Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

Year 1999, The Matrix introduced your neighbor, your dad, and pretty much every hacky-sacking college kid in the country to the idea that the real world around us … might not be so real. In the film, our trenchcoated protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is only an illusion, piped into his brain while his body sits submerged in a gooey chemical broth. The idea that we are not really here at all -- that life is just an illusion – is as old as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But The Matrix had that special sauce that made this mind-bending concept palatable to high schoolers shuffling around in JNCO jeans: guns, Keanu Reeves, and a soundtrack anchored by Rage Against the Machine. "Entering the Matrix" became pop-culture shorthand for the notion that technology could eventually deliver us from our mind-numbing reality and allow us to live in a faux universe of our own creation. Want to learn kung fu in seconds? Just take the red pill. A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix -- or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke -- in real life -- after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter. And yup, you can freeze time and stop bullets, too.

Much has been made of A.I.'s potential to destroy jobs by automating away routine and bureaucratic tasks. But when I think about what makes a job fulfilling, regardless of industry, a few things come to mind: consequential decisions, meaningful personal interactions and challenging problems to solve. It's not fun to do nothing or nothing important. So while we worry about A.I. reducing the job supply, it's also true that those that remain will be better. A.I. is a powerful engine of job inequality. The best example of this I've seen is at a major medical benefits management company here in the U.S. The company sits between payers and providers, determining whether procedures are medically justified and covered by a given insurance policy.

If you've been seeing what looks like a new-age mantra making the Twitter rounds, you'll be happy to know it's not a call to chill out before the holidays. DJs have been tweeting "Om Telolet Om" over the past few days as random videos recording people shouting the phrase have been on the rise. But the odd trio of words has origins far beyond the turntable. It actually comes from a roadside ritual in Indonesia. The phrase means "Sir, honk your horn, sir" (more or less) and generally doesn't make much sense outside the context of honking buses in Indonesia.

There's nothing more dispiriting than when you line up what you think is the perfect photo, snap the shot and end up with an image where all the vibrant colors you saw in the real world have been washed out in the digital realm, thanks to backlighting, bad white balance or any one of a number of mishaps that can mar a photo you tried capturing casually. And the company wants to provide you with a camera capable of producing shots that match what you thought you were capturing in your mind's eye. The trick, as it turns out, is not to load the camera with features -- the newly unveiled Relonch 291 has nothing but a shutter button -- but rather to supplement the camera with an algorithm-based approach to processing images that's part of a $99-a-month membership you get along with your Relonch camera. It's an unconventional -- and pricey -- approach to photography, but the people behind Relonch are betting that it's one that will appeal to people who want to be able to capture vivid photos of everyday life without having to mess around with a camera's sittings. Before showing me the Relonch 291 camera, co-founder Yuriy Motin flipped through a coffee table book of presidential photos, noting how much more compelling the candid shots of assorted presidents in their day-to-day lives were compared to official shots and staged photo opportunities.

The same tech we use to trade stocks, such as machine intelligence, neural networks, really diverse forms of artificial intelligence, we can and do use to influence elections. We just created a new digital species that influences, as well as buys/sells, no actually is seeking to manipulate attitudes and most likely votes. Hacking Reality used to influence elections and harness attitudes that consumers hold, signals a new dangerous era of mass communications. This is information warfare on steroids focused not on military but civilian world. The nuanced soft war that goes on we don't talk much about.

Imagine being trapped on a spaceship with only your lover and a robot bartender for nearly a century -- there isn't a spaceship big enough or a bar that well-stocked to make that sound appealing. This is the issue at the center of the ostensibly "romantic" sci-fi drama "Passengers," directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Jon Spaihts. While romance is the intended effect, the film's real premise -- concealed by the glossy trailers -- is imbued with some seriously creepy undercurrents about bodily autonomy, consent and stalking. Instead of turning it into a horror movie, these issues are all breezily glossed over with the sex appeal of stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The spaceship is the Avalon, 30 years into a 120-year autopilot journey to the planet colony Homestead II with 5,000 passengers on board, encased in pods that keep them in a state of suspended animation.

Representation of human actions as a sequence of human body movements or action attributes enables the development of models for human activity recognition and summarization. We present an extension of the low-rank representation (LRR) model, termed the clustering-aware structure-constrained low-rank representation (CS-LRR) model, for unsupervised learning of human action attributes from video data. Our model is based on the union-of-subspaces (UoS) framework, and integrates spectral clustering into the LRR optimization problem for better subspace clustering results. We lay out an efficient linear alternating direction method to solve the CS-LRR optimization problem. We also introduce a hierarchical subspace clustering approach, termed hierarchical CS-LRR, to learn the attributes without the need for a priori specification of their number. By visualizing and labeling these action attributes, the hierarchical model can be used to semantically summarize long video sequences of human actions at multiple resolutions. A human action or activity can also be uniquely represented as a sequence of transitions from one action attribute to another, which can then be used for human action recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for semantic summarization and action recognition through comprehensive experiments on five real-world human action datasets.

Today in Entertainment: Tom Arnold on'racist' Donald Trump footage; Tupac joins Rock Hall of Fame Here's who was just inducted into the 2017 Rock Hall of Fame Tom Arnold claims he has footage of Donald Trump saying'racist' things Dane DeHaan stars in new'A Cure For Wellness' trailer Margot Robbie might have secretly wed over the weekend Here's who was just inducted into the 2017 Rock Hall of Fame Tom Arnold claims he has footage of Donald Trump saying'racist' things New movie reviews: 'Sing,' 'Assassin's Creed,' 'Passengers' and more

May 14, 2017, will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of someone you might not have heard of: William Thomas ("Bill") Tutte. During the Second World War he made several crucial contributions to decrypting the Lorenz cipher used to protect the Nazi high command's most crucial radio communications. This work provided the statistical method implemented electronically by Tommy Flowers, a telecommunications engineer, in the Colossus machines, which pioneered many of the electronic engineering techniques later used to build digital computers and network equipment.a The British code-breaking effort of the Second World War, formerly secret, is now one of the most celebrated aspects of modern British history, an inspiring story in which a free society mobilized its intellectual resources against a terrible enemy. That's a powerful source of nostalgic pride for a country whose national identity and relationship with its neighbors are increasingly uncertain. Tutte's centennial gives a chance to consider the broader history of Bletchley Park, where the codebreakers worked, and the way in which it has been remembered. Some kinds of people, and work, have become famous and others have not. Films reach more people than books. So statistically speaking, most of what you know about Bletchley Park probably comes from the Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game. This gives us a starting point: the film is a bad guide to reality but a useful summary of everything that the popular imagination gets wrong about Bletchley Park. One myth is that Alan Turing won the war pretty much by himself.