeds, the dining room smells of za'atar, and Aleppo pepper flows like water.

Today, there is incredible interest in anything that is even remotely related to #Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is dominating the conversation on a variety of levels. Philosophers and thinkers are debating the moral implications and risks for human kind of a world where intelligent machines are ubiquitous. In the media, it seems that a new movie or TV series on AI is launched every month. Academic papers on the topic are receiving attention from far beyond the scope of the usual research audience.

I'm a big Star Wars fan, so when "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" descended on theaters late last year, I braved the crowds to see it -- twice in the first 18 hours. And just like all the other Star Wars movies, "Rogue One" stoked our geeky imaginations with all the technological possibilities of a galaxy far, far away, like holographic displays and all sorts of strange devices. And did you notice the Imperial server farm? Of course, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) was well-represented too: Like C-3P0, R2-D2 and BB-8 in earlier movies, Rogue One's K-2SO displayed uncanny humanness. The futuristic Star Wars-esque world is still mostly the stuff of Hollywood movies, but technology visionaries are hard at work bringing us ever closer.

This was the gist of a conversation between three automotive experts during a recent episode of SAP's Future of Cars with Game-Changers radio broadcast. Hosted by Bonnie D. Graham, the show focused on the transformations car manufacturers and their customers can look forward to as connected cars hit the road in growing numbers. The car industry has to wake up to a future of manufacturing, which Larry Stolle, Sr. Director, Global Automotive Marketing at SAP, said "isn't about screwing a nut on a bolt anymore…the opportunity is so huge to retrain, to reinvest, and to develop skills necessary to create innovation today…in technology, robot design, plant design, product designs – those are where the real capital of the future is." Companies also have to equip future employees with the technology skills for tomorrow's auto factories. According to Kim Knickle, Research Vice President at IDC, effective workforce education starts in elementary school with a diverse population of children by gender and ethnicity.

Marketing and sales seemed to be much easier in the past. Customers simply visited a retail shop, where they could ask a knowledgeable salesperson about a product they discovered in a local newspaper. In recent years, the ubiquity of the internet and a state-of-the-art technology changed everything. Customers became prosumers, well informed about the product before the purchase. And what is even more important, customers frequently use a variety of channels: online and traditional stores, mobile apps, online auctions, price comparison websites, social media and more. Today, in spite of all the available technologies, life is more challenging for both marketers and salespeople.

Taking a souvenir home from an art gallery no longer has to mean a trip to the gift shop. A new app lets people scan a work of art with their smartphone camera to find out more about it and save a digital copy. The app, called Smartify, uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection. Smartify co-founder Thanos Kokkiniotis describes it as a combination of the music discovery service Spotify and music recognition app Shazam – but for visual works.

Amper, a startup that offers AI-powered music composition, is announcing that it has raised $4 million in funding. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Foundry Group, Kiwi Venture Partners and Advancit Capital. Amper previously raised funding from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. You might not expect a film composer like Drew Silverstein (who founded the company with Sam Estes and Michael Hobe) to create a product that is ostensibly competes with his own work, but Silverstein doesn't see that way. Instead, he pitched Amper as a fast, affordable and royalty-free way to create the music for more "functional" projects (like commercials a or short online videos), where most companies would currently use pre-written stock music.

Dr. Stephen Roberts, director of the Oxford-Man Institute and professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, tells Newsweek that the entire internet only recently matched the capacity of a single human brain. "It wasn't until 2010 that the sum total of internet traffic exceeded a zetabyte, and that's just a single human brain," Roberts said. Roberts was speaking at Newsweek's Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in Capital Markets conference, in London, March 2.

The truth is that "artificial intelligence" is a broad term that refers to much more than what has been popularized in pop culture... and it's a branch of science that will have irreversible impact on the marketing world. Before we get into how, here is a short glossary of terms and some background information that will help you get the most out of this issue. A way of talking about the algorithms that computers use to build their own models based on example input. It describes a computer that can move beyond fully descripted code and learn from experience, just as humans do. Deep learning is also sometimes known as neural networks.