Tom Murphy graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD in computer science. Then he built software that learned to play Nintendo games. In some cases, the system works well. Playing Super Mario, for instance, it learns to exploit a bug in the game, stomping on enemy Goombas even when floating below them. It can rack up points by attacking the game with a reckless abandon you and I would never try.

Artificially intelligent beings, once portrayed in celluloid as gigantic machines inside mammoth control rooms, are now a part of every smartphone (virtual assistants). And as I write this post, technology bigwigs and startups alike are tirelessly engaging in the effort to build the perfect virtual assistant for everyone. In their powerful endeavor, they have been strongly aided by the power of inexpensive, computing platforms in the form of the smartphones. Significant advancements in speech recognition algorithms have also contributed to the optimism. Those who understand technology will also appreciate the fact that access to data through web APIs has also boosted the research and outcome in the domain.

As I write this, I'm listening to music written and performed by a robot that was built by Brain.fm to help me focus. I think it might be working, giving me a tiny buzz. It could of course be a placebo effect. In fact, the fact that I even wrote that last three-word sentence should tell you something about the attitude in which I approached Brain.fm's Brain.fm is a new audio startup out of Chicago that produces music written by artificial intelligence that promises to get your brain into one of several desired states, from deep sleep to focused work.

It's odd holding a minute's silence for a dead person who you never knew anything about, especially at a tech show where you can see messages from their AI reincarnation flashing up on a massive screen behind the very-much-alive woman who has made this whole strange scene possible. Is this what a 21st-century Dr Frankenstein looks like? Except now, instead of stitching body parts together to recreate life, what we're seeing is found fragments of the deceased's personality put through a form of machine learning to create a semblance of their life after death. Very recently however, Luka was adapted in a brand new way, to include a chatbot based on a real human being--one who just so happens to be dead. It's this ghost-in-the-machine that has the audience spellbound, as Luka's cofounder Eugenia Kuyda explains how text messages, social media conversations, and other sources of information on the deceased were grafted onto an existing AI platform.

Sandia National Laboratories is the nation's premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation with major facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California. We are a world-class team of scientists, engineers, technologists, post docs, and visiting researchers all focused on cutting-edge technology, ranging from homeland defense, global security, bio...technology, and environmental preservation to energy and combustion research, computer security, and nuclear defense. To learn more, please visit our website at www.sandia.gov. We are searching for a Manager for the Semiconductor Device Sciences Department for the Albuquerque facility. Must be able to obtain and maintain a DOE Security Clearance.

SINGAPORE: At a time when radicalism is on the rise and people are concerned that their city might join the list of those tainted by terror, safety and security are topmost on the minds of government customers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise told Channel NewsAsia. The US-based IT giant is thus hoping to tackle these issues with a tool to help governments better make sense of the huge amounts of information being shared online by citizens, in the form of a Citizen Insights Dashboard. The tool, which is currently in beta, will be showcased for the first time at the World Cities Summit (WCS) held in Singapore from Sunday (Jul 10). It was developed in the city-state since April by a team led by Mr Jason Tan, director of HSE Insights Lab Singapore spearheading the project. More than just surveillance for security, the dashboard looks to make sense of posts made by citizens on social media to understand their thoughts and what they care about.

Researchers from the University of Southern California have developed a new machine learning tool capable of detecting certain speech-related diagnostic criteria in patients being evaluated for depression. Known as SimSensei, the tool listens to patient's voices during diagnostic interviews for reductions in vowel expression characteristic of psychological and neurological disorders that may not be sufficiently clear to human interviewers. The idea is (of course) not to replace those interviewers, but to add additional objective weight to the diagnostic process. The group's work is described in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. Depression misdiagnosis is a huge problem in health care, particularly in cases in which a primary care doctor making (or not) the diagnosis.

"Because we'll need something tasty to swill when our robot overlords finally come into their full artificial intelligence, a company in the UK is attempting to figure out if robots can help humans brew a better beer," reports The Consumerist website. "While there won't be robots stirring batches of wort or sorting hops, artificial intelligence will play a big part in London-based firm IntelligentX's plan to brew beer, CNET reports. And, you can found out that information by clicking here.

"Because we'll need something tasty to swill when our robot overlords finally come into their full artificial intelligence, a company in the UK is attempting to figure out if robots can help humans brew a better beer," reports The Consumerist website. "While there won't be robots stirring batches of wort or sorting hops, artificial intelligence will play a big part in London-based firm IntelligentX's plan to brew beer, CNET reports. And, you can found out that information by clicking here.

Millions of people use the world of Minecraft to bring their 3D visions to life, but Microsoft wants to take the creative utopia to the next level. A blog post by Minecraft's developers Mojang said that Microsoft's Project Malmo platform is now open to the public. The system was previously available to a limited group of computer scientists in a private preview, all of whom had a focus on artificial intelligence. According to Mojang, any developer can use Project Malmo's open source toolset to build artificial intelligence solutions that can be tested in Minecraft. Vast levels of coding experience are not necessary, as the Project Malmo team believes that the system is accessible for novice coders and above.