The trend is clearly visible: Sensors, and actuators, together with computation, memory and communication capabilities, are making all the objects around us smarter and smarter. Too many times, whether we call them robots or AIs, the trend is depicted in menacing tones, represented in the dystopian futures preferred by Hollywood movies, and shape the gut reactions of policymakers eager to please the reactionary impulses of their electorates. But smart machines are our allies, and the war is not against them but against the dumb machines that allow us to use them badly. More than a million people each year are killed by the dumbest of all machines--the car. Fifty million each year are disabled at various degrees, many permanently.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

That's the advice you might give a student struggling for a better grip on the ins and outs of language. On 18 February, Facebook released several data sets that it uses to train its home-grown neural networks. One is packed with the text of classic novels, such as The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Little Women, A Christmas Carol and Alice in Wonderland. There are more than a hundred stories in all, taken from the free online library Project Gutenberg. It's a reading list for fledgling AI (see box below).

Netflix is bringing a beloved toy-based digital gaming experience to life for (at least) two seasons of programming. Skylanders is a video game experience involving toy figures from Activision Blizzard studios. The popular game will become an animated comedy for Netflix to stream this fall. Though the series will be produced in-house by Activision Blizzard, Skylanders Academy will be Netflix's first foray into video game programming, and they've got a lot of material to work with--including an existing base of product tie-ins. Clearly no one is spooked by the relatively unimpressive performance from the Warcraft movie.

The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others -- and these ten are the most significant. Just a quick refresher before we get started. Though there's no formal definition, computer scientists describe algorithms as a set of rules that define a sequence of operations.

Throughout music history, theorists have identified and documented interpretable rules that capture the decisions of composers. This paper asks, "Can a machine behave like a music theorist?" It presents MUS-ROVER, a self-learning system for automatically discovering rules from symbolic music. MUS-ROVER performs feature learning via $n$-gram models to extract compositional rules --- statistical patterns over the resulting features. We evaluate MUS-ROVER on Bach's (SATB) chorales, demonstrating that it can recover known rules, as well as identify new, characteristic patterns for further study. We discuss how the extracted rules can be used in both machine and human composition.

Ryan Anderson, a solutions architect for IBM Watson, took his work home with him when he decided to make a functional'Harry Potter' sorting hat for his two daughters: Lucy, 8, and Julia, 6. "I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple daughters and they are mad keen on'Harry Potter' - they've read the books like 5 times," he told Tech Insider. The hat works simply enough. You place it on your head (that part is actually for fun, you could just talk to it) and tell the sorting hat a few things about yourself so it can sort you appropriately. The sorting hat runs on Watson's Natural Language Classifier, which interprets the intent behind a set of text. So since Anderson coded that'honesty' is a characteristic of Hufflepuff, the hat will dub you a badger if you describe yourself as honest or use similar words to do so.

When MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab researchers showed videos of a drumstick hitting and brushing through various objects, subjects were fooled into believing that the sounds they heard actually came from the objects and materials on screen. Instead, a computer programmed to analyze the video and apply the correct sounds from its own library of samples chose the audio clips for all the videos. And the subjects were none the wiser. The team's work is described in a new paper released Monday and being presented next week at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Las Vegas. To be clear, there really isn't any such thing as an Auditory Turing test.

All things considered, I've come to the conclusion that machines are not - and never will be - capable of creating content on the same level as humans. Yes, digital solutions can help, but only to a certain extent. In this case, humans do indeed beat the bots. I'm just hoping people will still recognize the value of quality writers over digital solutions.

"Warcraft," the critically panned video game-inspired film from Legendary Entertainment, made more than six times as much money in China as it did in the U.S. during its opening weekend, and it had observers including Jackie Chan saying it could be the harbinger of a new age in blockbuster filmmaking. That's undoubtedly a historic split for a Hollywood film -- although it's not unusual for a movie to make more in China than at home -- and certainly something that could happen more as China's rapidly growing box office catches up with the U.S. Rather, "Warcraft" is just a movie with several unique factors that gave it a much bigger potential audience in China than anywhere else. The world is big, interests are regional, and Chinese companies have certain competitive (or anticompetitive) advantages that Hollywood studios don't, like a restriction on foreign competition and the ability to own theater chains. As a result of such factors, "Warcraft" blew the doors down in China, but it didn't really blaze a trail that too many other movies could realistically follow. China is a nearly 8 billion -- and growing -- movie market with only 34 slots for Western films, so naturally Hollywood is going to produce its megabudget blockbusters with that in mind, taking steps not to offend the Chinese state censors that have to approve every imported film.