In anticipation of Sunday's Emmy Awards, this week WIRED staffers are looking back at some of their favorite shows from the past year. One scene from Westworld replays in my head again and again, a little like (I imagine) one of the poor, doomed robots on the show who start noticing and remembering the programmatic loops in their simulated, hyper-violent Old West sandbox game. It's when the android Maeve, played by Thandie Newton, grabs a technician's tablet showing the dashboard for her personality software and, with a deft finger swipe, upgrades herself to genius. Yes, maybe taking control of your life by literally taking control of your life is a teensy bit on the nose. But for me it was the best flicker of weirdness from a show that--again, like its robots--dreamed big dreams.

Getting a job done often still relies on sending chains of messages back and forth to the extent that it would be nice to have an assistant to help deal with it all. That's the idea behind Astro, a new app that applies artificial intelligence to email in an attempt to make life easier for its users. Its marquee feature is Astrobot, a chatbot powered by machine learning that's designed to keep users abreast of what's important in their inbox. For example, Astrobot will read through users' emails and notify them when they've been asked important questions. It can also be used to unsubscribe from emails, clean out a user's inbox and more.

It was at Carnegie Mellon where Dr. Hon began seriously building the foundation for his later work in machine-human interaction. His PhD supervisor, Turing Award winner Raj Reddy, was a former student of John McCarthy, the computer scientist who coined the term'artificial intelligence' in 1956 and is widely known as the father of AI. This connection would have richly benefited Dr. Hon, except that an'AI Winter' was happening from 1986 to 1992 when he was completing his doctorate degree. Recalling the climate of this period, "government agencies, universities and even companies slowed down or stopped funding to the field. It was only until the first decade of the 2000's that AI got so hot," said Dr. Hon. Dr. Hon credits the power of improved hardware and software and Big Data for heating up the AI scene.