The Guardian has launched a news chatbot on Facebook Messenger in a further experimentation with the format that it first used to share recipes this summer. A chatbot is a computer programme that a user can interact with in a conversational, human way. The idea being that you can ask it any question and it will give you the answer. Send a message to the Guardian on Facebook Messenger, whatever it may be, and you'll be met with a polite response from the "prototype chatbot" asking if you want a daily news briefing. Say "yes" and it will ask you what time you want it delivered in the morning and whether you'd like to see the headlines or the most popular stories of the moment.

Tennis fans watching the U.S. Open at home or in person this year will get some extra insights delivered by IBM's machine learning technologies. "The way we're thinking about it is: the first time Watson's come to the U.S. Open," says IBM program manager John Kent. IBM is using its cloud-based data-processing tools, including the Watson machine learning suite, to enhance its online videos by automatically generating everything from video captions to automated analyses of ongoing matches. During each match, IBM's online SlamTracker platform provides real-time scores and assessments, pulling in data from officials and on-court speed tracking radar to evaluate players' moves as they happen. "We not only provide the real-time scores, but for each point, try to provide a little bit of insight as to what happened," Kent says. For example, the system can indicate on which areas of the court each player won the most points, how many feet each player moved over the course of a match, and which points were won by unforced error.

IBM's artificial intelligence programme obviously reached the pinnacle when it guest-edited an issue of the The Drum magazine but now it has also conceived the world's first ever movie trailer composed by an AI (trailer above - behind the scenes follows). Watson was fed the trailers of more than 100 horror films to help it identify the normative structure and path in the horror genre. It embarked on a visual, audio, and composition analysis of these clips, categorising the variables and generating the movie using probabilities once it gained an understanding of the genre. The tricky part was teaching the machine the tropes involved in cutting the trailers, from moments of terror, suspense and more using sequential clips from the movie, making the most of audio and visual cues. John R Smith of IBM said: "There are patterns and types of emotions in horror movies that resonate differently with each viewer, and the intricacies and interrelation of these are what an AI system would have to identify and understand in order to create a compelling movie trailer. "Our team was faced with the challenge of not only teaching a system to understand, 'what is scary', but then to create a trailer that would be considered'frightening and suspenseful' by a majority of viewers.

An "evolving" artistic tribute to pioneering scientist Alan Turing is to be unveiled just a few miles from his west London birthplace. The work, called Message from the Unseen World, uses artificial intelligence to light up a wall with words and phrases from a poem written in honour of the scientist, who was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 Oscar-winning The Imitation Game. Turing was a pioneering mathematician who is now hailed for his work as part of the war-time team tasked with cracking Nazi codes. He is widely credited as the father of modern computing, but died a broken man in 1954, aged 41, after chemical castration following a conviction for homosexual activity. The installation on Bishop's Bridge Road, near the entrance to Paddington Tube station, is based on a poem by Nick Drake which imagines the scientist looking back on his life.

In the last couple of years, we have examined how deep learning shops are thinking about hardware. From GPU acceleration, to CPU-only approaches, and of course, FPGAs, custom ASICs, and other devices, there are a range of options--but these are still early days. The algorithmic platforms for deep learning are still evolving and it is incumbent on hardware to keep up. Accordingly, we have been seeing more benchmarking efforts of various approaches from the research community. This week yielded a new benchmark effort comparing various deep learning frameworks on a short list of CPU and GPU options.

I've spent many years referencing Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can't recall the name or details. It's been an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking. Nothing else I've come across seems to be both as comprehensive and as succinct. However, honestly, the Wikipedia page is a bit of a tangled mess. Despite trying to absorb the information of this page many times over the years, very little of it seems to stick.

IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence XPRIZE -Using AI in new ways to solve the World's biggest problems #Gsummit At the Singularity University Global Summit 2016, Nextbigfuture interviewed Amir Banifatemi who is managing the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE. Amir Banifatemi is a founder and managing partner at K5 Ventures. He focuses on working with startups and growth-oriented companies on products and initiatives that could trigger significant breakthrough with strong economic and societal impact. He has a special emphasis on machine learning and predictive systems, IoT, knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing, Education, and digital health. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a 5 million AI and cognitive computing competition challenging teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges.

A model takes a selfie with CHiQ TV in the background at the launch of the device in Beijing. Watching television in the digital era has just got a lot easier. Sichuan Changhong Electronic Co Ltd, a manufacturer of TVs, has ushered in the era of intelligent TVs. Combining its expertise in sensor modules, speech recognition chips, artificial intelligence and big data, Changhong has produced a TV that promises to eliminate desperate browsing of hundreds of live channels during prime time to figure out what's on and what to watch. Freedom from the struggle with multiple remote-controller buttons is nigh.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are finding their way into an insane amount of products and services these days, some more conventionally useful than others. You would be hard-pressed to find a company in the tech sphere that isn't involved in AI in some form, whether by using somebody's product that leverages AI, or by developing their own solutions. This push is not a fad or just another random happening in the tech world; it's something that has been long in the making, but the technology just hasn't been up to snuff until now. Specifically, neural networking in computers and other methods of machine learning have been researched since the 1970s, though they spent a while on the shelf, since people recognized after a while that the technology just wasn't ready. Now it is, however, and the race is in full swing to find the next great AI platform for all of the services of tomorrow to run on.

The goal of Explainable AI (XAI) is to create a suite of new or modified machine learning techniques that produce explainable models that, when combined with effective explanation techniques, enable end users to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage the emerging generation of AI systems.