From within the dark confines of the skull, the brain builds its own version of reality. By weaving together expectations and information gleaned from the senses, the brain creates a story about the outside world. For most of us, the brain is a skilled storyteller, but to spin a sensible yarn, it has to fill in some details itself. "The brain is a guessing machine, trying at each moment of time to guess what is out there," says computational neuroscientist Peggy Seriès. Guesses just slightly off -- like mistaking a smile for a smirk -- rarely cause harm.

We made it, space travelers. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice proved challenging in many ways--mentally, emotionally, grammatically. Find our concluding thoughts below (spoiler alert, needless to say), and follow up with responses of your own and questions for Leckie in the comments. We'll be talking to her next week. So, Did Breq Go Crazy Over the Death of Lieutenant Awn? Jay Dayrit, Editorial Operations Manager: I wouldn't say crazy, per se, maybe just an identity crisis.

Stress is actually a bit of a buzzword. The initial definition was "the reaction to changes", which is why you get stressed also when good things happen, hence the distinction between good stress, eustress, and bad stress, distress. Since the 90's, stress has become a synonym of the everyday hustling, describing a life style. We focus on the original definition, evaluating the user autonomic balance that can be estimated from heart rate variability (HRV). The autonomic nervous system (the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems) has a direct influence over most of our internal organs.

Artificial intelligence is expected to revolutionise the financial services industry with an unprecedented depth and breadth of insight and the ability to act on information and learn from its actions. However, many executives acknowledge a degree of risk surrounding the use of AI, according to a research from global law firm Baker & McKenzie. Trading, financial analysis and IT are expected to be changed the most over the next three years according to respondents, but the impact is expected to be wide ranging with machine learning to affect risk assessment, credit assessment and portfolio management. Survey respondents were clear that machine learning will have a positive impact on competitiveness in financial markets yet believe the most negative effects of AI will be in the makeup of the work force and market stability. Like with all technology, the introduction of AI in financial services will largely depend on how it is employed that will ultimately determine the risk and reward. It also raises important questions and concerns about the liability of a functioning AI platform.

Outcomes Based Healthcare and Big Data Partnership have won an Innovate UK grant for a 1m project to change healthcare's approach to diabetes. In partnership, these two organisations will be creating "a dashboard and software product for doctors to predict and pre-treat for complications of diabetes." The press release explains that this will utilise health and non-health data in conjunction with advanced Machine Learning and analytics techniques to develop a system that can identify the progression of the disease. This will come from a local London population. The reason this Big Data and Machine Learning approach is interesting though, is it offers a top-line independent perspective on a difficult disease.

While Gupta might have been relieved that he was not taken to task by his stern coach at Prepathon, an online test prep startup founded in September 2015, what he didn't know was that the person he was chatting with on the Prepathon app was not his coach but a bot! Millennials - those born between 1980 and 2000 - are texting more and talking less. And millennials matter because they will account for 40% of all consumers in the US by 2020, as projected by Goldman Sachs. While Jaiswal might be content with one chatbot, others want multiple bots. Aarti Gill is one of them. The cofounder of FitCircle, a chat-based health and fitness platform, boasts 32,000 bot users.

Hisashi Taniguchi took a sabbatical from developing software for driverless taxis and drones to pilgrimage to a Buddhist temple in western Japan. He shaved his head, donned black robes and studied to become the shrine's leader. He passed the test, yet within a week was back at the Tokyo offices of ZMP Inc., overseeing his robotics company in a more-typical wardrobe of jeans and red Converse sneakers. As ZMP's founder and chief executive officer, he tries to sync millennia-old teachings with efforts to make artificial intelligence part of everyday life. "The temple teaches you that if you shine, you'll shed light on those around you," Taniguchi, 52, said.

It seems like everyone wants to invest in artificial intelligence (AI). And it's not just the tech giants: USAA is using AI to protect its users from identity theft and Under Armour has connected its health app, MyFitnessPal, to IBM Watson so users can get a more thorough read of their health. AI is already a 15 billion dollar industry, according to the MIT Technology Review, with more than 2,600 companies developing their own tech, and the value of AI is reported to rise to over 70 billion by 2020. Because of AI's business opportunities, hundreds of designers in digital agencies, people who were taught to create products and services that live on the Internet, are starting to build physical products that interact with us, respond to our moods, and make decisions for us. It's a challenge that requires every skill they've learned, plus many they haven't. Still, designers know the basics: The principles of user-centric design lay the groundwork for building a great AI system.

In NLP we use sentiment to refer to the positive or negative emotions a person expresses in their language. It may be measured categorically (negative) or numerically (-1.2). It may be measured at the utterance level or as applied to a particular entity or topic. It may be calculated via any number of algorithms, but from the standpoint of a user of text analytics software, you provide text to a program and get back information about the sentiment. When you design the conversational paths of your chatbot you are concerned primarily with the topics of conversation.

No longer confined to science fiction, artificial intelligence is here and it's set to transform the way we live and work. At the forefront of this computing revolution is IBM, which has its sights set on changing the world with its cognitive computing engine Watson. As many will know, Watson shot to fame in 2011 when it appeared on US game show Jeopardy, beating two previous winners to secure the 1m prize. Since then IBM have put the technology to use in various industries including retail, healthcare and financial services. A survey carried out by IBM earlier this year showed that 50% of top CEOs predict AI and Cognitive Computing will disrupt their industry.