Imagine a world where your every sensation is augmented with music. When you pick up speed while out running, the music responds; as you enter a forest, instruments of deeper bass are seamlessly layered into the piece; and as your car creeps beyond the speed limit, the music alters rhythm to keep you in check. It may not be as far away as you think. "When we say we want to soundtrack your life, it's a big ambition," acknowledges Philip Sheppard, CEO of LifeScore. "But take a movie: when a soundtrack is considered, it is getting under your skin and leading your emotional response. "We're not telling people what to feel, but hopefully forcing serendipity – which is the point when the movie director of your brain goes'I'm here and present for this'." Virtuoso cellist Sheppard knows quite a bit about soundtracks – a renowned composer who has written with the likes of David Bowie and Queens of the Stone Age, he has more than 65 film scores to his credit and has worked on global music projects including Olympic Games ceremonies, the Rugby World Cup and the Tour de France. Accentuating the small moments which together make up a lifetime is the goal of a London start-up which uses AI – the company considers this to mean'Augmented Intelligence' – to help music respond to these changes in environment. "Massively generalising, the music falls into five camps: calming and sleep; flow and focus for work; daydreaming and wonder; narrative fantasy; or energy and uplift," says Sheppard. "We've really got into sensory ontology, which is how you link colour, texture, flavour and taste to sound.

Congress signaled its confidence in the Pentagon's young artificial intelligence office through a series of measures to increases its standing in the agency, including giving its director acquisition authority. The annual defense policy bill, called the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, would alter the reporting structure of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, raising the office to report directly to the deputy secretary of defense, instead of the department's chief information officer. The bill, which still needs President Donald Trump's approval, establishes a board of advisers to give the center strategic advice and technical expertise on AI matters. The measures to bolster the importance of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center come as the organization pivots from focusing on artificial intelligence projects to identifying and solving problems within the services using AI. The JAIC was established in 2018 to increase the adoption of AI across the Pentagon.

Philip Sheppard has recorded solo cello albums, composed more than 60 soundtracks, and adapted 206 national anthems for Olympic Games medal ceremonies. He knows every corner of the famed Abbey Road Studios. His work is the process of creating music, but sometimes he just wants to listen, preferably while walking in the woods. During one of those walks, in 2016, he didn't want to be bothered choosing what music to play. Instead he imagined some sort of magical accompaniment piped into his earphones that would dynamically reflect his surroundings and his mood, a literal soundtrack for his saunter.

Hyper-converged vendors Pivot3 and Scale Computing this week expanded their use cases with product launches. Scale formally unveiled HE150 all-flash NVMe hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances for space-constrained edge environments. Scale sells the compute device as a three-node cluster, but it does not require a server rack. The new device is a tiny version of the Scale HE500 HCI appliances that launched this year. Scale said select customers have deployed proofs of concept.

Must have: cool head, moral compass and the will to say no to generals, scientists and even presidents. The Pentagon is looking for the right person to help it navigate the morally murky waters of artificial intelligence (AI), billed as the battlefield of the 21st century. "One of the positions we are going to fill will be someone who's not just looking at technical standards, but who's an ethicist," Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the US defense department, told reporters last week. "I think that's a very important point that we would not have thought about this a year ago, I'll be honest with you. In Maven [a pilot AI machine learning project], these questions really did not rise to the surface every day, because it was really still humans looking at object detection, classification and tracking. There were no weapons involved in that."

Check out AI-Powered Crime Prediction at the Strata Business Summit at the Strata Data Conference in San Jose, March 5-8, 2018. Hurry--early price ends January 19. In this episode of the O'Reilly Media Podcast, I spoke with Gayle Sheppard, vice president and general manager of Saffron AI Group at Intel, and David Thomas, chief analytics officer for Bank of New Zealand (BNZ). Our conversations centered around the utility of artificial intelligence in the financial services industry. According to Sheppard, associative memory AI technologies are best thought of as reasoning systems that combine the memory-based learning seen in humans--recognizing patterns, spotting anomalies, and detecting new features almost instantly--with data.

The academic community are producing research papers at an exponential rate, so much so that good research and innovation can easily become lost in the sheer volume of information produced. How scientists and industry can shift through the noise was the basis for SCI's Fine Chemicals group'What can big data do for chemistry?' event, held on 11 October 2017. Delegates heard from experts on the importance of computational research in drug discovery and development, as well as the chemical sciences. Highlights included talks from Prof Gisbert Schneider, ETH Zurich, on his work into big'dada' in medicinal chemistry and the need for a balance between'the mind and the machine', as well as an update from Dr Aileen Day on the data science project at the Royal Society of Chemistry, which is working towards building a database of their work that can help disseminate knowledge to researchers. Artificial intelligence (AI) was a common theme at the event, with many of the speakers from biotechnology companies.

Comic-Con 2017 live updates: 'Robot Chicken' has a President Trump puppet, and a real life Iron Man takes off Day two of Comic-Con is all about TV. "Game of Thrones," "Twin Peaks," and "The Walking Dead" will all offer tributes to the throngs of Hall H. And we'll be there, bringing you all the intel and surprises. Stay tuned for interviews, panel updates and more. The can't miss panels at 2017 Comic-Con Inside Comic-Con's Hall H, the most important room in Hollywood Comic-Con through the years, a look back in one GIANT timeline The can't miss panels at 2017 Comic-Con'Robot Chicken's' ninth season will include President Trump: 'Just take a look at the puppet's hands' There is no pop culture or political figure safe from the claymation-style harpooning of Adult Swim's "Robot Chicken."

Artificial intelligence isn't an industry so much as a technology poised to transform business across a wide variety of sectors--and probably more than you think. During a panel discussion Tuesday at the Las Vegas tech trade show CES, a group of A.I. experts talked about which industries are the most ripe for adoption and application of A.I., and why entrepreneurs and consumers alike stand to benefit significantly from the technology. The number one industry set be transformed by A.I. appears to be healthcare, with $400 million invested by health care companies in the technology as of last year, a figure that's projected to grow to $3 billion or more by 2020, according to data from the Beacon Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. The retail industry is close behind, with $100 million invested as of 2015, expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020. Panelists pointed to manufacturing, financial services and government as the three followers to healthcare and retail.

While it's a bit premature to start fearing for your job just yet, robots are on the rise in the restaurant sector. The US' influential National Restaurant Association show in Chicago featured three robots this year: a sushi bot that can make 3,600 pieces of nigiri per hour; a vending-machine-style robot that makes bespoke salads and a robotic fry cook. More impressively, over in Japan, Pizza Hut is trialling a robotic waiter called Pepper. If the promotional video is to be believed, the 3ft humanoid is extremely sophisticated, verbally interacting with diners in much the same way as a human being. It can even respond to questions about dietary requirements, giving info on calorie counts and fat content.