A whole lot has happened since Emily St. John Mandel published her literary science-fiction novel Station Eleven ten years ago this week--including certain global disruptions that made the book appear startlingly prescient. Station Eleven traces the aftermath of a swine-flu pandemic that kills most of the human population, following a group of traveling players who tour the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare. Station Eleven sold over a million copies, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and recently secured a top spot on the New York Times readers' list of the best books of the century. The 2021 miniseries, creatively adapted for HBO by Patrick Somerville, scored several Emmy nominations and the deep, abiding love of television critics. This list of accolades still fails to represent how many readers connected to this particular story of postapocalyptic society, going so far as to get "Survival Is Not Enough" tattoos--a reference to a motto the Traveling Symphony favors in the book.

"There are a lot of folks around the world, especially younger folks, contemplating whether to pursue a STEM degree or not. There might be self-doubt about whether their background becomes a barrier, or they might think tech is intimidating and whether they'll be able to do it. Even if one person who doesn't have enough resources or facing challenges, gathers the courage from examples like this, not just mine, it would bring a sense of achievement for me because I feel like there should be nothing that should stop a true learner." Pratibha serves on the AnitaB AI committee and has worked both in natural language processing and deep learning. She has founded a start-up in video analytics that was selected for the Target Accelerator program.

Artificial intelligence is getting everyone excited. It's going to end or improve the world, depending on your optimism/pessimism. The latest hullabaloo was triggered by the release of ChatGPT – the progression of so called generative AI, which doesn't just analyse data but actually creates new content (in this case written text). There's been lots of speculation of what this might mean for education (the end of coursework?), but my focus is on the implications for the labour market. Now the first serious research on that front has arrived.

This story is part of an ongoing series in which we highlight graduates of Capital One's Machine Learning Engineering Training Program (MLETP), a 160-hour program that teaches software and data engineers the skills necessary to work in machine learning and AI. Pradeep picked up the value of continuous learning from his mother, who earned multiple master's degrees and a Ph.D. in education. So after becoming a software engineer at Capital One in 2017, he was quick to embed himself in our culture of growth and development. Pradeep followed his curiosity and began developing skills in machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that can automatically predict outcomes. Capital One uses machine learning to create real-time and intelligent customer experiences that bring simplicity to banking.

An AI can beat a chess grandmaster. An AI can become the StarCraft esports champion. But creating an AI that could play Pokémon at the competitive level has been a more elusive problem. Thanks to the variety of monsters, stats, moves, and items, a Pokémon battle has hundreds of thousands of factors for any player -- or machine -- to consider. But that hasn't stopped some people from trying.

The destruction of mankind by swarms of intelligent robots is a film trope long held dear by Hollywood producers and directors. Whether it's the Terminator, or Ultron or the computer in WarGames, ever since the introduction of the first computer, we've been worrying about ways in which such technology could destroy us. Thankfully, visions of an invading army of kill-bot is well wide of the mark, at least within the bounds of foreseeable technology, but the fact is artificial intelligence (AI) is already being used for nefarious purposes, and the world's biggest nations are falling behind in their attempts to keep ahead of the threat. That is certainly the conclusion made by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which reported recently to both the US Congress and President Joe Biden that: "America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era. This is the tough reality we must face. And it is this reality that demands comprehensive, whole-of-nation action."

Jason Baker was studying political science at UC Davis when he got his hands on "SimCity." He took a careful approach to the computer game. "I was not one of the players who enjoyed Godzilla running through your city and destroying it. I enjoyed making my city run well." This conscientious approach gave him a boost in a class on local government.

As a birder, I had heard that if you paid careful attention to the head feathers on the downy woodpeckers that visited your bird feeders, you could begin to recognize individual birds. I even went so far as to try sketching birds at my own feeders and had found this to be true, up to a point. In the meantime, in my day job as a computer scientist, I knew that other researchers had used machine learning techniques to recognize individual faces in digital images with a high degree of accuracy. These projects got me thinking about ways to combine my hobby with my day job. Would it be possible to apply those techniques to identify individual birds?

NSFW: This article contains links to and descriptions of explicit sexual acts including BDSM play that some may find uncomfortable. The individuals included in this report are consenting adults who observe proper safety procedures in their play. A dining room table in a quiet British town is the birthplace of one of the most interesting developments in sextech. It's here where a hobbyist has built the world's first digital, voice-controlled dominatrix capable of delivering very real punishment, and she sounds weirdly familiar.

Truly understanding artificial intelligence is rare. AI doesn't think in concepts and images the way humans do. It has individual goals, like to preserve humankind as technology's caretakers, or to dismantle complex systems. And in the sci-fi thriller Void Star, things are further complicated by the fact that AI's "thoughts" are actually glyphs, or waves of data, that only make sense to people with special cranial implants connected to the net. The elegant, if cerebral, examination of how both technology and humans process information is just one of many ideas explored in Void Star, out today.