The White House and New York University's Information Law Institute, with support from Google Open Research, Microsoft Research and the MacArthur Foundation will host a major public symposium to address the near-term impacts of AI technologies across social and economic systems. The focus will be the challenges of the next 5-10 years, specifically addressing four themes: social inequality, labor, healthcare, and ethics. Leaders from industry, academia, and civil society will share ideas for technical design, research and policy directions.

Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI expert Ross Goodwin created a neural network named Benjamin (its own choice!) over the course of a year. Once the network was up and running, Benjamin wrote the script based on just a few prompts. Then, they made it into a movie. And yes, that is the guy from Silicon Valley.

A team of researchers led by MIT's Katie Bouman have developed a new computer algorithm that could help astronomers generate the first true image of a black hole. At present, astronomers rely of imaginative minds of artists to create a clear image of a black hole. Black holes are very compact and are very far away from Earth, making it harder for astronomers to create a high-quality photo. "Taking a picture of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is equivalent to taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope," Bouman explained in a press release. For years, researchers have been using radio wavelengths to detect and explore distant objects due to the ability of radio frequencies to penetrate through galactic dust.

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount of incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

You might have seen this famous xkcd comic before. The goof is based on the idea that any 3-year-old child can recognize a photo of a bird, but figuring out how to make a computer recognize objects has puzzled the very best computer scientists for over 50 years. In the last few years, we've finally found a good approach to object recognition using deep convolutional neural networks. That sounds like a a bunch of made up words from a William Gibson Sci-Fi novel, but the ideas are totally understandable if you break them down one by one. So let's do it -- let's write a program that can recognize birds!

Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch stars in a strangely dark but hilarious sci-fi movie written by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was created by filmmaker Oscar Sharp and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin.

Just when when marketers thought they were getting a handle on mobile, everything is changing. Ten thousand developers are working on Facebook bots so companies and customers can chat like friends. Artificial intelligence is driving personal digital assistants that will book flights, reserve hotel rooms, call a Lyft or Uber, get great dinner reservations, and maybe even find the perfect date. Amazon is shipping smart tools that re-order products automatically, or with the push of a button, and Google is jumping in on the action. And some of us just got good old-fashioned email and SEO down pat.

On Monday, Apple exec Craig Federighi quickly mentioned how Apple is going to try and catch up to Google's smart Photo app: "on-device intelligence." Similarly, Microsoft offers developers a cloud service that will automatically caption photos. "It's disappointing to see that Apple is not offering developers and customers the option to tap into the power of applying machine learning to data hosted in cloud services. Apple has increased the privacy and encryption capabilities in their operating systems, but at the expense of not taking advantage of powerful machine learning capabilities," he adds.

On Monday, Apple exec Craig Federighi quickly mentioned how Apple is going to try and catch up to Google's smart Photo app: "on-device intelligence." But at least one analyst is skeptical that this tech will really allow Apple to keep up with its competitors, much less leapfrog them. On-device intelligence lets Apple jump on the biggest trend in tech: machine learning (also known as artificial intelligence and cognitive computing). This is where smart computers are fed a large amount of data and learn from it. Apple will use it to scan your photos and understand who's in them and what's going on, something Google Photos is already doing. But Apple has a problem.

For PlayStation maker Sony, this year's E3 video game conference has been all about games. From a virtual reality Resident Evil to a surprise Spider-Man title, PlayStation gamers have plenty to look forward to in the coming months. TIME sat down with SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden to talk about the future of PlayStation. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. TIME: Sony came out this week and confirmed that a high-end PlayStation 4 is in the works.