The people behind Ghostlight, a company that offers creative services for film, recently decided to try and build a 7-foot robot replica of the villain from the first Robocop movie, ED-209. This awesome replica is able to walk and move without the help of any visual effects. YouTuber Indy Mogul documents the entire fascinating process in this video, from initial research to completion. The final product is a true testament to the power of human ingenuity and DIY glory. 'The End Is Near': Watch a teaser for Season 3 of'The Leftovers' Here's how the new'Overwatch' mode works in'Year of the Rooster'

"The industry will continue to focus on refining systems, applications, software, security and network infrastructure to meet their needs. Machine learning is the megatrend: its application and influence, particularly on our mobiles, will be improving all parts of our lives in 2017," he said. So begins Deloitte's annual global TMT (Technology, Media, and Telecommunications) report, that since its inception in 2001 has reached an 87% prediction accuracy rate. The report is long but makes for interesting reading. Deloitte Australia forecasts a year that will see further significant breakthroughs in machine learning, indoor GPS navigation, safer travel in motor cars, more cyber mischief and a growing use of biometric security.

Horror movies have always reflected and explored the political climate of the eras that produced them. In the 1950s, Cold War paranoia led to a spate of films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers about aliens hiding among us, looking to destroy humanity from within. Later the chaos and bloodshed of the Vietnam war inspired a cycle of cynical, anarchic and bloody movies such as Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven's Last House On the Left, in which the rules of civilised society collapse amid senseless, numbing violence. Horror cinema, with its in-built tropes of shock and tension, has always provided a convenient way for culture to process real-life fears. This is why Resident Evil 7, released this week to much critical acclaim, is an interesting benchmark for where horror video games are right now, and what they say about the world around us.

A longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump's tweets. These organizations have always existed: they're old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They've been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades--they're practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar.

But first up are the things you may have missed, like a massive update for Google Voice, the name of the new Star Wars movie and why cassette sales are way, way up. Fitbit's recent acquisitions hint at a device we'd actually want to buy. It hasn't been a great year for wearables, with sluggish sales and underwhelming products dominating the space. Several smartwatches have disappeared over the last twelve months, and for Dan Cooper, devices from Apple, Samsung and Google that try to recreate the smartphone experience on the wrist just aren't compelling. However, those companies are increasingly the only games in town after the demise of low-power wearable companies like Pebble, Vector and Basis.

It seems pretty clear that 2017 is going to be the year that Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant really begins to hit its stride, going from a fast-growing niche product to a mainstream must-have. While Microsoft and especially Google have made their competitive strategies clear -- even Samsung and Baidu have started to make rumbles in the market -- there's one elephant that, notably, isn't in the room yet: Apple, the most valuable company in the world and a notorious latecomer to any new product category. While Apple recently built Siri into the Apple TV, the company is said to be working on a direct competitor to the Amazon Echo -- one that would apparently be more advanced than anything we've seen, down to a possible facial-recognition camera so it knows who's talking. That device, if and when it comes out, would bring Apple's 5-year-old Siri assistant head-to-head with Alexa. And the clock is ticking.

Artificial intelligence is likely going to change our world like no other technology ever has. AI might steal our jobs. But what we know for sure is that 2017 is the year artificial intelligence is hitting the mainstream. Smart assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant live on our phones and in our homes. AI is influencing what we find in Google search results and what we see in the Facebook news feed.

Most of the previous approaches to lyrics-to-audio alignment used a pre-developed automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that innately suffered from several difficulties to adapt the speech model to individual singers. A significant aspect missing in previous works is the self-learnability of repetitive vowel patterns in the singing voice, where the vowel part used is more consistent than the consonant part. Based on this, our system first learns a discriminative subspace of vowel sequences, based on weighted symmetric non-negative matrix factorization (WS-NMF), by taking the self-similarity of a standard acoustic feature as an input. Then, we make use of canonical time warping (CTW), derived from a recent computer vision technique, to find an optimal spatiotemporal transformation between the text and the acoustic sequences. Experiments with Korean and English data sets showed that deploying this method after a pre-developed, unsupervised, singing source separation achieved more promising results than other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and an existing ASR-based system.

Patrick Stobbs recently sat in a conference room here playing songs from his smartphone, attempting to show how his start-up, Jukedeck, is at the cutting edge of music. The tune sounded like the soundtrack to a 1980s video game. "This is where we were two years ago," he said, looking slightly embarrassed. "And this is where we are now," he continued. He then played a gentle piano piece.

We all know AI, the super villain from Hollywood movies which intends to finish the human race. The Artificial Intelligence, the one watching us all the time, knows our every step, even correctly predicts our future steps. Even outside of the science fiction arena, in our real world Artificial Intelligence is feared to be the job killer. So, how does a company sell this fictional super villain, a real life job killer? How do you sell products based on AI, when people are so scared of them?