There is no sexy origin story for the Assassin's Creed movie, to hear Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot tell it. He speaks of bringing down customer acquisition costs and finding ways to offset the investment needs of AAA game development. It's all part of the philosophy Ubisoft Motion Pictures was founded upon when the division was established in 2011. SEE ALSO: Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard get philosophical about'Assassin's Creed' "It came from the fact that I saw competitors doing movies [based on] games," Guillemot told Mashable in an interview. "I saw the risk and the opportunity linked to that."

Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg just achieved what most of us have only seen in the movie "Iron Man" and never dreamed would be possible in 2016: He has an artificial intelligence (AI) system running his home, which incidentally, just like you, hates Nickelback. Inspired by Stark's home in "Iron Man," Zuckerberg developed the project and named it "Jarvis," just like in the movie. And oh yeah, it's voiced by Morgan Freeman. So Zuck may have just one-upped "Iron Man" for real. It may be a little less high-tech than the one in the movie, but we're still impressed.

With continuing advances in technology, robots are likely to become more common in many types of workplaces, from manufacturing and food service providers to hospitality and healthcare. Whereas they were once limited to functions such as welding and painting in industrial environments, robots are now moving heavy items from place to place, packaging and shipping orders from warehouses, performing some types of surgeries, even greeting visitors at hotels. Shipping exemplifies where robotics has made significant progress, according to David Bourne, principal systems scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Bourne notes the massive use of robots to fetch products for workers who then package and ship those products. "This points to the new wave of robotic applications where people and robots work together on tasks according to their skills," he said.

Stock photo company Shutterstock introduced reverse image search for desktop earlier this spring. This made it easy for users to search Shutterstock's website with an image, instead of using keywords. Shutterstock's data scientist Kevin Lester, who looks closely at the adoption of these new tools, was able to find out what patterns emerge from the data. In fact, Lester shared with IBTimes, that those who used reverse-image search for searches wound up making more downloads per search than those from a user with a text-based search. "We've found that users who performed at least one reverse image search prior to making a purchase with Shutterstock were 3.49 times more likely to make a subsequent purchase than those who did not," says Lester.

Engineers at the EPFL Technology Institute in Switzerland have built a drone made with artificial feathers. It can fly at high speeds, make sharp turns and manoeuvre through tight spaces.

Algorithms use ratings, rankings and recommendations to present us with items Before items can be ranked, they need a measure by which they can be ordered This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion With ranked lists in hand, websites may turn around and make recommendations This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion This holiday season, when we Google for the most trending gifts, compare different items on Amazon or take a break to watch a holiday movie on Netflix, we are making use of what might be called'the three R's' of the Internet Age: rating, ranking and recommending Apple's new AirPods are tough to recycle: Breakdown reveals... How to win like Andy Murray: Adversity and hardship could be... Does hurting a girlfriend's CAT make you more immoral than... The root of human kindness is NOT in our ancestors:... Apple's new AirPods are tough to recycle: Breakdown reveals... How to win like Andy Murray: Adversity and hardship could be... Does hurting a girlfriend's CAT make you more immoral than... The root of human kindness is NOT in our ancestors:... Websites' algorithms use the'new 3 Rs' to combine, process and synthesize information before presenting it to us. AMAZON'S ALGORITHM DOESN'T ALWAYS GIVE THE BETTER PRICE Before items can be ranked, they need a measure by which they can be ordered This is really a rating of each item's quality according to some criterion With ranked lists in hand, websites may turn around and make recommendations Amazon has mechanisms in place to screen out these sorts of reviews – for example, by requiring a purchase to have been made from a given account before it can submit a review. The prime example of recommendation systems is Netflix's method.

Mark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances. Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be "easier than [he] expected" in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon's Echo. To be fair, most (all?) Echo owners didn't build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that's what Zuckerberg set out to do, coding his own personal Jarvis using Python, PHP and Objective C, and incorporating machine learning techniques including language processing, speech recognition and face recognition. The Facebook CEO also had to wrangle a bunch of connected devices that don't necessarily talk to each other out of the box, including Sonos, Spotify, a Samsung TV, a Crestron smart home and lighting system, a Nest cam and more. And once these were all tied together, Zuckerberg also had to build a way to translate natural language requests made as though you were talking too another person into commands that could operate all of the above.

When director Justin Kurzel re-teamed with cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and Oscar-caliber actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard for Assassin's Creed after working together on the critically-acclaimed Macbeth, we thought we might have our first great video game movie adaptation at last. Early reviews are now rolling in for the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide, and they aren't pretty. The film currently sits at a 20% at Rotten Tomatoes with only 6 out of 23 reviews being positive. Yes, film reviews can tick up and down, but it's extremely unlikely that a movie starting out this low will ever make its way up to "fresh." And yes, Rotten Tomatoes is often flawed, but it's not usually wildly off the mark.

You probably didn't expect many surprises in Rogue One, the first Star Wars "side story" which details how, exactly, the Rebel Alliance acquired the plans for the Death Star. Indeed, the entire film seems to exist just to fill in a bit of background detail for A New Hope, our first Luke Skywalker adventure. But it turns out Rogue One is much more than an elaborate bit of fan service. Rogue One brought Peter Cushing, the legendary British actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars and passed away in 1994, back from the dead this past weekend as a CG character. His digital copy, which was portrayed by actor Guy Henry, isn't just a quick cameo, either.

Will robots put Arnie out of a job? Schwarzenegger comes face to face with a rival during a press conference for'Terminator Genisys' at a press conference in South Korea (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) Science fiction in the movies is almost as old as the movies themselves. It didn't take long before frock-coated futurologists spotted the potential of the medium resulting in the production of'A Trip to the Moon' by George Melies in 1902. But how good is cinema at predicting the future with any degree of accuracy? Where for example were all those spaceships that were supposed to be buzzing backwards and forwards to the moon fifteen years ago according to '2001: A Space Odyssey', given that the last person to set foot on it did so back in 1972? Despite the efforts of Richard Branson and Elon Musk I wouldn't recommend holding your breath on that one happening any time soon.