I've never played Minecraft in my life--but then I'm not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of "A Minecraft Movie." He's best known for "Napoleon Dynamite," from 2004, which evokes its spiritual milieu only implicitly, by the absence of secular pop culture and of teen-age ribaldry. He followed it with "Nacho Libre," starring Jack Black as a friar who enters the wrestling ring to save a convent, and, in 2009, with "Gentlemen Broncos," a celestial gross-out vision of an adolescent gospel. His satire "Don Verdean," from 2015, is explicitly set in church communities and involves relic smuggling in Israel; his 2016 comedy, "Masterminds," is a heist film that's centered on grace and holy innocence. With "A Minecraft Movie," I was impatient to see what Hess would do with another world of extreme fantasy, akin to that of "Gentlemen Broncos." The short answer is, too much and not nearly enough; the I.P. is the boss, the characters are its minions, and Hess--constrained both by a script that he didn't write and by the demands of complex C.G.I.--struggles to live up to his own œuvre, which is among the most substantially loopy (or loopily substantial) in modern cinema.

Thank you for joining me. Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has funded a pro-Trump political action committee with tens of millions of dollars and planned a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania. He speaks to Trump multiple times per week and has urged other billionaires to endorse the Republican candidate en masse in private gatherings, according to the New York Times. Taken together, Musk's actions amount to something unprecedented in modern times – a man who is both the richest in the world and owner of an influential means of mass communication throwing all his weight behind a political candidate.

Some two years ago we published an article that tried to answer the question of when will we see the world's first AI movie director? In this article I stated that "It seems certain that the first AI directed movie will be either a cartoon or animated film." Well, two years on, it was brought to my attention, rather embarrassingly, that some people feel that by the time I even wrote that article that we had already seen the first AI directed film. I noted in that article that the "first ever AI generated script that was turned into a movie called Sunspring (2016)", a real milestone for artificial intelligence. Well, it turns out that it was an evolution of the same artificial intelligence system that, only two years later in 2018, did in fact'direct' a movie.

With the midterm elections just weeks away, the political vitriol and rhetoric are about to heat up. One Arizona State University professor thinks most of the hyperbolic chatter will come from malicious bots spreading racism and hate on social media and in the comments section on news sites. Victor Benjamin, assistant professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business, has been researching this phenomenon for years. He says the next generation of AI is a reflection of what's going on in society. Benjamin says that as AI learning becomes increasingly dependent on public data sets, such as online conversations, it is vulnerable to influence from cyber adversaries injecting disinformation and social discord. They are swaying public opinion on issues such as presidential elections, public health and social tensions.

The development of new AUV technology increased the range of tasks that AUVs can tackle and the length of their operations. As a result, AUVs are capable of handling highly complex operations. However, these missions do not fit easily into the traditional method of defining a mission as a series of pre-planned waypoints because it is not possible to know, in advance, everything that might occur during the mission. This results in a gap between the operator's expectations and actual operational performance. Consequently, this can create a diminished level of trust between the operators and AUVs, resulting in unnecessary mission interruptions. To bridge this gap between in-mission robotic behaviours and operators' expectations, this work aims to provide a framework to explain decisions and actions taken by an autonomous vehicle during the mission, in an easy-to-understand manner. Additionally, the objective is to have an autonomy-agnostic system that can be added as an additional layer on top of any autonomy architecture. To make the approach applicable across different autonomous systems equipped with different autonomies, this work decouples the inner workings of the autonomy from the decision points and the resulting executed actions applying Knowledge Distillation. Finally, to present the explanations to the operators in a more natural way, the output of the distilled decision tree is combined with natural language explanations and reported to the operators as sentences. For this reason, an additional step known as Concept2Text Generation is added at the end of the explanation pipeline.

He graduated w/Special Honors in ChE & later Cert. in Quality Mgmt. Syndicated research (silicon photonics); writes for trade press and web communities. Served Fortune 1000 and FTSE 250 companies in a variety of projects, including global market/product strategy and most recently deep analytics and forecasting. Following ten years in government research and management (Deputy Director, National Measurement Laboratory (US DoC NIST) and Chief, Chemical Engineering Division of NIST), Mr. Bateman worked at several start-ups in electronics and antennas, resulting in 100s of products and several patents. Mr. Bateman led efforts to bring design and manufacturing of telematics and in-building antennas to China and Malaysia, and was key in creating an Automotive Connectivity Unit in Laird, and led technical diligence for multiple acquisitions and creation of an Infrastructure Antenna Unit.

Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Siri backend creator Nuance in a bumper deal that it says will usher in a "new era of outcomes-based AI". "Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance's best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft's secure and trusted industry cloud offerings," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud AI Group at Microsoft. "This powerful combination will help providers offer more affordable, effective, and accessible healthcare, and help organisations in every industry create more personalised and meaningful customer experiences. I couldn't be more pleased to welcome the Nuance team to our Microsoft family." Nuance became a household name (in techie households, anyway) for creating the speech recognition engine that powers Apple's smart assistant, Siri.

After an almost year-long buyout process, Microsoft has completed the acquisition of Nuance, folding the latter's voice biometrics and conversational AI capabilities into its portfolio. The $19.7 billion acquisition had to pass several regulatory roadblocks since it was revealed in April 2020. The EU held up the acquisition in December 2021, after receiving permission from U.S. and Australian regulatory bodies prior. Though the EU would eventually give the green light for the deal in the same month. It is the second-largest acquisition by Microsoft, only behind the $27 billion buyout of LinkedIn in 2016.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man needs ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control, said Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. His book, Superintelligence, is a crystal ball on AI's timeline and the future of humanity. Inarguably, artificial intelligence has become an integral part of our lives. Here, we look at the AI breakthroughs that precipitated this paradigm shift. In 1956, John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI, coined the term "artificial intelligence" during the Dartmouth workshop in 1956.

Assistant Professor Wim van Rees and his team have developed simulations of self-propelled undulatory swimmers to better understand how fish-like deformable fins could improve propulsion in underwater devices, seen here in a top-down view. MIT ocean and mechanical engineers are using advances in scientific computing to address the ocean's many challenges, and seize its opportunities. There are few environments as unforgiving as the ocean. Its unpredictable weather patterns and limitations in terms of communications have left large swaths of the ocean unexplored and shrouded in mystery. "The ocean is a fascinating environment with a number of current challenges like microplastics, algae blooms, coral bleaching, and rising temperatures," says Wim van Rees, the ABS Career Development Professor at MIT. "At the same time, the ocean holds countless opportunities -- from aquaculture to energy harvesting and exploring the many ocean creatures we haven't discovered yet."