Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said he and his team were anxious to make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech, and the tools they had to work with were slowing them down. So, a group of volunteers set out to solve this problem on their own, using a homegrown solution that stressed performance over all else.

But artificial intelligence isn't some far-off fantasy imagined by a science fiction film-maker or writers. It's here, and only going to get better. From Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 in his 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Samantha, the AI assistant that Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with in Spike Jonze's film Her, humanity has long dreamt of the day it can just talk to its computers. And some very bright people indeed are betting this will be the way we'll all interact with our computers very soon. We've all heard of Siri, of course – Apple's AI assistant, built right into the iPhone and iPad.

This list of hand-picked leaders was compiled by Wojtek Aleksander, from GetResponse.com. Other bigger lists (sometimes created by robots) can be found here and are usually based on your Klout score, which in my opinion is not accurate. The list below is truly original and I would even add, somewhat unexpected, as you won't find Bernard Marr, Kirk Borne and other well known gurus. Just in case you're wondering, @FILWD stands for Fell In Love With Data, which happens to be the name of Enrico Bertini's blog. While the Assistant Professor at NYU doesn't talk much on Twitter himself, he uses the platform very effectively to share news and insights about data visualizations and adds his highly-valued opinions.

The 1986 sci-fi action/horror film Aliens is one of the greatest sequels to ever grace the silver screen, if not one of the greatest movies ever made. The mix of stunning practical FX with amazing characters and outright thrilling segments has made it a must-see film for pretty much…everyone! But just because the movie is practically flawless doesn't mean it isn't ripe for parody every once in a while. And when it comes to poking fun at popular titles, there's few shows that do it better than Adult Swim's "Robot Chicken"! Remember in Aliens when Ripley and Hicks enter an elevator only to have a xenomorph try to catch a ride with them? Well, the below segment follows that moment only it sees the aftermath from the perspective of the alien, who finds out the hard way that its acid blood can make for a very long and painful fall!

Back in October 2014, Taylor Swift opened an account on Line, the messaging app that is massively popular in Asia. The account currently doesn't do much. If you communicate with it, you can hear a funny voice message from Swift, for instance. Paul McCartney has one, too. Burberry and Selfridges also have accounts on WeChat and Line.

Mark Hamill is a lot busier this time around in Star Wars Episode VIII. The actor, who reprised his role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, took a break after a long day of filming the franchise's eighth installment at London's Pinewood Studios to talk about his return to video games. Hamill is part of an all-star cast that spent time with game designer Chris Roberts (creator of Wing Commander) to bring full performance-capture acting to the characters in Squadron 42. The upcoming PC action game is part of the massive crowdfunded Star Citizen universe. Hamill talks about his second stint with Roberts, and how much technology has advanced in the PC gaming space, in this exclusive interview.

Balls blasting across the court weren't a sign of basketball practice; they signified the next step in designing a "throwing" machine for athletes. "Our company," said one of the owners, Jim Langland of Ottumwa, "makes sewing machines for quilting. About three years ago, we did some R and D in a completely different direction; we're now throwing basketballs." He was on the Ottumwa campus helping a crew take photos and video of the basketball-throwing machine, which shoots balls out during practice. The quilt-sewing machine company, APQS, now has the first in its line of smart robot pitchers, the Hot Shot.

As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don't throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Traditional neural networks can't do this, and it seems like a major shortcoming. For example, imagine you want to classify what kind of event is happening at every point in a movie. It's unclear how a traditional neural network could use its reasoning about previous events in the film to inform later ones. Recurrent neural networks address this issue.

This is 2016 version of the Eurovision prediction. I have explained systematics in quite detailed fashion in the last year post which you can find here. Very shortly, I measured how many tweets have been sent about each song from each country. From this, I estimated amount of votes that each country would give to another. For example, if Germans tweets the most about Polish song, I assume that Germany will give Poland 12 points.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? In 1950 English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which starts off by proposing a thought experiment that he called the "Imitation Game." In one room is a human "interrogator" and in another room a man and a woman. The goal of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which of the unknown hidden interlocutors is the man and which is the woman.