A single node in a simple neural network takes some number of inputs, and then performs a weighted sum of those inputs, multiplying them each by some weight before adding them all together. Then, some constant (called "bias") is added, and the overall sum is then squashed into a range (usually -1 to 1 or 0 to 1) using a nonlinear activation function, such as a sigmoid function.

Michael Schmidt is the founder and CTO of Nutonian. But despite all the talk around AI, no one seems to really understand what it is or how companies can use it. Is AI the computer that competed on Jeopardy? Will machines really take our jobs? As data volumes surge and analytic engines become more mature, has technology finally caught up with the hype?

If you tell Siri to set an alarm for 5 am, she'll set an alarm for 5 am. But if you start asking her which prescription pain killer is least likely to upset your stomach, she's not really gonna know what to do--just because that's a pretty complicated sentence. Siri is a long way from what computer scientists call "natural language understanding." She can't truly understand the natural way we humans talk--despite the way Apple portrays her in all those TV ads. In fact, we shouldn't really be talking about her as a "her" at all.

"Interspecies love is in the air!" enthuses one movie fansite at the prospect of the forthcoming Warcraft movie. There's a lot to get up to speed with in Warcraft. The original video games were so wildly popular that their community of players exceeds the population of Norway, and the World of Warcraft wiki has over 100,000 pages. For novices, it's a fantasy world not far removed from Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons: a realm of elves, dwarves, mythical creatures and medieval weaponry. Warcraft the movie revolves around Azeroth, a kingdom apparently ruled by European humans.

Fans of the "Assassin's Creed" video game series got a look Wednesday at the first trailer for 20th Century Fox's upcoming film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Fassbender ("X-Men: Apocalypse") plays Callum Lynch, a violent man who finds himself recruited by a corporation and dispatched through ancestral memory as a highly trained killing machine. The film is the latest iteration of the "Assassin's Creed" mythos, which has sold over 80 million copies of its games, as well as several spinoff comics and novels. Joining Fassbender in the cast of the 150-million adaptation are Academy Award winners Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") and Jeremy Irons ("Reversal of Fortune") as Justin Kurzel, who worked with both Fassbender and Cotillard in his 2015 "Macbeth." While it's clear a large portion of that budget is dedicated to the special effects required to render a live-action version of a video game, it's unclear whether those moments will translate to anything approaching emotional resonance.

Filmmaker Duncan Jones says his dad, David Bowie, inspired him to make movies. The director of "Moon" and "Source Code" talked about his late father Wednesday at the Los Angeles premiere of Jones' latest film, the video-game adaptation "Warcraft." Bowie died in January at age 69. "My dad was obviously prolific in music, but he also acted and I think I had the most fun when we were on film sets... I think I got the (directing) bug back then," Jones said.

It's a phrase likely to strike fear and dread into the heart of most gamers, and indeed most moviegoers. All of these classic, hugely acclaimed video games have been thrust onto the big screen (or the straight-to-DVD shelves) by people whose knowledge of the source materials seems to have been passing at best. The results have been ... horrible. Assassin's Creed, we are being told, is a different story. Produced by Ubisoft, the company that developed and published the bestselling games, it has actual star actors (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons) and a talented director in the form of Justin Kurzel, who made the award-winning Snowtown and helmed Fassbender's gritty Macbeth movie.

First dates can be a nerve-wracking experience, filled with unease and uncertainty over whether or not the other person is interested. But new technology that could help clear up at least some of the mystery surrounding such dates might be on its way. An'emotion detector' has been created which researchers claim will be able to tell whether or not a person finds you attractive almost instantly. An'emotion detector' concept has been designed that can tell if a person finds you attractive on the first date by measuring skin and heart rate responses and a pupil-dilation measure. Researchers at the University of Lancaster were inspired to make the device by a gadget featured in the 1982 sci-fi fantasy film'Blade Runner'.

Along with Duncan Jones's Warcraft it's been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. The omens so far are good. Assassin's Creed comes from the team behind last year's blistering new take on Macbeth, with director Justin Kurzel bringing back his stars Michael Fassbender (also a hands-on producer) and Marion Cotillard. Here are five takeaways from the first trailer for the film. How strange that the cute copine from France's hit Taxi comedies has developed into one of the most sublime screen beauties of modern Hollywood.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard of TV shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother or Game of Thrones. While I generally don't spend a whole lot of time watching TV, I have also undergone some pretty intense binge-watching sessions in the past (they generally coincided with exam periods, which was actually not a coincidence…). As I was watching the epic final season of Breaking Bad, it got me thinking on how TV series compare to one another, and how their ratings evolve over time. I therefore decided to look a bit further into user rating trends of popular TV series (and by popular I mean the ones I know). For this, I simply had to define a quick scraping function in R that retrieves the average IMDB user ratings assigned to each episode of a given series.