Millions of young online gamers today are accustomed to battling bad guys. But their biggest foes are often their fellow players. Many online gaming sites are rife with creepy bigotry, harassment and even death threats. So how do you root out the rotten apples? Over the past several years, Riot Games, which produces the immensely popular League of Legends, has been experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics tools to find the online trolls and make their games more sportsmanlike.

Remember the English composition teacher who could always find a gentle way to improve that middling passage in your writing? The editor who elevated the lightning bug to lightning? Textio, a Seattle machine learning and natural language processing startup focused on improving job listings and recruiting e-mails for companies including Starbucks, Microsoft, and Twitter, is releasing a new feature that can identify words and phrases that are not bad, per se, but could be better. The company's "opportunities" feature is confined to the rather narrow--and importantly, measurable--world of writing done by recruiters and hiring managers. It only suggests improvements to a few words here and there, rather than providing a wholesale rewrite.

Apple's Siri has a fantastic yet little-understood feature that brings a little artificial intelligence into every iOS user's life. Here is how to use it. Apple calls this feature Proactive and makes it mainly available through Siri. Proactive is context-based artificial intelligence solution the company intends will become more powerful than Google Now and more private than any other solution out there – even Royalty should be able to use it without being spied upon (and, by extension, anyone should enjoy equal levels of privacy). You access it using Siri and it can do things like show you photos you took last month to reminding you to do things when you get into or out of your car.

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple's iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years. The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. During a 20 minute demo onstage at Disrupt NYC, Viv flawlessly handled a dozen complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations. The major difference between Siri and Viv is that the latter is a far more open platform.

Students taking an online course at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were duped into thinking one of their teaching assistants, named Jill Watson, was an actual human. And how can you blame them--the virtual TA managed to answer many of their questions with 97 percent certainty. Now, being "certain" is not the same as being correct. But computer science professor Ashok Goel felt it was a sufficient level of confidence to allow the virtual TA, named Jill Watson, to answer student inquiries on her own. For nearly the entire month of April, Jill was responding directly to the class through an online student forum, but only when she was 97 percent sure her answers were correct. The students weren't told that they were interacting with a virtual TA until April 26.

Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party services. This product is called Viv and, in a world first, Kittlaus just gave us a demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that shows off the power of what they've built with Viv. Like with Siri, Viv wants to build a conversational and smart layer that lets you interact with various services. But Viv is taking everything one step further. More importantly, there's a developer platform to add more services.

Automotive Grade Linux could be the answer to today's woefully fragmented, often frustrating automotive operating-system landscape. A project of the Linux Foundation, AGL is currently focused on providing an operating system for in-vehicle infotainment consoles. But its backers envision an OS that can control instrument clusters and handle everything from connected-car features to autonomous vehicles. Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Ford, and Jaguar Land Rover are all participating. I spoke with Dan Cauchy, general manager of the Automotive Grade Linux project at the Linux Foundation, to learn more about this project.

Question: I recently had surgery on my hand and am quite certain that the handprint will no longer match that on the Global Entry database. I have two international trips coming up and I'd really like my Global Entry to be up to date. Answer: Brown doesn't have to do anything to use his Global Entry privileges, which include expedited re-entry into the United States and screening at domestic airport security, all for 100 for five years. Customs and Border Protection, which administers Global Entry, said it is fingerprints, not handprints, that are used for identification. The re-entry kiosks at immigration, a spokesman said, use four fingerprints from one hand to validate who you are.

LONDON – Reliable economic statistics are a vital public good. They are essential to effective policymaking, business planning, and the electorate's ability to hold decision-makers to account. And yet the methods we use to measure our economies are becoming increasingly out of date. The statistical conventions on which we base our estimates were adopted a half-century ago, at a time when the economy was producing relatively similar physical goods. Today's economy is radically different and changing rapidly – the result of technological innovation, the rising value of intangible, knowledge-based assets, and the internationalization of economic activity.

Ed Boyden is a professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain, and applies them systematically to reveal ground truth principles of biological function as well as to repair these systems. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include expansion microscopy, which enables complex biological systems to be imaged with nanoscale precision, and optogenetic tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural activity with light. Amongst other recognitions, he has received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (2015), the Schuetze Prize (2014), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (2013), the NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2013), and the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2011). Ed received his Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned.