In Charlie Kaufman's puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It's as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from his table and notices everyone – waiters, diners, perhaps even a passing dog – have his face and voice, has gone global. No one is immune: at one point, the mouth of the narrator, a motivational speaker called Michael Stone, falls from his face into his hands and chatters away all by itself. The guru's improving homilies are so artificially intelligent, predictable and effectively transhuman, that they need no warming body or soul to sustain them. Each puppet is incessantly enjoined by life coaches and other professional fascists to express their individuality. But how can they since they are all the same and have access to the same narrative codes?

As 2022 comes to an end, EE Times is highlighting memorable stories from each of its editors over the past year. Today's spotlight is on Sally Ward-Foxton, a correspondent at EE Times. Sally covers AI topics for EE Times and the EE Times Europe magazine. She has spent the last 18 years writing about the electronics industry from London, U.K., and has written for Electronic Design, ECN, Electronic Specifier: Design, Components in Electronics, and many more. She holds a master's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Today, there are lots of neurotechnologies that can read what's going on in our brains, modify the way they function, and change the wiring. Deep brain stimulation, for example, involves implanting electrodes deep into the brain to stimulate neurons and control the way brain regions fire. It's considered pretty invasive, in the medical sense. Other treatments, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which involves passing a device shaped like a figure 8 over a person's head to deliver a magnetic pulse to parts of the brain and to interfere with its activity, are considered "noninvasive" because they act from outside the brain. But if we can reach into a person's mind, even without piercing the skull, how noninvasive is the technology really?

Antwerp University Hospital (UZA) in Belgium is using an AI-powered robot to greet patients, check temperatures, and ensure masks are worn correctly. By removing initial human-to-human contact, the multilingual robot makes life a little easier and safer for hospital staff. The robot works pretty intuitively. As patients enter the hospital, they collect a barcode and feed it into the robot. This then uses temperature measurement cameras and ultrasonic sensors to check that the patient is safe.

High cost of labor, expansions of scientific research, food and beverages industry demand, improved efficiency and reduced workspace are major growth drivers. In the modern competitive business, the role of robots is becoming significant for industrial applications.

The Amazon Echo with Alexa is great, but it can act a little funny sometimes. These are Ranker's best stories involving Alexa. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The Amazon Echo with Alexa is great, but it can act a little funny sometimes.

We asked each of our staff to suggest the best story they had written or edited in 2017--the most important, most interesting, or best executed. I found the scientists quietly thinking about how to make better--or just different--kinds of humans to colonize outer space. From our dreams of space travel, a surprisingly strong ethical argument emerges in favor of messing with an individual's genetic code. Kids like my four-year-old niece Hannah are growing up from infancy with digital assistants, and it's time to start talking about what effect it will have on them. My story attempted to start a serious conversation on an under-explored topic despite the scarcity of academic research.

Would you have your paychecks deposited to Google, Apple or Facebook instead of Wells Fargo or Bank of America? The single outstanding factor customer seek in a banking brand is trust with their money. Chatbots Magazine has run many articles by people who build and deploy bots for big banks, or for banking startups. These seven offer a quick way to get up to speed. "Let your customers use the words they are familiar with and use every day, not the quasi-words you tell them to use." "We can fit these conversations into our lives, rather than having them interrupt us."

It turns out Mafia III is the game I worried it might be, just not in the ways I expected. It's hard to see at first, given how long it takes to unpack its slow pyramidal crime climb, or how well and powerfully told its mob-revenge story is. It has many charms, in other words. But as a game (for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), it's mired in monotony, and more than a few play-futzing bugs. A stirring cinematic opening that's smartly delivered documentary-style from the vantage of people reflecting on what happened initially obscures this.