Meet BB-8 - the app-enabled Droid that's as authentic as it is advanced. BB-8 has something unlike any other robot - an adaptive personality that changes as you play. Based on your interactions, BB-8 will show a range of expressions and even perk up when you give voice commands. Set it to patrol and watch your Droid explore autonomously, make up your own adventure and guide BB-8 yourself, or create and view holographic recordings. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews).

In a previous post I wrote about how to build a'People Who Like This Also Like ...' feature for displaying lists of similar musicians. My goal was to show how simple Information Retrieval techniques can do a good job calculating lists of related artists. For instance, using BM25 distance on The Beatles shows the most similar artists being John Lennon and Paul McCartney. One interesting technique I didn't cover was using Matrix Factorization methods to reduce the dimensionality of the data before calculating the related artists. This kind of analysis can generate matches that are impossible to find with the techniques in my original post.

Could we soon be getting it on in the front seats of our cars? With the rise of self-driving vehicles, all of the time that was once spent navigating the road could soon be spent having sex. At least that's what Barrie Kirk of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence recently told The Toronto Sun. "I am predicting that, once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars," Kirk said, adding that could mean big trouble because it will be "one of several things people will do which will inhibit their ability to respond quickly when the computer says to the human, 'Take over.'" On this week's HuffPost Love Sex Podcast, I chat with my co-host, Carina Kolodny, about the future of vehicular sex and what could be in store for us.

Artificial intelligence can control self-driving cars, beat the best humans at incredibly complex board games, and fight cancer; but one thing it can't do perfectly is communicate. To help solve the problem, Google has been feeding it's AI with more than 11,000 unpublished books, including 3,000 steamy romance titles. "come with me," she said. "talk to me," she said. "don't worry about it," she said.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference. There were more details of a new version of Android; new messaging and video-calling apps; a built-in new VR platform for Android; and a good-looking Amazon Echo-like smart speaker called Google Home. There was even a cool new research project called Instant Apps that will let users run portions of apps from the web without installing them first. But the biggest theme stressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants, over and over again throughout the two-hour keynote, was that Google is doubling down on artificial intelligence as the next great phase of computing.

The predictive powers of computers will work nicely in cases where reality does not change dramatically. However, it will fail in any case where there are dramatic, unpredictable, changes in the future. The authoritative science journal Nature announced recently that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines?

The founding father of the concept Artificial Intelligence is Alan Turing and he did believe in the development of artificial intelligence as an entity that outgrows humankind. The theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have surpassed human intelligence is called Singularity and is often used by the church of AI. You have an interviewer, the'supposed' AI and another random person put in 3 separate rooms. They can communicate only via mail, fax, or chat (nothing verbal). The interviewer has a limited amount of time to ask questions at the other rooms.

Yesterday was the first day of Google's annual I/O developer conference: its equivalent of Apple's WWDC in terms of revealing new products and services for the year ahead. While there were no direct news about the music aspects of Google Play and YouTube, there was plenty for the music industry to think about in Google's other announcements. Starting with Google Home, a connected speaker controlled by its owner's voice, which will compete directly with Amazon's Echo. The speaker will use the Google Cast technology to stream music, which means that services like Spotify will be supported alongside Google Play Music. Amazon's speaker has been a big hit in the US, and Google is training its sights squarely on the device.

The partnership was formed in 2001 to develop a drone that can monitor whales, but it continued to evolve until it led to Emily's creation. Emily's current iteration has two-way radios rescuers can use to talk with the people stranded in the water. It also has a video camera that sends live feeds to responders' phones and lights for night rescues. Emily can be thrown off helicopters and do just fine, thanks to its Kevlar and aircraft-grade composite components. The Navy recently demonstrated its latest version at the Naval STEM Expo and Sea-Air-Space Exposition on May 15th and 16th.

The second-largest shareholder of Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Publishing said Wednesday that passing up a buyout offer from rival publishing company Gannett could "destroy enormous shareholder value." In a letter sent to Tribune's board and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, downtown L.A. investment firm Oaktree Capital Management made clear it wants the board to reconsider selling to Gannett and raised serious concerns about the turnaround plans of new Tribune Chairman Michael Ferro. The board this month rejected an offer of 12.25 a share from Gannett, which responded this week by raising that offer to 15 a share. That's a 99% premium to Tribune Publishing's stock price before Gannett went public with its proposal last month. Oaktree, which owns 14.8% of Tribune Publishing's shares, this month urged the company's board to negotiate with Gannett.