When BYU PhD candidate Kristine Monteith was sitting in natural language processing class, it wasn't letter sequences going through her head but music notes. The class was talking about probability in language that helps with speech recognition of knowing what words would come up next. When she did the experiment, "It made me think, oh, you could do the same thing with music," Monteith said. The Utah State graduate in music therapy pursuing her PhD in computer at BYU decided to apply her right and left brain abilities to combine music and computer science. She invented a computer program that can compose original music that evokes emotions humans can relate with, even though it was generated from a machine.

Our metal friends have long been a source of inspiration, wonder and fear for filmmakers and audiences. A way to examine our own humanity, and view emotions – or lack of them – from a new perspective, artificial intelligence has been in films for almost as long as we've been making them. We seem drawn to them, more often that not casting them as our creations gone rogue and seeking to rise up against us, but sometimes as tragic figures wanting to be more like us. Either way, they're fascinating, and pretty damn cool. Brought to artificial life by the brilliant Alan Tudyk, Sonny is the robot at the heart of the Will Smith blockbuster, which really bears no resemblance to the seminal short story collection by Isaac Asimov, other than acknowledging his three laws of robotics (for those who don't know: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.). However, Sonny is the best thing in the film, with a subtle motion captured performance hinting at the humanity lurking within, and for a film about robots, it's probably a good thing its most memorable character is one… One of those bonkers Japanese films that really has to be seen to be believed. I sadly can't include the RoboGeishas of the title due to them actually being cyborgs, but I can include the baddies' headquarters which turn into a giant robot at the end in order to walk to Mount Fuji and deliver a device 17 times more powerful than the atomic bomb. Nope, I don't know why it was specifically 17. But what I do know is that the two RoboGeishas have to fuse together in order to defeat this behemoth.

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game. While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them. Socher, now CEO of machine learning developer MetaMind, did not intend his remarks to be construed as a comparison of Watson to the academic model he and his colleagues built. As an illustration of the new technical and cultural landscape around NLP, however, the laughter Socher's comment drew was an acknowledgment that basic and applied research in language processing is no longer the exclusive province of those with either deep pockets or strictly academic intentions. Indeed, new tools and new techniques--particularly open source technologies such as Google's word2vec neural text processing tool--combined with steady increases in computing power, have broadened the potential for natural language processing far beyond the research lab or supercomputer.

Sting has had his brain scanned - so scientists can work out what makes gifted musicians tick. He underwent the examination at a Montreal university the afternoon before a Police concert in the city. Researchers say the scans uncovered an incredible ability to link seemingly different pieces of music together. A Montreal University -professor scanned Sting's brain the afternoon before a Police concert in the city in a bid to find how music is mapped in the brain. The results led to unexpected connections between the 1960s Beatles hit'Girl' and Astor Piazzolla's evocative tango composition'Libertango', at least in the mind of the famously eclectic singer songwriter.

The project uses techniques revealed earlier this year by German researchers. To make it work, the researchers could not just apply the algorithm to individual frames, as this would lead to flickering or and rough transitions. So, they introduced a temporal constraint that'penalized' deviation between two frames, meaning it considers the flow of the original video to preserve smooth transitions. In order to improve the method's consistency over larger periods of time, they incorporate long term motion estimates. They also developed a multi-pass algorithm to work around the'artefacts' created during style transfer The video was made as a part of the Deep Slow Flow project, and uses video processing methods revealed earlier this year by a team of German researchers to apply distinct styles to the clips. It begins by panning across a colourful view from the Hudson River, with One World Trade Center visible in the background.

Trying to picture yourself older or with a different hairstyle is near impossible. But now researchers have developed the ultimate face swap that analyzes a picture of your face, searches for images using key terms and seamlessly maps your it onto the results. Called Dreambit, this AI lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine. Dreambit lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine - as it has done with American actor George Clooney (pictured). 'Dreambit is a personalized image search engine,' reads the website.

A new Twitter bot shows that not all them are bigots -some just want to make you smile. '@smilevector' was recently unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting predecessor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by turning their frown upside down. Using neural networks, this algorithm can plant unsettling smiles on celebrities with what seems to be impressive accuracy. '@smilevector was unleashed on Twitter and, unlike its Hitler supporting processor Tay, this bot manipulates faces by making them smile. Created by Tom White, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in Wellington, New Zealand, this algorithm uses a generative neural net to manipulate faces.

It could finally be the home robot you've dreamed - capable of keeping the kids quiet and doing the shopping. Asus today revealed a Zenbo, a $599 home robot it hopes will help bring robotics into the home. Chairman Jonney Shih pledged the firm will'enable robotic computing for every household.' Asus chairman Jonney Shih pledged the firm will'enable robotic computing for every household.' The robot was unveiled at Computex 2016 alongside a new range of mobile phones.

With the next series of Game of Thrones set to hit our screens this month anxious fans may be wondering which one of their favourite characters is next on the hit list. The first five of the series have not been an easy watch, with the writers killing off key characters just when their luck starts to change and as audiences warmed to them. But researchers have developed a computer algorithm aimed at predicting the next character to die in the hit series. Students in Germany have developed a GoT-related computer algorithm which uses available data from the internet to predict the next character to die. By trawling the internet for data and clues, a team of computer scientists have created a model which crunches the numbers to work out which characters are most likely to die in the upcoming sixth series.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.