Watching TV can be a very educational experience for a computer. In a paper that will be presented this week at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) created an algorithm that can predict how humans will behave in certain situations. The algorithm'watched' 600 hours of TV shows culled from clips posted on YouTube, including The Office, Big Bang Theory, and Desperate Housewives. The purpose was to see if it could accurately predict what humans would do during an interaction--would they shake hands? After feeding it the background material, the researchers had the algorithm watch new clips, and froze the clip just before an action was about to happen, and asked the algorithm to predict what happened next. That's worse than humans, who were able to correctly predict what would happen 71 percent of the time.

Amazon's brightest star doesn't appear on any of its high-profile TV shows. Rather, it's Alexa, the voice-controlled "brain" at the center of the cylindrical Amazon Echo device that gets smarter the more often users engage with her. Alexa has moved the battle for the most helpful digital assistant from portable smartphones and watches to our homes, where consumers want the hands-off experience that decades of sci-fi movies have promised. Echo has sold an estimated 3 million units since it debuted 18 months ago. Later this year, Google will challenge Amazon with Google Home, an Echo-style device that will manage schedules, play music, and perform routine tasks like ordering an Uber.

Facebook Inc. FB 0.69 % is paying an array of media companies and celebrities to create videos for its live-streaming service and has signed nearly 140 contracts totaling more than 50 million, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The social network's partners vary widely. It includes established media outfits like CNN and the New York Times NYT -0.75 %; digital publishers like Vox, Tastemade, Mashable and the Huffington Post; and celebrities including Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, Deepak Chopra and NFL quarterback Russell Wilson. The value of individual contracts varies widely, with 17 worth more than 1 million, according to the document. The document isn't a comprehensive accounting of all of Facebook's dealings with video creators, but it shows the broad scope of the tech giant's efforts to promote its nascent Facebook Live product.

A world where you can download your personality on to a computer to create your own avatar may sound like something from a science fiction novel. But according to Dr Michio Kaku, this'immortal world' could soon be a reality. He claims that soon we will be able to go to speak to loved even after they die, by keeping them alive through virtual reality. Dr Kaku was born in California on 24 January 1947. He led a distinguished academic career, attending Harvard University and the University of California, Berkely – where he received his PhD in 1972.

Nowadays, recommender systems are used to personalize your experience on the web, telling you what to buy, where to eat or even who you should be friends with. People's tastes vary, but generally follow patterns. People tend to like things that are similar to other things they like, and they tend to have similar taste as other people they are close with. Recommender systems try to capture these patterns to help predict what else you might like. E-commerce, social media, video and online news platforms have been actively deploying their own recommender systems to help their customers to choose products more efficiently, which serves win-win strategy.

Westworld's intriguing new teaser trailer, released before Game of Thrones last night, is certainly a tease. While the original film was set in a futuristic attraction full of robotic brothels and malfunctioning gunfighters, Westworld the series is populated by sentient artificial intelligence (and possibly set in virtual reality). It has been called "a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin" by The Hollywood Reporter. Anthony Hopkins plays the genius at the helm of this digital Dodge City, and it looks like he will not be as adorable as Richard Attenborough's grandfatherly architect of Jurassic Park. This is familiar territory for EP Jonathan Nolan, who has co-written and contributed to reality challenging films like Memento, Interstellar, and Terminator Salvation.

Who knew Han was so self-conscious?Lucasfilm screencap One of IBM Watson's many talents is analyzing personality traits by looking at written text. The supercomputer assesses traits based on the popular Big Five test, which rates subjects for extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It can also identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. These skills have been used to do everything from assist customer service agents in analyzing how their phone calls went to providing dating tips. We tested out Watson last week on the "Harry Potter" universe and were wowed by its conclusions. This week, we worked with IBM researcher Vinith Misra to analyze the "Star Wars" original trilogy screenplays.

Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc. But could it actually happen? At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Texas last month, a workshop was held on the ethics of AI development and a panel discussed whether or not so-called'lethal autonomous weapons' should be banned. "There are many arguments, legal, ethical, political and technical for a ban," Toby Walsh, head of the Optimisation Research Group at Australia's research body NICTA and chair of the proceedings, told Fairfax Media.

The dating app has rolled out verified profiles, which means now you'll know if "celebrity" profiles on the app are for real – instead of having to rely on whether or not the profile picture is a heavily pixellated crop from a website, complete with watermark still attached. Tinder announced the move on its blog: "Now when notable public figures, celebrities and athletes appear in your recommendations, you'll know it's for real." Verified profiles for celebrities have long been in development, and were first mooted back in March 2014, when Tinder's chief executive, Sean Rad, said: "This will allow celebrities to enter Tinder in a different way." The app's chief marketing officer, Justin Mateen, added: "Tinder gives them [celebrities] the control to filter through the noise and communicate with people they want to know." Back in May 2014, singer Ed Sheeran said he believed he was the first celebrity to be approached by Tinder for a verified profile.

Netflix does not usually jump to the top of the list when one thinks of leaders in artificial intelligence, but Netflix's VP of Product Innovation, Carlos Uribe-Gomez, and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt published a paper informing investors that some of its algorithms help them save 1 billion each year. In the paper, the two executives detailed how the company's recommendation engine impacts its churn rate. The video streaming giant does not report its churn rate, but the paper mentions that the Netflix's retention rates "are already high enough that it takes a very meaningful improvement to make a retention difference of even 0.1%." This year, the streaming giant plans to spend 6 billion on content. With such a big investment, it could get all sorts of TV series and movies, but if it just presents the most popular selections to everyone, many titles would remain unseen.