When people ask me what I'm working on, I'm often confused about the depth I need to go to in my response. 'Artificial Intelligence' is way too broad for my personal satisfaction, and image understanding probably too specific. Nevertheless, every single time, I do get this completely unrelated follow-up question that infuriates me to my core. And I can't even blame the skeptic -- most people think artificial intelligence is some unknown, mysterious entity which is conspiring infinitesimally, and will eventually kill us all, since it can predict that Sausage Party is the next movie we'd want to watch after we've binge-watched Evan Goldberg flicks all night. That's what makes predicting your favourite music, or suggesting the correct phone app to use while you're taking a dump -- an easy task for machines.

The Microsoft Emotion API is based on state of the art research from Microsoft Research in computer vision and is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model trained to classify the facial expressions of people in videos and images. This is an attempt to explain how to apply the API for data-driven reporting. Let's be honest, the last and final debate was depressing. The negativity, the personal allegations, and Trump's Belzebub-like facial expressions made it difficult to stay up to 3:30am and watch this combat with my American wife, which resembled an old feisty couple close to divorce. However, the debate was a gold mine for computer assisted reporting. One of the APIs I recently stumbled across when talking to the research lab from Microsoft is a neat emotion video API.

Temperament has been a key issue in the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and an issue highlighted in the series of three debates that concluded this week. Quantifying "temperament" isn't an easy task, but The Economist used the Microsoft Emotion API to chart the anger, contempt, sadness and surprised expressed in the faces of the candidates during key sequences of the debates, like this from the third debate: Economist Data Journalist Ben Heubl explains how you can analyze emotions in a video file using Python and R. The Emotion API provides scores for eight attributes of emotion as expressed by a face in a still image or video clip. For example, this expression by Donald Trump expresses mostly anger, with a touch of disgust and a soupçon of contempt. Ben provides Python code for passing a video clip into the Emotion API and retriving frame-by-frame emotion scores. He then uses R to analyze and chart the scores: mostly happiness for Clinton; mostly sadness for Trump.

Baidu has created a virtual version of "turn your head and cough." The Chinese search engine launched "Melody" on Tuesday, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to help doctors care for patients over text. Baidu (BIDU, Tech30) aims to make medical consults more accessible and help patients determine whether or not they should see a doctor in person. For instance, if you tell Melody your child is sick, it might ask whether she has a fever or is jaundiced and follow up with additional questions. Melody integrates with the Baidu Doctor app, which already lets patients ask doctors questions, make appointments and search for health information.

Artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that is capable of making complex decisions to accurately predict the outcome of human rights trials. The AI "judge" was developed by computer scientists at University College London (UCL), the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania using an algorithm that analyzed the text of cases at the European Court of Human Rights. Judicial decisions from the court were predicted with 79 percent accuracy by the machine learning algorithm. "Previous studies have predicted outcomes based on the nature of the crime, or the policy position of each judge, so this is the first time judgments have been predicted using analysis of text prepared by the court," said Vasileios Lampos, co-author of the research. The study follows warnings from several high-profile academics and entrepreneurs that AI could pose an existential risk to mankind. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, advanced AI could be "more dangerous than nukes," while in 2015 physicist Stephen Hawking suggested it could lead to the end of humanity.

The computer scientists from the University College London and the University of Sheffield developed a software that can predict the outcome of the real life cases in court trials. The software was said to have predicted the verdict of the European Court of Human Rights with 79% accuracy. The scientists developed an algorithm that did not only consider and weigh up legal evidences, but also took considerations of what's right and wrong. The A.I. 'judge' has gotten the same decision at the European courts in almost four out of five cases relating to torture, degrading treatment and privacy. To develop the software, what the scientists did was to have an A.I. computer scan 584 cases with published judgements and examine the information in each case until it was able to come up with its own verdict.

In an interview in Vox, Marc Andreessen asserted that Vinod Khosla "has written all these stories about how doctors are going to go away...And I think he is completely wrong." Mr. Khosla was quick to respond via Twitter: "Maybe @pmarca [Mr. Andreessen] should read what I think before assuming what I said about doctors going away." He included a link to his detailed "speculations and musings" on the topic. It turns out that Mr. Khosla believes that AI will take away 80% of physicians' work, but not necessarily 80% of their jobs, leaving them more time to focus on the "human aspects of medical practice such as empathy and ethical choices." That is not necessarily much different than Mr. Andreessen's prediction that "the job of a doctor shifts and becomes a higher-level, more important job that pays better as the doctor becomes augmented by smarter computers."

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Over the past few decades, smart machines and robots have taken on numerous manual labor jobs, and developments are showing no signs of stopping. Where does this leave the future of the work force? Surely only blue collar jobs are at risk, right? In a new study, father-and-son Richard and Daniel Susskind, information technology researchers, sought to debunk the standing belief that some human experts--like doctors, lawyers, and accountants--cannot be replaced by robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). The belief is maintained by the claim that there's just some things too tricky for robots, like subjective judgement, creativity, and empathy.

There are as many as 1.5 billion English speaking people in the world, including those who speak English as a second language. That may sound like a lot, but that means four out of every five people do not speak English. Therefore, any speech recognition or natural language technology that is built primarily for English speakers will be missing out on 5.9 billion potential customers. That is a big opportunity; but with 6,500 spoken languages still in use throughout the world, it is also a very big challenge. Speech technology has solid roots in American research.