Save the "Star Wars" franchise? Everyone's favorite "Star Wars" actress, Daisy Ridley, told The Hollywood Reporter at this weekend's Empire Awards that there "have been conversations" about her wielding the storied video game heroine's dual pistols in an upcoming reboot. Conversations, however, don't mean that Ridley's casting is a done deal, as the 23-year-old actress has yet to receive an official offer. "I'm waiting for someone to say'I want you, let's do it,'" she said, explaining that the project doesn't have a script yet. But Ridley is committed to the role, even with her busy "Star Wars" schedule -- she is currently filming the eighth installment in the sci-fi epic. If the opportunity presented itself, Ridley would be happy to make time for "Tomb Raider," telling THR that "I'm trying to fill up my calendar."

As the velocity of the rate of change in today's technology steadily continues to increase, one of the contributing factors behind this acceleration the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). "Smart" attributes and functionalities are being baked into a multitude of systems that are affecting our lives in many visible and, at other times, transparent ways. Just to name one well-known example of an AI-enabled app is Siri, the voice recognition system in the iPhone. Two recent Subway Fold posts have also examined AI's applications in law (1) and music (2). However, notwithstanding all of the technological, social and commercial benefits produced by AI, a widespread reluctance, if not fear, of its capabilities to produce negative effects still persists.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may conjure up far-fetched ideas of robot assistants, or perhaps an all-seeing presence like HAL 9000, the sentient machine in the movie 2001. But the likelier truth is that AI will come in the form of software running in your data center. And it will be coming very soon: Research firm Gartner predicts that "smart machines" will have a widespread impact on business within the next four years. In general terms it's likely that AI will be able to help IT departments do their job - and help businesses be more productive – by ensuring that "processes get applied, stuff is accurate, errors are eliminated, and compliance is met," according to Dr Stuart Anderson, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. It will also be quite unremarkable, according to some.

There is no meaningful sense in which there is an abstract notion of purpose. That is, purpose is something that comes from history. One of the things that might be true about computation, might be true about our world, that would be disappointing, is maybe we go through all this history and biology and civilization and so on, and at the end of the day, the answer is 42 or something. That's the end, so to speak. We got to the answer.

Doha, Qatar - Faced with shrinking budgets, greater competition and increasingly selective audiences, leaders of international media organisations gathering vowed to share ideas about how best to gather and present news. "We are 20 years into the digital revolution of the media," Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press news agency, told a gathering in Doha of around 300 journalists from across the world. "Demand for news will only grow from here, but the supply of news will also grow. Much of it will not be of very high quality." He said that "a key component to innovation at AP is to increase work and investment into media and technology startups", adding that the agency has tested drones for news gathering purposes, and has used "robot journalism" to produce reports without human intervention.

Returning to Short of the Week for a third time, creative studio Factory Fifteen serve-up this enticing science-fiction short that centres around a worker in a futuristic car manufacturing plant as he starts to experience problems with the artificial intelligence that runs the production line. A 4-minute introduction to a world the talented team are currently developing into a larger project, ANA dazzles with its impressive aesthetic but really hooks its audience in with its intriguing narrative take on the singularity. Aiming to put a new twist on a popular science-fiction storyline and make their concept more relatable by showing how such a situation could affect the "ordinary" man, ANA explores one vignette from a world where technology is rising-up against those that created it. Produced as a way to entice an audience into the universe they are currently evolving into a longer piece, Factory Fifteen's Paul Nicholls spoke to Short of the Week about the aims of the project: "We had multiple ambitions with the film. A short-term ambition was to create a really high-end piece of drama, mixing performance and VFX. For us the design of the world (Jonah, Chupan Chupai, The Bug) is as important as the performance in our projects, to create a believable world. Working with Richard Brake (Game Of Thrones, Batman Begins, Doom), we knew we had the performance down, it was then up to us and the rest of the team to deliver the rest. The long-term goal was to develop this as a teaser to a larger project, which is currently in development".

During the holiday season, warehouses across the country used different kinds of robots to fill retail orders and they made--and continue to make--warehouses more efficient than ever before. In fact, if robots were more broadly implemented it's estimated retailers could reduce their fulfillment costs by 450 million to 900 million in North America, according to research from Janney Capital Markets. Today there is a growing group of startup companies developing robots for use in manufacturing, e-commerce and logistics operations. A decade ago, robots working in a warehouse -- or, for that matter, writing newspaper stories, caring for the elderly or providing comfort to hospitalized children -- was the stuff of science fiction. But today, the world is on the cusp of a rapid economic transformation via robotics and artificial intelligence.

"Soon, our habitat will be invaded by unreal humans. Not only they'll influence our way of living, but also intervene in our modus operandi." I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Last week I released a list of must watch movies on Machine Learning and Data Science. I've watched 8 of them till now.

The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand. Despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree. Those may sound like the Luddite ravings of a crackpot who breached security at an IEEE conference. In fact, the opinions belong to IEEE Fellow Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan is one of the world's most respected authorities on machine learning and an astute observer of the field. His CV would require its own massive database, and his standing in the field is such that he was chosen to write the introduction to the 2013 National Research Council report "Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis." San Francisco writer Lee Gomes interviewed him for IEEE Spectrum on 3 October 2014. IEEE Spectrum: I infer from your writing that you believe there's a lot of misinformation out there about deep learning, big data, computer vision, and the like. Michael Jordan: Well, on all academic topics there is a lot of misinformation. The media is trying to do its best to find topics that people are going to read about. Sometimes those go beyond where the achievements actually are.

Empathy is a tricky business. The range and complexity of human emotion makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ever really understand how someone else is feeling. Nevertheless, empathy is considered to be a crucial aspect of what makes us human--indeed, our brains appear to be hardwired for it. So perhaps it won't come as much of a surprise that as machine learning becomes ever more sophisticated and capable of mimicking some of the most complex functions of the human brain, figuring out a way to teach a computer empathy is quickly becoming a business in itself. Known as artificial empathy, the idea here is to train machines to recognize social signals from humans, aka'visual data,' and then produce an appropriate response.