Actor Tori Thomas on set at the AI studio Promise in Los Angeles filming the studio's newly announced AI-enabled horror film, Touch Grass. Actor Tori Thomas on set at the AI studio Promise in Los Angeles filming the studio's newly announced AI-enabled horror film, Touch Grass. 'I see the incredible promise': on set of an AI film shoot as new studios embrace controversial tech N ear the collonaded entrance to Sony Pictures' historic Culver City film studio, a tech-powered rival has sprung up this summer. The artists at Promise, a new studio feeding off the potential of AI, can glimpse the lots where Singin' in the Rain and Men in Black were shot, but no longer do they need to get beyond the studio's high walls to make their visions come true. From far more modest premises, they are making movies with rapidly accelerating AI models that create backgrounds, special effects and even "synthetic performers" - using US models but also driven by market-leading Chinese AI.

Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand Keith Thomas, a man in his 40s with no sensation or movement in his hands, is able to feel and move objects by controlling another person's hand via a brain implant. The technique might one day even allow us to experience another person's body over long distances. Keith Thomas (right) was able to control another person's hand A man with paralysis has been able to move and sense another person's hand as if it were his own, thanks to a new kind of "telepathic" brain implant. "We created a mind-body connection between two different individuals," says Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York state. The approach could be used as a form of rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, allowing people with paralysis to work together, and may one day even allow people to share experiences remotely, says Bouton.

A new Instagram page is using AI to make parodies of Republicans attempting to push anti-LGBTQ bills. The account, called @RuPublicans--a spin on name of the political party with a nod to the famed RuPaul–has gained nearly 100,000 followers in less than two weeks since its launch, going viral for its creative AI portraits of different Republicans in full drag. Created by partners and digital nomads Craig and Stephen (who asked to be identified by their first names only to maintain their privacy), the project sees the couple using art and technology for political activism. "We were bearing witness to the rhetoric and actions against the drag community," Craig tells TIME, "and it made us want to do something, so we had this idea of putting the GOP in drag." The pair were traveling in an Airstream through the American West when they came up with the idea for the Instagram account, which comes at a particularly vulnerable time for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. State lawmakers are introducing more anti-LGBTQ this year than in the past collective five years, according to Bloomberg and data from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Botball is a national program in which teams of middle and high school students design, build, and program small autonomous mobile robots to compete in a highly charged interactive (but nondestructive) tournament. Botball students learn to program in c, construct feedback and control loops, create electromechanical systems, and integrate it all together while they work on a team. Botball takes place in regional tournaments across the country and culminates in a National Botball Tournament traditionally hosted by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence at its annual conference. This program puts reusable equipment into schools and, at the Botball Teacher Workshops, trains teachers in robotics and the integration of robotics into their curriculum. Botball appeals to a wide variety of students and brings out the best in each, challenging them to solve realworld problems in a dynamic environment at their own level.

Carnegie Mellon University established a branch campus in Qatar in the fall of 2004. We are offering a BS degree in Computer Science to an international student body. The university invites applications for a visiting faculty position to begin as early as January 2006. We are seeking a faculty member in the area of Learning Science and Technology with research experience ideally in designing, implementing, deploying, and evaluating educational technology in school or college settings. An ability to teach courses in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, or related areas is also desired.

Jane Wang started out as an applied physicist modeling the complex network dynamics of memory systems in the brain before moving into experimental cognitive neuroscience as a postdoc at Northwestern. Since joining DeepMind two years ago, her non-machine learning background has equipped her with a unique set of tools and perspectives for tackling the hardest AI problems. "It's exhilarating to formulate theories of human brain function as powerful deep reinforcement learning models that can solve similarly complex tasks," she shares. Though Wang has been successful without a formal AI background, she's concerned the steep learning curve and hypercompetitive atmosphere of AI research can discourage diverse participation. "Although competitiveness drives the field forward, it also discourages those who wish to work in more inclusive, cooperative environments," she warns.

The company best known for its search engine wasn't kidding around: It made hardware the centerpiece of its Google I/O developers conference here and later poached Amazon executive David Foster, who ran the lab responsible for Amazon's Kindle tablet and Echo smart speaker, to head hardware product development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has referred to hardware as "our next big bet." A year later, Google has discovered that hardware can be, well, hard. As Google gets ready to lay out its vision at this year's I/O Wednesday, it's still making that hardware bet pay off. Pixel phones are in short supply and relatively few have sold.

Welcome to the Schindler Conference Call on key figures for the First Quarter 2017. I'm here together with Erich Ammann, our CFO we will go into all financial details later during the call. As an introduction to the remark it is fair to say that we continued our successful plan of the last year as we kept our direction towards top-line growth and also higher profitability. Let's have a closer look on our highlights of the first quarter 2017 on slide two. We made further operational and strategic progress. First, we were able to confirm our growth path. Orders received increased by 5.9% in local currencies and also operating revenue rose by 3.8% in local currencies. Operating revenue was therefore within our guidance of 3% to 5% growth in 2017. Our investments into our geographic diversification mainly into our strategic markets were paying off. Second, we also continued to improve our profitability. The EBIT margin increased to 11.5% and even 11.7% before restructuring costs. Net profit stayed flat at CHF179 million due to some temporary booking losses on the ALSO exchangeable bond. Third, we made further progress in our strategic initiatives. We are on track with our globally harmonized modular product platforms, but it is still a long way to go to finalize this, and we were also able to successfully launch our new Internet of Elevator and Escalator Solutions, Schindler Ahead. Yesterday, we launched officially our new Schindler Ahead initiative and I would like to stay a little bit with that topic. As you can see on slide number 3, we will create significant customer benefits in the future. We increased the uptime of our equipment with predictive maintenance, we offer comprehensive insights about all type of information of the equipment for a better building, maintenance and management, and we generate convenience with superior customer service by interactive and personalized passenger experience. On slide four, you find the solution concept of our enhanced service offerings. There are four elements to be mentioned. First the Cube, The Cube enables machine intelligence, all relevant machine data are collected, filtered and transmitted to the cloud platform. The Cube is an intelligent device, not only a transmitter or a gateway, as we can run apps and stream multimedia content and handle emergency calls. The second topic is the cloud platform. The cloud platform creates real time insights.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. IBM's Watson project has always been about putting the power of data science into the hands of the masses. Today, IBM is announcing another step towards that vision with the launch of the Watson Data Platform.

The shadowy arm of the US Defense Department devoted to funding cutting-edge technology is building an interactive robotics system powerful enough to perform an incredibly difficult task: a trumpet solo. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the US military's technology research arm, has handed over its first cheque to Kelland Thomas, associate director of the University of Arizona School of Information (and a jazz musician in his own right) to fund musical machines. "The goal of our research is to build a computer system and then hook it up to robots that can play instruments, and can play with human musicians in ways that we recognize as improvisational and adaptive," said Thomas. Machine learning is a complex field, and one that a scientist at Darpa's Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California, earlier this year likened to "a three-day-old child". A three-day-old child's brain is incredibly powerful, but it doesn't yet know how to riff like Charlie Parker.